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AMERICANIZATION AND AUSTRALIA
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AMERICANIZATION AND
AUSTRALIA
Edited by Philip Bell and Roger Bell
A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney 2052 Australia © Philip Bell & Roger Bell 1998 First published 1998 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Americanization and Australia Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 784 4. 1. Australia–Civilization–American influences. 2. United States–Civilization– 20th century. 3. Australia–Civilization–20th century. I Bell, Roger J. (Roger John), 1947–. II. Bell, Philip, 1947–. III. Title: Americanization. IV. Title: Americanisation 303.48294073 Printed by Griffin Press, Adelaide
CONTENTS PREFACE THE CONTRIBUTORS INTRODUCTION: THE DILEMMAS OF ‘AMERICANISATION’ PHILIP BELL AND ROGER BELL WHICH AMERICA? JILL JULIUS MATTHEWS AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH PAM PETERS POPULAR CULTURE RICHARD WATERHOUSE SUBURBIA MARK ROLFE ‘RACE’/ ETHNICITY ROGER BELL POLITICAL CULTURE ELAINE THOMPSON FREEDOM OF SPEECH: JURISPRUDENCE KATHE BOEBRINGER INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS BRAHAM DABSCBECK FEMINISMS CATHARINE LUMBY SPORT RICHARD CASHMAN AND ANTHONY HUGHES TELEVISION PHILIP BELL FILM NEIL RATTIGAN LITERATURE JOAN KIRKBY ART TERRY SMITH VIRTUAL EMPIRE MCKENZIE WARK BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
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1 15 32 45 61 81 107 123 149 166 179 193 210 228 245 261 277 279
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PREFACE This collection of essays arises from various responses to the editors’ 1993 book, Implicated: The United States in Australia, which analysed 200 years of actual and imagined ‘Americanisation’ of the younger Pacific nation. Implicated sought to understand the processes usually labelled ‘Americanisation’ by contextualising the most blatantly imitative aspects of Australian history and culture within modernisation and the globalisation of the economic sphere, especially since World War II As global capital switches its nominal allegiance in a nanosecond and as the migration of goods, information and people is effected on an unprecedented scale, it is more obvious than ever that no island is an island, and that Australia’s isolation is less significant than its recent historical links with powerful Anglophone nations, most obviously the United States. Experts in many fields have accepted the invitation to discuss the relationships that exist between the United States and Australia in areas as different as the law and industrial relations, recent ‘grunge’ literature and action movies. Each addresses what the United States means to Australia and the historical background to these most important relationships. The various writers share no general view of the putative ‘Americanisation’ of Australia, but they all reject as simplistic any interpretation which reduces the process to economic or cultural ‘imperialism’. Some emphasise the empirical details of the relationship, others are more theoretically interpretative. We believe the essays represent a rich repertoire of argument and illustration relating to the controversy of Australia’s ‘Americanisation’.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without the material and intellectual support of a number of people. The Humanities Research Program of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales generously supported the project. Thanks to the Dean of the Faculty, John Ingleson, and to Conal Condren, convenor of the program, for their encouragement. Amanda Snowden and Sonja Wilkinson have done much of the organisational and typescript preparation, with great skill and good humour. Sarah Hatton prepared the index. UNSW Press agreed enthusiastically to publish the essays and we are grateful to the Press for the professional expertise which they have brought to editing and design. The editor of The Journal of International Communication has generously agreed to the incorporation of sections from our paper, ‘The “Americanisation” of Australia–rethinking postwar economic and cultural relationships’, 1995, vol. 2(l), pp. 120–34. Most important, of course, are the contributors who have written original essays on the issue of ‘Americanisation’ as it arises in their respective fields.
THE CONTRIBUTORS Philip Bell is Professor and Head of Media and Communications at the University of New South Wales. He has published widely on Australian media representations of social and political issues and on psychoanalysis and cinema. His recent books include Implicated: The United States in Australia (with R. Bell, 1993) and The Media Interview (with T. van Leeuwen, 1994). Roger Bell is a Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. He has written widely on international relations, Australian history and the United States in the Pacific. His books include: Unequal Allies: Australian American Relations and the Pacific War (1977), Last Among Equals. Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics (1984), Multicultural Societies: A Comparative Reader, editor, (1987), Implicated: The United States in Australia (with P. Bell, 1993) and is joint editor of Negotiating the Pacific Century (1996). Kathe Boehringer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, Macquarie University, where she co-convenes the Media, Technology and Law MA, jointly offered by the School of Law and the Media Studies Department. Richard Cashman teaches sports history at the University of New South Wales, where he is Director of the Centre for Olympic Studies. He has published widely on popular culture and sport and is editor of the journal Sporting Traditions.
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Braham Dabscheck is an Associate Professor in the School of Industrial Relations at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of numerous books on industrial relations in Australia and is currently editor of the Journal of Industrial Relations. Anthony Hughes is a postgraduate student in sports history, and Executive Officer for the Centre for Olympic Studies, at the University of New South Wales. Joan Kirkby is an Associate Professor in English and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, with research and teaching interests in Australian and American literatures and cultures. Current research projects include Julia Kristeva, Emily Dickinson, gender studies and psychoanalysis as critique. Catharine Lumby is a lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University. She writes regularly for Australian and international journals and newspapers on the subject of feminism, popular culture and the media. She writes an opinion column for the Sydney Morning Herald and is the author of Bad Girls: The Media, Sex and Feminism in the 90s (1996). Jill Julius Matthews is a Reader in the History Department, The Faculties, Australian National University. She has published Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia (1986), and edited Jane Gallop Seminar Papers (1994) and Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures (1997). She is currently working on a project on Americanisation, commercial popular culture and gendered modernity in Australia. Pam Peters is Associate Professor in Linguistics at Macquarie University, with research interests in Australian English usage and the use of corpus (data-based) evidence. She is the author of the Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (1995), which she is now adapting with fresh evidence from corpora in Britain and USA for readers in the northern hemisphere. Neil Rattigan lectures in Communication Studies at the University of New England, New South Wales. He is the author of Images of Australia: 100 Films of the New Australian Cinema (1991) and has also published in the areas of Australian and British cinema and on masculinity in Hollywood films.
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Mark Rolfe teaches and researches Australian politics, urban development and political satire at the University of New South Wales. Terry Smith is Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. His recent publications include Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (1993). Elaine Thompson is an Associate Professor at the School of Political Science at the University of New South Wales. She teaches and researches both US and Australian politics, and has been awarded two Fulbright fellowships for research in the United States. Her book Fair Enough: Egalitarianism in Australia was published by UNSW Press in 1994. McKenzie Wark’s publications include Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (1994) and The Virtual Republic (1997). He lectures in media studies at Macquarie University. Richard Waterhouse is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of four books on American and Australian history, the latest of which is Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788 (1995).
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INTRODUCTION: THE DILEMMAS OF ‘AMERICANISATION’ Philip Bell and Roger Bell America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. Jean Baudrillard
‘AMERICANISATION’ AND GLOBAL POWER In the burgeoning literature on the internationalisation of culture(s) ‘Americanisation’ is frequently invoked but seldom defined. Its origins reside in domestic pressures for a consensual society. ‘Americanisation’ was the label originally applied to the anticipated assimilation of immigrants and racial minorities or, more formally, to qualities demanded of territories seeking statehood. In each context, Americanisation was defined broadly as ‘a process by which an alien acquires our language, citizenship, customs and ideals.’1 In the United States a potentially diverse people was to be assimilated (and until the 1970s assumed to have been Americanised) by the combined forces of the frontier, a shared language, the pressures of the ‘melting pot’, common forms of government, universal education, shared forms of consumption, and widespread mobility – both economic and spatial. Writing at the turn of the century Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, believed that ‘the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanised, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. This process has gone on from the early days to our own.’2 As America’s continental empire was won, states were accepted at least ostensibly because
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they were thoroughly imbued with American traditions and ideals. The spread of Americanisation did not end at the nation’s continental borders. During the 1890s, especially, ideals of national mission and economic self-interest propelled the United States outward as it sought an Open Door for its trade and commerce in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time it attempted to stifle European colonial authority, opening the world to so-called liberal ideas consistent with ‘manifest destiny’ – a term sufficiently vague and emotive to serve the various groups seeking territory or influence overseas. As the United States joined the Great War its mission had become universal – democracy synonymous with Americanism. The Cleveland Americanisation Committee proclaimed for example: ‘Americanisation is carrying democracy to all peoples, first within the boundaries of America and second to all peoples without the boundaries of America, in order that the world may have great industrial, educational, economic and political freedom’.3 Wilsonian liberalism expressed similar aims as it sought to open all states to principles which it assumed had universal appeal. America’s international military preeminence was accompanied by expressions of racial virtue, civilising missions and the extension of political morality to the Old World and its empires. Woodrow Wilson maintained in 1919 that ‘[T]he rest of the world is necessary to us’, and confidently accepted that his nation possessed ‘the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world’. Defending his vision of a new liberal world order, Wilson told the US Senate: ‘America shall in truth show the way’.4 The light on the hill remained a powerful metaphor, even after its liberal democratic associations had long dimmed. But the empires of Europe persisted, and new ones arose in the interwar years to undermine the influence of Wilsonian liberalism and American power. Geographically separated from the contests of the Old World, the United States nonetheless continued to extend its economic and cultural influence throughout much of the world. At the same time, many of those processes identified with modernisation coalesced, even as extremist nationalism separated states and people with unprecedented ferocity. The temporary collapse of international capitalism in 1929, followed by prolonged economic depression and the expanded role of the state in the New Deal, fostered in Washington a determination to establish new international mechanisms to govern the international economy. These, in turn, would ensure long-term stability and prosperity within America. US officials in the early 1940s were anxious to expand their nation’s access
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to new international markets, to avoid a postwar contraction of demand for American products, to boost demand both at home and abroad, and to open up new avenues to US investment. Such policies demanded the dismantling of ‘closed’ international economic arrangements centred on colonial systems or socialist economies. In short, the United States wanted to promote a liberal international economic order – a series of multilateral arrangements based on the ideal of the ‘open door’ that would ensure nondiscriminatory trade, currency convertibility, and unrestricted access to materials and markets everywhere. As Emily Rosenberg has claimed: ‘This brand of liberalism – emphasising equal trade opportunity, open access, free flow, and free enterprise – was advanced as a formula for global development, a formula that the Americans liked to think had succeeded in the United States’.5 As the most efficient industrial nation, advantaged by economies of scale and boosted by the demands of war, the United States stood to benefit far more than any competing economy from liberal multilateral economic arrangements and the erosion of barriers to cultural interaction. After World War II international conditions were ripe for the expansion of America’s cultural and ideological power – labelled later by a prominent US official as its ‘soft power’. America’s institutions, from the military/political to the economic/cultural were uniquely placed to promote ‘Americanisation’ as the rational alternative to authoritarian communism. President Truman observed, in words which betrayed his nation’s persistent ambitions as well as its growing global interdependence: ‘The whole world should adopt the American system ... [t]he American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system’.6 Decolonisation, and the more fluid international system which eventually displaced the rigid divisions of the Cold War, extended the power of the American model. No longer in any sense a reluctant internationalist, the United States enthusiastically pursued its new ambitions in an increasingly open global order.7 In the postwar world the central tenets of American political culture were assumed by US state agencies, especially during the Cold War, to have a self-evident, universal relevance. Yet these very ideas required promotion abroad. They were projected by an elaborate machinery of & cultural’ diplomacy, and embodied in the activities of diverse organisations ranging from the Pentagon and the CIA to the American Chamber of Commerce and cultural affairs units in diplomatic posts. Like the Peace Corps, the many agencies of America abroad were expected, in President Kennedy’s words, ‘[t]o represent the United States and its people in the most positive way’.8 Inter-governmental agencies –
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notably the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, agencies of the United Nations, the Truman and Marshall Plans, GATT – helped to expand the global economy while containing socialism and stimulating demand for US investments, consumer goods and technologies. Multinational corporations became even more persuasive vehicles of American expansion than the government agencies. ‘For business purposes the boundaries that separate one nation from another are no more real than the Equator’, an IBM executive observed. ‘The whole world outside the home country is no longer viewed as a series of disconnected customers and prospects for its products, but as an extension of a single market.’9 The American suburb, home, car and styles of living were projected abroad by consumer goods, advertising, and, from the early 1950s, television. More than any other society, the United States realised and encouraged that which was modern in the postwar world. The exhausted empires of the Old World and the reconstructing economies of Germany and Japan were not, individually or collectively, serious rivals to America’s new global power. US corporations, commerce and its culture of consumer capitalism were the most powerful vehicles of influence abroad. The global reach of government, corporations and media projected the United States overseas as an exceptionally affluent, open, dynamic and virtuous society – the model against which all other societies should be measured. Embedded in this global model were economic, social and ideological elements that were both modern and American, and both modernising and Americanising. In Von Laue’s words, the US ‘stood out as the universal model, the heir of the great Western European empires’.10 Recently, Said has echoed this claim: ‘America began as an empire during the nineteenth century, but it was in the second half of the twentieth, after the decolonisation of the British and French empires, that it directly followed its two great predecessors’.11 America’s expanding activities in the postwar world were usually represented in a liberal rhetoric that disclaimed self-interest. They derived from a conviction that the world must be reformed by the United States, since it alone had the capacity to complete the task. Yet if the United States sought to universalise its ideology and example, communities throughout the world – from the nation to the neighbourhood – often remained frustratingly unresponsive to its appeal or power. Incursions which might be labelled as Americanisation were seldom received passively by other economic, political or national cultures. American initiatives rarely went unchallenged abroad, however influential they proved to be in some fields, most notably military/strategic affairs, the assault on Soviet communism, the demand
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for an ‘open’ global political economy, or as vehicles of a commercial international culture. The limits to Americanisation as the agent of global, homogenising change are everywhere apparent. In the (post)modern world, as Peter Worsley and others acknowledge, nationalism, regionalism, ethnicity, gender and class divisions are arguably ‘far more important than internationalism and secularism’.12 Assessments of US influence must be made against a recognition that increasing internationalisation of politics, commerce or culture is not necessarily synonymous with Americanisation. The varied responses provoked by Americanisation, along with the different readings of its cultural forms which characterise reception beyond its national borders, qualify arguments about the homogenising power of its culture. America’s ‘soft power’ cannot remake the world in its own image. Broadly, as the evidence and arguments in this volume suggest, cultural interrelatedness, exchange and diversity, not Americanised uniformity, remain. American ascendancy, to return to Said’s argument, is ‘unstable’, confronting fragmentation and difference (even within the host culture).13 The blanket term ‘Americanisation’ is frequently no more than an assumption concerning the origins of a cultural example (language, dress, food) which may or may not be accurate. It is applied indiscriminately within Australian media discourse to label an array of factors seen as threatening to national(istic) identity, way of life or values. This pejorative use of Americanisation sees Australia as adopting social practices and cultural values which putatively originate in the United States (or in Hollywood, Los Angeles, or some metonymic reference to that nation). It assumes that the offending items are not meaningful within the Australian context merely because they make cultural sense to some local groups, but that they carry with them their alien ‘American’ origins. It follows that popular discourse on this issue is frequently nationalistic, assuming a uniquely Australian cultural and political identity and consensus which US-originated culture threatens. In more scholarly discourse, it is possible to detect elements of a similarly negative critique of social and cultural change thought to have originated in the United States. In general, the contributors to this book use the terms found in such discourse but do not wish to prejudge the effect these labels assume nor to align themselves with the nationalistic rejection of Americanisation with which the terms are often linked. Nevertheless, they implicitly argue that Australian responses to American power, influences and example are not simply those of protective
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nationalism. Rather, these responses are culturally specific, active and much more complex than ‘national identity’ reactions would predict. The need for different analyses of the various dimensions of Australia’s relationship with the United States highlights the inadequacy of the assumption that Americanisation may be thought of as a simple cultural consequence of economic/political influence, even control, by a powerful United States. From within a putatively imitative national culture – Australia – local history and conditions, not imported cultural forms, generate local response. Writing independently in 1993 of very different national experiences, Richard Kuisel, Bell and Bell, and Rob Kroes14 each discussed the inseparability of so-called Americanisation from broader processes of global change. Kuisel, for example, wrote in his historical work Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanisation: The issues raised by this study bear on a global phenomenon of basic economic, social, and cultural changes that has unfolded during the second half of the twentieth century .... There is a kind of global imperative that goes by the name Americanisation. Although the phenomenon is still described as Americanisation, it has become increasingly disconnected from America. Perhaps it would be better described as the coming of consumer society. Whatever the case, the phenomenon to be observed in postwar France has parallels all over the world in recent decades.15
Americanisation, then, is understood as linked to ubiquitous global processes sometimes identified as modernisation or consumer capitalism. In this recent literature, also, the United States remains a powerful social model and cultural precursor which other societies cannot ignore.16 However, in recent discussions of American influences abroad, metaphors of mediation, seduction, translation, negotiation and creolisation have displaced those connoting unilateral domination, cultural infiltration, and alarmist fears focused on the transforming power of the ‘centre’ over the ‘periphery’.17 As Kroes observes: ‘America’s culture has become an unavoidable presence. Its reception knows many varieties.’ And, he concludes, even if the processes of cultural integration and mediation prove impossible to specify (theorise?), ‘there is a resilience in other cultures that refuses to be washed away ).18 Finally, recent interpretations highlight the contradictory discourses of Americanisation which imply either a dystopic or a utopic future: America is received ‘as both a model and a menace’ – even in non-Anglophobe national cultures like France or Germany. As Bell and Bell have emphasised in writing about Australia, its ‘great and powerful’ American friend has always been understood
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ambivalently by most within the smaller society: ‘Because both positive and negative views of “Americanisation” see the process of modernisation generally as originating in the US, they have emphasised either the gleaming promise of modernity or the barbarism of an economically-driven consumerism, as Australia’s future.’19 America’s varied presence in Australia is rooted in the significant, if unbalanced, relationships between the two nation states. Following World War II and the Bretton Woods agreement, the United States gradually eclipsed Great Britain as the principle source of investment capital in Australia. By the mid-1990s US investment capital in Australia was greater than in the combined economies of East Asia. Australia ranked fourth as a destination for American capital – direct and portfolio investments totalled more than A$80 billion, three times the level of Australian investments in the United States. At the same time the United States enjoyed a massive trade surplus with Australia. This surplus had reached A$12 billion annually, and was running at a ratio of four to one in favour of the United States. In absolute terms, this trade surplus was greater than that enjoyed by the United States with any other nation.20 Yet neither the economic nor the cultural implications of these increasingly unbalanced investment and trading relations provoked serious complaint in Australia. Few nationalist commentators were disturbed by what Phillip Adams labelled a ‘growing penetration’ by a form of US ‘cultural imperialism that makes past imperialisms look puny’.21
‘AUTHENTICITY’, ‘IDENTITY’ AND CULTURAL DIALOGUE Australian complaints about putative Americanisation have shifted from the economic to the cultural sphere, at least since the rise of global capital in the 1980s which seems to have displaced the Yankee dollar as the preferred culprit in popular discussions of US influence on other nations. Culture (language, dress and sport in particular) has attracted the most vocal reactions – if the correspondents to and professional commentators in the local media are taken as the yardstick. Yet cultural reception and transformation (what Bell and Bell called ‘negotiation’ in Implicated) involve complex processes, much more than ‘imitation’ or ‘domination’ suggest. As Australia is increasingly an exporter as well as an importer of commercial Anglophone culture (such as ‘IV ‘soaps’) it is increasingly difficult to see all such commerce in imperialistic terms. Recently, commentators such as Tom O’Regan have discussed cultural transfer in more active and subtle ways, following the model proposed by Yuri Lotman.22
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Adopting a semiological approach, Lotman describes five overlapping stages through which cultural importation passes. First, cultural imports are imitated and overvalued as ‘pure’ and strange but superior to local equivalents. Second, local and local versions of imported cultural forms ‘negotiate’ with each other, but the local examples continue to ‘refer out’ to the external models. This may lead to a third stage in which local versions are more highly valued than the imported ‘original’ or competitor. In the fourth stage, imported texts are ‘absorbed’ into the receiving culture, coming to be seen as local anyway. In Australia for example, the ‘cultural cringe’ is loudly decried by cultural nationalists as ‘we’ produce original culture which seems to be derived from no external source or model. Finally, the local culture need not even proclaim its difference from, or superiority to, the other; it is described as having its own identity, transmitting meaning on its own unique and authentic terms. These stages are identifiable in many Australian examples. ‘Our’ television has been constructed in the popular media in ways which seem to reflect Lotman’s trajectory. At different periods since the late 1960s, the TV guides have claimed, we have become authentically Australian, our television genres have matured and are now imbued with our accents. The distinctive miniseries of the 1980s, parodic talk and comedy shows, for example, are uniquely our own. We need cringe no more in the face of Los Angelean entertainments. Ironically, the history of Australian analyses of Americanisation might also be seen as reflecting the sequence of processes described in Lotman’s model. In addition to the processes identified in these (overlapping) stages, local opposition and resistance to cultural imports are likely in the earlier phases, as in the period after the introduction of new media (cinema, the Internet), when they are especially noticeable in attempts by local culture industries (and nationalistic political interests) to erect protective barriers against the imports. Lotman’s account should thus be seen as an overview of the processes of cultural transfer, with implications for the claim to ‘authentic’ identity made in various ways by the receiving culture. Most significantly, Lotman’s work draws attention to the shifting discursive construction of the ‘local’ in relation to the projected threat and promise of the invading (if that is not too strong a word) culture. Lotman’s model also asks that we test the nature and degree of cultural transfer against particular cases in different media, focussing on the meaning of the supposedly imitative cultural example. Just how dynamic and unbounded are cross-culture interactions in a field as popular as cinema or television is elegantly demonstrated by van der Heide.23 The American Western movie genre, to use his example, constituted about a quarter of all Hollywood feature films made between
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1926 and 1967. Van der Heide discusses three Asian film genres: the Japanese samurai film, the Chinese martial art film and the Indian stunt film, commenting: ... their generic labelling in the West as Noodle Westerns, Chop Suey Westerns and Curry Westerns (cf. Spaghetti Western ... ) does imply a perceived association with the Western genre. The interrelationship between all these ‘Westerns’ is best approached through transtextual transformations, which can range from overt quotations to more imperceptible and unconscious citations from the cultural ‘pool’. Stories and styles are absorbed, adapted and transformed in the context of local cultural production practices, with the concepts of origin(ality) and authenticity fading in the face of such multidirectional cultural activity.24
One might add to this list a group of Australian films centred on legendary bushrangers (‘eucalyptus’, ‘damper’ Westerns perhaps) and note that the Australian film Shame (1988) is a reworking of the classic genre Western Shane (1953) with an explicitly feminist but local inflection.26 The long-argued question of Australian national identity is, of course, at the centre of debates around Americanisation. But as the Western genre example indicates, recent culturalist analyses have moved away from ‘essentialist’, fixed typifications of such identity towards more contested, even contradictory and shifting or provisional postulations of ‘identities’ (always in quotation marks, usually plural). Such a discursive approach emphasises that what we label national ‘identities’ are not aggregations of psychological types; instead they can be thought of as particular modes and fields of representation itself Australian cultural identity, then, refers to particular discursive productions rather than to psychological character types or some list of ideal cultural ‘values’ which have no precise material basis or context. Identity, ironically, is not singular, but a fabric of textual strands with no fixed boundaries. Subjects within this field claim their identity, or can be identified, with one or more intersection or ‘node’ in this field. These discursive points are, following Lacan, said to ‘call’ or interpellate the subjects who/which exist only in, so to speak, answering the call, becoming subject to the national(ist) discourse(s) in question. As Bakhtin puts it: Cultural ... traditions ... are preserved and continue to live not in the individual subject memory of a single individual and not in some kind of collective ‘psyche’, but rather in the objective forms that culture itself assumes ... and in this sense they are inter-subjective and inter-individual (and consequently social); from there they enter literary works,
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Cultural approaches to national identity, then, have decentred the human subject and relativised the identity/ies labelled, for example, ‘Australian’. Nevertheless, the imaginary nation that is postulated through such theorising is built on several foundational assumptions which at least invoke historical and ethnic reality. The question of essential cultural Australianness is never completely erased in the Americanisation debate. Indeed, this assumption is the mirror-image of the seldom questioned labelling of the invading or dominant culture as ‘American’, as though such a label is unproblematic for one side of the cultural interaction but not for the other. For this reason, Bell and Bell’s previous analysis of the United States in Australia sought to reinterpret the homogeneous and essentialist characterisation of American cultural products by at least asserting, if not really demonstrating, that what is labelled ‘American’ is also contextually crosscultural/international and embedded in global cultural movements. The engagement of two nationally-labelled cultures may then be seen as a positive, productive process. Indeed, Bakhtin discusses the value of the dialogical cross-cultural readings by ‘outsiders’, ‘ ... where meaning only reveals its depth once it has encountered and come into contact with another foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and onesidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures’.27 Bakhtin’s dialogical metaphor reminds those of us trying to come to terms with the relationships between ‘Australian’ and ‘American’ that ‘our’ readings of ‘their’ culture and of our own culture are necessarily dialogical also, and that, in a potentially positive way, local cultures themselves are always engaged dialogically with various others. (AngloAmerican and other hyphenations draw attention to these hybrids, although such labels may also lead to an essentialist or reductionist account of the authenticity of the local hybrid.) In linguistic terms, hybridisation is creolisation, which, despite its sometimes negative connotations, is an equally productive metaphor. No cultural nationalist welcomes the label of creolisation, yet if the colonising centre is itself seen as a result of the same intermixing the insult might be softened. It should be obvious that the label is only demeaning if one assumes what the process denies: that in cultures and languages there ever was a fixed, authentic centre or norm against which all derivative cultures should be judged. Kroes has claimed that: ‘[I]n every country of the periphery there
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are always replicas of the distant ... country, local branch offices staffed by representatives of the centre’.28 Perhaps somewhat facetiously, Kroes argues that ‘America, as a country at the periphery of a Eurocentric world, might be thought of as a “creolised” version of Europe: ‘Not only have Americans broken the European cultural syntax and grammar [sic], they have also changed our cultural semantics’.29 In Implicated, Bell and Bell also adopted a linguistic metaphor to express the fluidity and dynamism of cultural influence: If one thinks of Australian culture and society as structured like a language, ... then one might think of ‘Americanisation’ as like linguistic infiltration. It does not so much replace or displace the local lexicon as supplement it and change its elements ... change is effected throughout the whole structure even though no obliteration of a previous lexicon may occur ...30
So, the creolisation model illuminates the dialogical response to European culture in the United States and might be extended to a second phase in which the creolised American culture(s) become(s) the standard for further, distinct creolisations, including Australian. ‘Hip hop’ or ‘rap’ musical and linguistic expression amongst Sydney suburban youths of immigrant background is an obvious example. However, even allowing for this theoretical observation, the empirical realities of various cultural fields of interaction and dialogue should not be relativised to the degree that they become ‘unspeakable’. All cultural products (what recent writing labels ‘texts’) are, by definition, contextual and intertextual (referring to, incorporating, other texts). Their meaning is open to contextually-distinct interpretation (‘reading’), that is, to dialogue. Indeed, the process of interpretation can be thought of as itself dialogical, with each reading constituting a new (dialogical) text. But the process has to stop (or be stopped) at some point for the purposes of sociological or historical generalisation. The newness produced through cross-cultural dialogue has, at some point, to be described and its significance evaluated. Still, such novelty (what Salman Rushdie31 calls ‘melange and hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that’, based on migration and colonisation) should not be condemned as inauthentic or impure. So, in the papers which follow, the positive and productive consequences, as well as the negative and destructive results of American-Australian cultural dialogue, will be considered. The interpretation of contemporary cultures as modern in their own ways rather than as clones of America, is emphasised by Appadurai32 and by Chatterjee,33 who argue that Indian examples (including cricket in the television era) demonstrate that post-colonial societies may ‘fashion a
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“modern” national culture that is not Western’.34 Continuing the linguistic analogy of creolisation, Appadurai and Breckenridge speak of the vernacularisation of the colonial centre, which they see as ‘ ... cultural contestation ‘in which modernity can become a diversely appropriated experience’. Television, in particular, works at the level of everyday experience, ‘ ... articulating the space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state – where different social groups constitute their identities’. Not all the papers in this collection deal directly with cultural issues. However, even in discussions of fields of interaction such as industrial relations or the law, cultural change is clearly a significant dimension of the America-Australia relationship. In all areas discussed, moreover, the active negotiation into which the two unequal nations have entered has led to a unique local outcome. Australian sports or legal institutions are structurally and culturally distinct compromises (solutions?) to the historical conflicts in which they have been implicated. Language, literature, the cinema and the internet, of course, are cultural by definition, and it will be clear in papers dealing with such forms that here it is the meaning of ‘Australian’ itself which is at issue in the context of international or ‘American’ culture. Still, the various experts represented in this collection disagree on the central question of just what Americanisation means in the particular field of interaction each addresses. Indeed, they take conflicting positions on whether the process should be labelled Americanisation at all. While some emphasise imitation and transfer, others stress negotiation and resistance or the perseverance of local (Anglo-Australian) practices, institutions and values in the face of putative influence from across the Pacific. Australia, as one form of modernity (and, perhaps, post-modernity, but that is another story), need not be assumed to be stamped from the template of the United States. Instead, we might join Appadurai and Breckenridge in beginning from the assumption that, ... most societies today possess the means for the local production of modernity’, and see our particular site of modernity as one distinct example among many. 1 H. C. Hill, ‘The Americanisation movement’, American Journal of Sociology, 24, May 1919, p. 612. 2 F. J Turner, The Frontier in American History, Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1920, pp. 3–4, 22–23. 3 H. C. Hill pp. 629–35. It is difficult not to employ the terms ‘America’ and ‘American’
INTRODUCTION: THE DILEMMAS OF ‘AMERICANISATION
13
as synonymous with the United States. Yet as Mark Berger has cautioned: ‘The historical appropriation of the words ‘America’ and ‘American’ by the US symbolises and reinforces the way in which the US has presumed to speak for and lay claim to common values with the rest of the hemisphere’. Throughout this book these words are used as conventional shorthand references to the United States. The authors remain conscious that the United States is but one nation in the Americas and that use of ‘America’, ‘American’ and, indeed, ‘Americanis/zation’ is not intended to arrogate to the US wider cultural forces which characterise the vast differences of societies in North and South America. See M. T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas 189–1990, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995, pp. 17–19. 4 Wilson in J. M. Blum et al. (eds), The National Experience: A History of the US, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1988, p. 559. 5 E. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945, Hill and Wang, New York, 1982, p. 232. 6 Truman, in C. Thorne, ‘American political culture and the Asian frontier, 1943– 1973’, S. Tryphena Phillips Lecture Proceedings of the British Academy, 3 December 1986, p. 2. 7 ‘Americanisation’ and the resistance expressed as Anti-Americanism are increasingly the focus of scholarly attention, even in conventional US historiography. In addition to the work of Rosenberg discussed above, important recent books in the field include: J. Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 1989. M. Blonsky, American Mythologies, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992. P. Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad 1965–1990, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992. A. Iriye, The Globalising of America, 1913–1945, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1993. P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, New York, 1987. D. Lacorne, The Rise and Fall of the Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception, St Martins Press, London, 1990. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, New York, 1993. T. H. Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernisation: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987. 8 In Von Laue, p. 183. 9 R. Barnett, and R. Miller, Global Reach: The Rise of Multinational Corporations, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1974, pp. 14–15. 10 Von Laue, pp. 165, 181–83. 11 Said, p. xxv. 12 P. Worsley, ‘Models of the modern world system’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalisation and Modernity, Sage, London, 1990, p. 92. 13 E. W. Said, pp. 371, 391–406. 14 R. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993. P. Bell and R. Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993. R. Kroes, ‘Americanisation: What are we talking about?’, in R. Kroes, R. W. Rydell and D. F. J. Bosscher (eds) Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe, VU University Press, Amsterdam, 1993, pp. 302–20. 15 R. Kuisel, pp. 1–4.
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16 R. Kroes, pp. 304, 313, 317–18. 17 Bell and R. Bell, pp. 125–26; R. Kuisel, p. 3. 18 For a discussion of economic relationships and trade figures, see R. Bell, ‘Australia’s relationship with the United States’, in J. Ravenhill and J. Cotton (eds) Seeking Asian Engagement, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 213–27. 19 P. Bell and R. Bell, pp. 203. 20 ibid., pp. 125–26 21 P. Adams, ‘Dolls on the American knee’, The Australian, 12 September 1993. 22 T. O’Regan, Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 213–31, discusses Lotman’s model in relation to Australian-produced films. The model is heuristically useful but one might question whether the ‘stages’ identified are sequential or merely alternatives. However, they describe at least some of the ways in which local culture has been proclaimed and valorised in relation to American models. See Y. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Indiana University Press, 1990. 23 W. van der Heide, Ph.D. Thesis, Panggung Wayang: Film in Malaysia, University of New South Wales, 1997, and ‘Boundary Riding: Cross-cultural analysis, national cinema and genre’, Social Semiotics, vol. 5 (2), 1995, pp. 213–37. 24 van der Heide, 1997, p. 13. 25 S. Crofts, ‘Identification, gender and genre in film: the case of Shame with Shame the Screenplay’, Beverley Blankenship and Michael Brindley, Melbourne: AFI The Moving Image, no. 2. 1993. 26 M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Forms of Time and the Chronotape in the Novel, Four Essays, University of Texas, Austin, 1981, p. 249, note. 27 M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, University of Texas, Austin, 1986, p. 7. 28 R. Kroes, p. 309. 29 ibid., p. 307. 30 P. Bell, and R. Bell, p. 202. 31 S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, Granta Books, London, 1991, p. 394, cited in van der Heide, above p. 23. 32 A. Appadurai, ‘Playing with Modernity: Decolonisation of Indian Cricket’, in C. Breckenridge, (ed.) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, University of Minneapolis Press, London, 1995. 33 Chatterjee, P., The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993, p. 6. 34 ibid., p. 13. 35 A. Appadurai and C. Breckenridge, Public Modernity in India, in Breckenridge, C (ed.), 1995, p. 5. 36 A. Appadurai, p. 45.
WHICH AMERICA? Jill Julius Matthews1 Following several decades of little-regulated mass immigration from Mexico and eastern and southern Europe, the United States embarked on an extensive campaign of Americanisation in the years around the first world war. Members of the ruling elite–business and civic groups, patriotic associations, industrialists, social workers, educators, and later government authorities–sought to assimilate the newcomers and turn them into efficient and productive citizen workers and mothers, good English-speaking Americans who would live according to the Anglo middle class ethic of self-discipline, hard work, clean homes and thrifty consumption.2 Writing in 1896, Merrill Gates, leader of an American reform group, the Friends of Indians, proclaimed: We have, to begin with, the absolute need of awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we can make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants.3
‘To awaken in him wants’ and then to provide for purchase the commodities to satisfy those wants was not a strategy of Americanisation to be addressed solely to the relatively small number of native Americans. Much more expansively, in the first several decades of the twentieth century, it was a strategy that many commentators believed had ensconced itself as the central dynamic of a process that would lead to the Americanisation of the world. It was a psychological, cultural and commercial strategy, whose target was the individual, calling into existence personal desires for pleasure and
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happiness to be satisfied in the capitalist market place. Opposition to it around the world, including from within the United States, came from many sources, but particularly from those who sought to keep individuals loyally embedded in the older traditions of larger collectivities of nation, gender order, class, race, Empire. In Australia in the years following the first world war, members of the ruling elite–business and civic groups, patriotic associations, industrialists, social workers, educators, and later government authorities–embarked on an extensive and long-term campaign of denunciation of Americanisation. Clearly they did not mean by this the same as their United States counterpart meant, since the middle class ethic translated easily and acceptably between both white settler countries. Moreover, there were aspects of American culture that this Australian elite admired. Government Commissions and private individuals conducted fact-finding missions to the United States into education, racial policy, immigration, public health, industrial relations, and many other topics. What seems not to have been admired were aspects of American popular culture that were imported into Australia and became popular here: moving pictures, jazz music and dancing, radio serials, advertising styles, cheap magazines and novels. The elite did not seem to fear this Americanisation as leading to perfidy or betrayal of the nation; individual subjects were not being drawn into a loyalty to the national entity of the United States. Rather, their fear had to do with their fellow citizens whom they saw as committing their allegiance to the wayward fashions of the modern, cosmopolitan market place. Yet even this was not straightforward. Neither this elite, nor its American counterpart, objected to the market place as such, although they might rail against excessive ‘commercialisation’. They wanted that market place, however, to be disciplined by a corset of older, hierarchical values which they believed would ensure that it conducted itself in the interests of the larger collectivities which they often called ‘civilisation’, itself deemed a fixed and immutable hierarchy of value. What Americanisation was accused of doing was vulgarly unloosening that corset and undermining loyalty to the old order. The effects that both American and Australian opponents decried were a democratisation of values, an individual ‘cosmopolization’,4 a subjective modernisation. In this chapter, I am seeking to understand what was meant by ‘America’ in these debates. In the first section, I tease apart some of the contradictions embedded in the term ‘anti-Americanisation’ as it operated in Australia in the 1920s. In the second part I look at the specific forms that resistance to Americanisation took and
WHICH AMERICA?
17
what united its proponents. It has never been entirely certain what Americanisation entailed. Clearly, it meant something different within and outside the United States. Non-Americans used the term disparagingly; Americans could not, so tended to call the same process by other names. This difference of naming points to a conflation of two somewhat distinct elements of the meaning of the term. The first involves America as a nation. Within the country, America was of course a positive figure, the subject of a patriotic attachment into which all residents should be drawn. ‘Americanisation’ was simply a name for that assimilation of many peoples into one nation. For those outside, however, America was not first but merely one nation among nations that were not one’s own, a nation of whose actions in the world of foreign affairs one might disapprove, and whose presence and activities–in physical, economic or cultural terms–in one’s own country might be resented. This might lead to anti-American agitation, opposition to what was seen as American imperialism. The second element was considerably more intangible, entailing an indeterminate metaphoric meaning for America: not the nation but a way of being, a way of life, a subjectivity, a set of moral and intellectual ideals. For some within America, this meaning settled into ‘the American way of life’ and was drawn back into the idea of the nation. For those who wished to criticise aspects of American life, more distance and other names were needed, such as commercialisation, degeneracy, modernity, Hollywood, mass culture, or even sometimes foreign, meaning nonlocal.5 For those outside America, a variant of this critical meaning seems to have been at play in their opposition to ‘Americanisation’. Here, the enemy was not out there but within. For these concerned citizens, the feeling was not so much one of resentment at the impositions and exploitation of an imperialism. Rather, it was one of distress that one’s own people were being seduced away from their own true national values, or indeed from true human or civilised values. They were being corrupted, and the source of that corruption was within America. A fascinating instance of this conflation between America as national entity and America as metaphor is found in a comparison between two documents prepared eleven years apart by US government officials stationed in Australia. Each document sought to explain antagonism by Australians toward the United States. The first was prepared by an American Commercial Attache, William C. Downs, in 1915. Stationed in Melbourne, Downs had been asked by his Chief of Bureau to provide ‘information regarding the present
18
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state of feeling in Australia toward America, the causes of the hostile attitude and the measures taken to create a better understanding’.6 One year after the start of a devastating, Europe-based imperial war, his account was premised explicitly on misunderstanding between national entities expressed through individuals defined as citizens of distinct nations. He began his story with the visit of the US fleet to Australia in 1908. On that occasion, Australian governments and people extended the most lavish welcomes and courtesies upon the fleet, expressing deep and abiding friendship. But these Australians, according to Downs, were afflicted by a narrowness of vision, blinkered to the boundaries of their nation and its relations with the British Empire; a narrowness that could not grasp the different obligations attendant upon ‘the position of the United States in the world and what it stands for’. Further, Australians had ‘been led to believe that their institutions and laws [were] the most advanced of modern times’ and had developed ‘exaggerated ideas of [their] relative importance in the family of nations’. As a consequence, they were completely unable to understand the United States’ position of neutrality in the European war and its refusal ‘to throw all other considerations to the wind and help fight the Empire’s battles’. From this grew an attitude of resentment. An editorial from the Age newspaper, attached to Downs’ report, expressed this attitude to perfection. (In the usual style of Empire nationalism of the time, Australian and British were merged identities.) In the earlier stages of the war most Britons felt that America had callously betrayed a duty of civilization by neglecting to protest against Germany’s repeated violations of the international laws of warfare. They have not altered their opinion; but, with a gradually developing appreciation of the American viewpoint, their resentment softened into contempt.7
In this editorial, which almost smirked at the United States’ apparent impotence in the face of German insolence over its sinking of the Lusitania, the Age identified America’s fault as lying in its incomprehensibly ‘uncivilised’ commitment to a market place unregulated by superior values. [America’s] sole desire is to live at peace with the world and sell its products to the highest foreign bidder ... America has our sympathy, but it is difficult to respect her in misfortune, because her misfortune is of her own wilful manufacture, and it arises from her refusal to discharge her duty to the cause of civilisation which the Allies are alone upholding.8
WHICH AMERICA?
19
Downs’ dispatch drew significantly on nationalist rhetoric to address both America and Australia. But while the solution he proposed seems, on one reading, to be an appeal to American national values, or perhaps even imperial ones, it can also be read as advocating adherence to the processes of a denationalised modern market place. They [American manufacturers] must so prove to the Australian public the superiority of American goods and services, and their scrupulous observance of business ethics, that the reluctant demand now created by necessity will be continued because a well-served market will require American goods.9
Eleven years later, in a world more or less at peace, another American official sent back a report ‘On Agitation Against American Films in Australia’.10 While not specified in the report, the Department of State’s request for information on the matter came in the context of increasing opposition to American films throughout much of the world.11 Australia was of particular interest because of its status as the top purchaser of American film in the world in terms of quantity imported (though not in terms of revenue repatriated).12 Vice-Consul Walter T. Costello commented upon the range of relatively minor incidents directed against American films and identified their perpetrators as elements within government, church and reform bodies, and local commercial competitors. His conclusion was that: It is generally conceded by men in the trade that as far as Australia and Australians are concerned, there is no anti-American feeling here nationally, with the exception of a few politicians and blue law societies. It is a well established fact that the populace as a whole chooses to view American pictures in preference to all other foreign films because, in the first place, of their outstanding superiority. Then again the standard of living in Australia is on the same high plane as that of the United States. The literature read here by the general public is much the same as that in the United States, and consequently the people have a similar outlook of things in general ... Perhaps the only remedy (at least it is the most important) that can be offered to counteract Australian prejudice or activity against American films is for the motion picture producers to exercise greater care in seeing that pictures for foreign trade do not savor too pungently of Americanism. It is felt that the American emblem should not appear too prominently in a film and that American slang expression should be omitted as far as possible ... This Consulate General is of the opinion that since the criticism directed against American films is not the consensus of opinion of the mass of theatregoers but, in the main, is the rantings; of a few politicians and reform societies, no serious diplomatic interference is necessary looking to the protection of the American film trade in Australia.13
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In this report, as with the 1915 dispatch, there was the same dual meaning of ‘America’, but here the unique national qualities were much more significantly downplayed in favour of the cosmopolitan. The ‘outstanding quality’ of films was in no way dependent upon the pungent savor of Americanism, and the ‘high plane’ of the American standard of living was not unique but enjoyed elsewhere in the modern world. In both of these reports, in so far as the interests of America were identified with the unencumbered working of the market place, the meaning of ‘America’ was necessarily unstable, at once a unique nation among nations and, at the same time, the exemplar of a denationalised, cosmopolitan, and capitalist modernity. Each element of this duality bore its own logic, they did not necessarily coincide, and either or both could trigger agitation against America and Americanisation. These two reports stand as good accounts of the mixture of emotions and reasons behind the anti-America/anti-Americanisation agitation that ran as an undercurrent through much of the official and public discourse from the war into the 1930s in Australia. Sometimes it erupted into specific public campaigns. Always it permeated the distaste for the popular–for the people not of the elite and for their activities. Costello’s report in particular pinpoints this division of the national entity ‘Australia’, although he, as an American official, reversed the values of the binary. For him, there was the good majority–the populace as a whole, the general public, the people–and the bad minority–politicians, newspaper editors, church leaders, social reformers, manufacturers: a collection that would seem to fulfil most of the usual criteria for a social elite or the leaders of society. It was a collection, too, that was almost directly analogous with the American Americanisers of the decade before. In an older way of arguing, this analytic segregation of a foreign nation in a diplomatic report might constitute prime evidence for an attempt by the American government and the economic interests it protected to extend their sway over Australia. That is, this is evidence of American economic and cultural imperialism. Such an argument would suggest that the old ruling class which supported unique traditional national values must be overthrown or undermined by the imperial power with the support of a local middle or popular class which was frustrated by the ruling elite’s monopoly of power and which was prepared to give allegiance to the imperial power. In these crude terms, such an argument does not work. Australia in the 1920s was already too similar to and too distinct from the United States for such projected alignments of power to make much sense. Nonetheless, there is still some benefit to be gained from a cultural imperialist analysis, if it is
WHICH AMERICA?
21
not taken as a sufficient explanation for the embracing of things American, and the opposition to Americanisation, by large portions of the Australian people in the 1920s. What is needed in addition to this reading of America as a national/imperial power is a closer look at the metaphoric meanings of America that might point the direction to a more complex interpretation. For it seems to me that both William C. Downs and Walter T. Costello got it right: in order to create a better understanding between the United States and Australia, most Australians wanted their mutual admiration for progress and modernity to be emphasised, they desired the awakening in themselves of new wants; they recognised the connection of those things with America the nation, but that aspect they preferred to downplay. As a Film Weekly editorial put it in 1927: Our opinion has always been opposed to the idea that Australia is being Americanised in any shape or form. Our country has simply moved with the times, and if certain of our ideas run parallel to those of America, it shows that our thoughts are both progressive ... the vogue of to-day–and for some years past–is one of progress–new ideas, new thought, and new everything.14
Nonetheless, the benefit of the cultural and economic imperialism analysis is that it recognises the aggressive capitalist drive of American national interests in the early twentieth century. There was without a doubt an explicitly imperial aspect to America’s relations with Australia in the 1920s, expressed in the threat veiled by Costello: ‘no serious diplomatic interference is necessary looking to the protection of the American film trade in Australia’.15 During the war and in the decade after, there was a very considerable expansion of American trade into Australia,16 and that trade was protected and assisted by the agencies of the United States Government.17 There is archival evidence of American covert as well as overt practices to enhance American interests in Australia at the expense of local bodies. At the economic level, threats of diplomatic interference, boycott, dumping, monopoly and restraint of trade were ever present. For example, A. W. Ferrin, Resident US Trade Commissioner, Melbourne, spent much effort among Australian businessmen in 1919 trying unsuccessfully to convince them that the recently passed WebbPomerene Act, which permitted the association of American manufacturers for export purposes, was not a measure to enable trusts to do to foreigners what they could not do to Americans. ‘The people apparently cannot get over the fact that it does seem to make fish of one and herring of another.’18 US government agents
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also provided information and support for American companies organising subsidiaries in Australia so as to minimise accountability and taxation payable in Australia.19 Political interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states was rarely admitted but some evidence exists. Thus, the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia, comprising executives of seven US subsidiary companies and two local bodies, contributed £6000 to a fund to ensure the defeat of the Bruce-Page Government at the October 1929 election because of that Government’s proposal to double the import duty on American films.20 At the cultural level, the benign threat of imperium americanum was present in the invocation of world peace made by the Czar of movies, Will Hays, at the beginning of his reign over the industry in 1922: We will sell America to the world with motion pictures. American producers furnish the majority of all pictures shown in the world, and this correct depicting of the life and habits of our own and foreign people, each to the other, will go far toward bringing the international understanding and appreciation which moves in the direction of world peace.21
As compared with Downs and Costello, above, Hays’ use here of the term ‘America’ is entirely encompassed by the national, not the metaphoric meaning. This imperial will to exploit the world, to explain the world to itself, and to be boastful about having done so seems to have been widely resented among Australians, expressed in two ways. First, there was public humour; second there was political and economic retaliation. The first mode of resistance was exercised informally. An executive of United Artists (Australasia) Ltd, reported to the head office in 1923 that: The writer was present when The Strangers Banquet was shown in the leading theatre in Sydney. In the last reel a scene shows two ‘radicals’ being deported and when they are together on the outgoing ship one says to the other ‘I’m glad to get out of that damn country any how’, when this caption came on the screen the entire house applauded. The writer several times whilst viewing American weeklies that showed scenes from the American Army or Navy has heard persons in the audience cry out ‘Who won the war’.22
The Melbourne Morning Post in 1927 outlined ‘our own comic paper conception of an American as an egotistic chicle-chewer, with hornrimmed “cheaters”, and an in-growing sense of “bustle”’.23 This form
WHICH AMERICA?
23
of humour directed against American national or imperial pretensions was available predominantly to lower class men. Costello in his 1926 report identified the proponents of the second mode of resistance: government and local commercial interests who complained about American competition, unfair American trading and organisational practices and, on more particular occasions, about American responsibility for a crippling exchange imbalance, and war debt. To these proponents should be added labour organisations, which denounced American imports denying workers jobs. The primary method used by A these groups was to lobby for tariffs against American goods. This was an extremely effective tactic where there were local or British alternatives, since few Australians would pay exorbitant prices just to obtain the American product. American Trade Commissioner E. C. Squires reported in 1932 that, ‘The landed cost of many American items, after exchange, duties & other charges are paid, reaches a figure which the average American exporter on first sight would consider fabulous’ and cited the case of silk stockings costing 4s.6d. in America being sold for 14s.6d. in Australia.24 Other tactics involved lobbying to prohibit dumping of American materials, particularly books and magazines, at cheap rates.25 In the case of films, anti-American activists urged a British quota to limit the number of American films screened, and a heavy censorship.26 The usual conflation of British with Australian in most of these campaigns led to the demand for Empire preference, which satisfied Anglophile patriots but left local manufacturers with only limited support. Although both of these modes of resistance seem clearly to involve anti-American activity, the distinction between them and antiAmericanisation is not easy to sustain in practice. Thus, in 1925 the Australian Worker reported on a deputation of workers from the printing and design trades seeking a heavier duty on imported books. They argued that ‘hundreds of local printers, artists, block-makers & writers are robbed of a great deal of remunerative & congenial work’.27 But from this pro-Australian, anti-American (or pro-local, anti-foreign) position, the argument then slipped into an anti-Americanisation, that is, metaphoric, stance. And there is another consideration–that of sentiment ... bringing in the cheaply-produced books of other countries doesn’t necessarily broaden our juveniles’ knowledge and outlook any more than the incessant screening of ‘bad man’ and debauched ‘Society’ Yankee films has an educative and elevating influence on the majority of moving picture patrons.28
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By and large, however, the anti-Americanisation stance tended to be the preserve of Church dignitaries, both Protestant and Catholic, of the urban cultural elite, and of the middle class supporters of both groups. Clearly, it was not all members of these groupings who were actively involved. Indeed, there were always some who did not see Americanisation as an entirely bad thing, and even encouraged its cosmopolising benefits. Do we not send delegation after delegation to see how they arc doing things in America? Do we not engage American Experts at thousands of pounds a year to show us how to Americanise this or that industry? Did we not adopt a system that caused an industrial upheaval? Why is the Prime Minister sending a Trade and Industry delegation? Is it not to see if we can Americanise Australian industry? One wonders what Americanising the films can do, other than that which is being done by the Governments and private firms. As a matter of fact it is in the cosmopolitan field of literature that we are to benefit. It is beginning to knit the people of the world in unity, and just as the films are they are helping man to rise to the cosmopolitanism that is the prelude to the universal outlook, which marks a new and higher stage of life.29
But overall, the loudest and most voluble religious and cultural voices were opposed to Americanisation whose chief agents, they claimed, were those aspects of American popular culture flooding into the country and dominating the leisure time of the people: especially moving pictures,30 but also jazz music and dancing31, radio serials and transcriptions, advertising styles, and cheap magazines and novels.32 A selective list of their complaints about these media made in sermons, the press, reform meetings, submissions to government inquiries, and in deputations to ministers, will begin to show the damage they believed flowed from such products and representations. The religious objections were forcefully stated in the 1936 Encyclical of Pope Plus XI, addressed particularly to the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of the US but also more generally: Every one knows what damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. They are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage and affection for the family. They are capable also of creating prejudice among individuals, misunderstanding among nations, among social classes and among entire races.33
Despite sectarian quibbles, there was general concurrence with the discourse the Pope drew upon among Protestant clergy as well.
WHICH AMERICA?
25
Catholics tended to keep alive the sectarian connotations of the terms ‘wowser’ and ‘puritan’ and to distance themselves from them,34 but there was little distinction in the vehement rhetoric of each sect’s condemnations. Secular critics shied away from sin but certainly incorporated morality into their denunciations of Americanisation. They objected to Americanisms in speech, accents, pronunciation35; they abhorred crooning, negro jazz and ‘coon’ turns36; they blamed sex and crime films for an increase in juvenile crime and delinquency.37 Overall, they despaired of the ‘vulgarisation of common life ... [and the tendency of films] to lower the tone of a community’.38 Beatrice Tildesley, a prominent intellectual and cultural reformer, reported to the Women’s Pan-Pacific Conference in 1930 on ‘The Cinema in Australia’.39 Her emphasis was on the ‘steadily-growing feeling of dissatisfaction at the Americanisation of this country, which proceeds apace and which is clearly due in great part to the films.’40 She quoted from a South Australian educational authority who summarised succinctly: taste and manners deteriorate with much picture-going, and young people become imbued with extravagant and false ideas of life. They develop neurotic tendencies, become precocious as to sex matters, and show lack of amenity to discipline. Speech and grammar become contaminated and vulgar idioms and accents are very noticeable.41
Her own final prophecy was that ‘it is America’s mission to vulgarise the world.’42 Four years later she returned to her theme, charging American films with encouraging ‘the bleak prospect’ of standardisation in the material trappings of life such as clothing and hairstyles as well as in behavioural traits such as ‘habits ... tricks of speech ... ways of reacting to certain crises’ and with encouraging people to buy American motor cars and other manufactured goods. More importantly, she identified the ‘subversive’ potential of American films and their capacity to break down the traditions of national cultures.43 Tildesley was careful to make an important pre-emptive move in this later article. ‘To begin with, I should like to deprecate any suggestion of priggishness or of a highbrow attitude in dealing with the cinema.’44 This indeed was one of the primary retaliatory responses made by apologists for American cultural products, especially film. There is a great amount of criticism of the American picture here, particularly by a class who do not regularly attend pictures, and when they do, it is more with the idea of not looking for entertainment but for some mental treat ... [They form] a very small percentage of the population [which is] a particularly noisy and active percentage ...
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AMERICANIZATION AND AUSTRALIA busy bodies who either from a false or foolish sense of loyalty, from sheer narrow mindedness and more often than not from gross ignorance of the true position have taken the stand they do.45
Not only did these complainants not go the pictures, but their accusations were extreme and unspecific. What a gift the motion picture has been to the uninformed critic seeking notoriety. He or she has attributed at one time or another all our ills to the American film. Do you ever notice that the critic of this type never names a picture? There is nothing you can pin him to. He just makes a general assertion trusting that a credulous and receptive public will accept his proclamation.46
Some of these opponents of Americanisation did speak from ignorance and narrow-mindedness and were, as Costello and other apologists for American popular culture described them, wowsers, busybodies, or self-serving inciters, of public wrath. But this is too easy a judgment. Many of the opponents were well-respected, highly intelligent members of Australian society. Beatrice Tildesley was a writer and critic, a cultivated and cosmopolitan woman who enjoyed good food, wine and company.47 Concerns about the effects of ‘American criminal plays’ were voiced by leading jurists such as R. Windeyer K. C. and A. B. Piddington K. C.48 Nettie Palmer’s views on the ‘insidious effect of cinema’ and her characterisation of ‘Australian culture in the twenties as vulgar and commercial, shunning any distinctively Australian product’49 were shared by many of her peers. These cannot be dismissed as the rantings of narrow-minded prudes. For such critics, their concerns arose from relatively coherent and deeply held moral and aesthetic views and from extensive professional experience. What is difficult to establish, though, is any single view or philosophy that can encompass all the reasons for objecting to Americanisation. The values invoked by the critics were embedded in the discourses of modernism as well as anti-modernism; of the disputatious discipline of psychology; of nationalism, mostly meaning Empire nationalism, but also a more Australian variety; and of degeneracy, racism and the brotherhood of man. Such variety of discourses meant that individuals and groups among the objectors were often considerably hostile to others within that same constellation. But perhaps what did unite them was a shared understanding of the power of film itself. As Pope Plus XI stated it:
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The power of the motion picture consists in this: that it speaks by means of vivid and concrete imagery which the mind takes in with enjoyment and without fatigue. Even the crudest and most primitive minds, which have neither the capacity nor the desire to make the effort necessary for abstraction or deductive reasoning, are captivated by the cinema. In place of the efforts which reading or listening demand, there is the continued pleasure of a succession of concrete and so to speak, living pictures.50
This same concern with the powerful influence of film for good or evil was expressed by the Royal Commissioners reporting on the Moving Picture Industry in 1928. Their particular worry was with the minds of children and of native races.51 Such minds were not fully formed and self-responsible but were susceptible to suggestion and to malign influence. Over and over again in the anti-Americanisation literature, the spectre of damage done to children and youth was raised, and more specially the risk to Aborigines and the ‘subject races’52 of the East. There were also other groups who, for a variety of reasons, were more open to suggestion and corruption. Pope Pius XI identified ‘a certain type of person and certain classes of people [who are attracted] to theatres which present picture plays calculated to inflame passions and arouse lower instincts latent in human hearts’.53 A secular version is found in a speech by the long-serving Sydney Censor, W. Cresswell O’Reilly, to the Good Film League in 1926. Much of his address was devoted to the influence of film on youth, but then it reached out to ‘the not so well-off classes in the community’, and finally he settled on movie fans. In answer to the question, ‘Why are undesirable pictures still made?’ he asserted that: there are two publics. There is the movie-fan public, and there is the general public, and the latter did not want the undesirable sort of picture ... Pictures should be controlled by the general public conscience. Public opinion.54
The significance of this bifurcation in O’Reilly’s view of the public lies in his work as Censor. The following year, the Chief Censor’s Report to Parliament concluded with the following statement: ‘Since a censor is not applying the standards of his own likes and dislikes to a picture, but is trying to interpret public opinion, it follows that a censorship cannot adequately perform its work if public opinion is not vocal’.55 Interestingly, not only critics, but motion picture entrepreneurs themselves distinguished between publics, although they reversed the values: the general public which wanted (American) entertainment, and the more cultured elite public which wanted (British) art.56
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This shared discourse of the public and of public opinion suggests a possible meaning of the vigorous anti-Americanisation campaigns of the inter-war years in Australia. Historically based analyses of the public sphere, following Habermas,57 suggest a transformation of that sphere from its eighteenth century bourgeois form of high culture and the genteel literary tradition, to a twentieth century industrial-commercial public sphere, ‘the maximally inclusive and homogenizing, specularized world of mass culture’.58 Crucial to that transformation was the United States film industry which Miriam Hansen argues became the ‘hegemonic model–and material cause–for the direction of mass-cultural production and reception in European countries and elsewhere’59 In Australia, this transformation over the first half of the twentieth century involved significant changes in the class, gender and generational orders, though not that of race. Such historical transformations are always conflictual, complex and incomplete, and it seems to me that the inter-war antiAmericanisation debates were a crucial moment in such a reconfiguration of the public sphere in Australia. On one side were men of the cloth, men of the law, men of letters, and women of refinement, culture and, increasingly, prestige in the professions of education, social work and writing. On the other side were commercial agents and associates of the imported American popular culture industries and the enormous number of Australians who went to the pictures over and over again. (In 1928, a total population of some six million attended 110 million picture shows.)60 Which side could claim social authority for its views? Which voiced the legitimate public opinion? ‘America’ stood for the winning side in that contest. 1 Part of the research for this chapter was supported by an Australian Research Council Small Grant. I wish also to acknowledge with thanks the assistance of Rachel Grahame. 2 J. Higham, Strangers in the Land. Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1955; E. G. Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant, Columbia University Press, New York, 1948. 3 Quoted in B. Ong Hing, To Be an American. Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation, New York University Press, New York, 1997, p. 21. 4 A term used by Dr. A. H. Martin, M. A., Ph.D., Lecturer in Psychology, University of Sydney, ‘In Defence of the Talking Picture’ The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 3, September 1930, p. 210. 5 L. W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow. The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1988; G. A. Waller, Main Street Amusements. Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City 1896–1930 Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1995.
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6 W. C. Downs, Commercial Attache, Melbourne, to Dr. E. E. Pratt, Chief, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Department of Commerce, 15 July 1915; Report 16; Australia – Reports 1915; Records relating to Commercial Attaches Reports, Australia (Sydney) 1915–1931; Records of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Record Group 151; National Archives 2, Washington, DC. 7 Editorial, the Age, 14 July 1915, attached with ibid. 8 ibid. 9 ibid. 10 W. T. Costello, American Vice Consul, Melbourne, to the Department of State, ‘Report on Agitation Against American Films in Australia’, 12 August 1926; (microfilm T1190, roll 6); American Consulate General, Melbourne, 1910–29; Records of the Department of State relating to Internal Affairs of Australia, 1910– 44, Record Group 84: National Archives 2, Washington, DC 11 ‘Opinions on the Foreign Outlook’, Film Year Book, 1926, p. 825. 12 K. Thompson Exporting Entertainment. America in the World Film Market 1907–34, BFI Publishing, London, 1985, p. 137. In 1925–26, well over 90 per cent of the approximately 700 features imported into Australia were American: Report of the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, Australia. Parliamentary Papers, vol. 71, 1926–28, nos 14–16. 13 Costello, ‘Report on Agitation Against American Films in Australia’, 12 August 1926; (microfilm T1190, roll 6); Record Group 84: NA 2. 14 Editorial, Film Weekly, 2 June 1927, p. 3. 15 Costello, ‘Report on Agitation Against American Films in Australia’, 12 August 1926; (microfilm T1190, roll 6); Record Group 84: NA 2. 16 The proportion of Australian import trade from the United States doubled from 1913 (12 per cent) to 1920 (24 per cent): Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, no. 14, 1921, p. 526. For moving pictures, see R. Megaw, ‘The American Image: Influence on Australian Cinema Management 1896–23’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 54, pt. 2, June 1968, pp. 194–204. 17 Assistance and protection were provided by the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Department of Commerce, and the Consular Service of the Department of State; also by specific legislation such as the Webb–Pomerene Act. 18 A. W. Ferrin, Resident US Trade Commissioner, Melbourne, to Chief, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Department of Commerce, 27 June 1919, 15 August 1919, 22 October 1919; Australia – General 1919–20; General Records Trade Promotion 1914–22; Records of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Record Group 151; National Archives 2, Washington, DC. 19 Chief, Far Eastern Division, Washington, to Mr Casey [Sydney?], ‘Suggestions to American Manufacturers for the Establishment of Trading Relations in Australia, 15 July 1919; Australia – General 1919–22; General Records Trade Promotion 1914– 58; Records of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Record Group 151; National Archives 2, Washington, DC. 20 R. R. Doyle, General Manager United Artists (Australasia) Ltd., quoted by A. W. Kelly, Vice-President-Treasurer, United Artists Corporation, to D. F. O’Brien, 15 October, 1929, O’Brien Legal File, UA (Australasia) Ltd. Correspondence 1929, United Artists Records, Group II, Archives Division, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; see also D. Carboch ‘The Fall of the Bruce-Page Government’ in A. Wildavsky and D. Carboch, Studies in Australian Politics, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1958, pp. 213–33. 21 W. H. Hays, November 1922, quoted in ‘The Hays Organization. A Resume of
30
22
23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30
31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39 40 41 42 43
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the Development of the M. P. Prod. and Dis. of America, Inc.’ Film Year Book, 1922–23, p. 333. C. E. Smith, United Artists (Australasia) Ltd., Sydney, to H. Abrams, Governor General, United Artists (Aust.) Ltd, New York, 18 October 1923, O’Brien Legal File, UA (Australasia) Ltd. Correspondence 1923–26, United Artists Records, Group II, Archives Division, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Morning Post, Melbourne, 17 July 1927, quoted in Costello, ‘Report on Agitation Against American Films in Australia’, 12 August 1926; (microfilm T1190, roll 6); Record Group 84: NA 2. E. C. Squires, Trade Commissioner, Sydney, Weekly Report, Week ending 24 September 1932; Sydney Reports 1932; Records relating to Commercial Attaches Reports, Australia (Sydney) 1932; Records of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Record Group 151; National Archives 2, Washington, DC. See, for example, ‘Retail Music Traders Association Active’, Australasian Phonograph Monthly and Music Trade Review, 21 November 1927, p. 39; Cultural Defence Committee, Mental Rubbish from Overseas, Sydney 1935. Report of the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, Minutes of Evidence, Government Printer, Canberra, 1927. ‘Imported Books’, The Australian Worker, 1 April 1925, p. 11. ibid. N. O’Sullivan, ‘American Films and Why Not?’ Film Weekly, 21 Oct 1926, p. 8. D. Collins, Hollywood Down Under. Australians at the Movies 1896 to the Present Day, Angus & Robertson, North Ryde, NSW, 1987; D. Collins ‘The Movie Octopus’ in P. Spearritt and D. Walker (eds) Australian Popular Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1979, pp. 102–20. J. J. Matthews, ‘Dancing Modernity’ in Barbara Caine & Rosemary Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, pp. 74–87. R. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure. A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788, Longman, Melbourne, 1995. ‘The Pope’s Encyclical’, Everyones, 12 August 1936, p. 8. Freeman’s Journal, Sydney, 5 March 1925: cited in F. K. Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents 1901–1939, Wren Publishing, Melbourne, 1972, pp. 398–99. For example, a series of letters to the Sydney Morning Herald, June–July 1932; see also J. F. Williams, Quarantined Culture. Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, 1995. ‘Both Sides of the Crooning Controversy’, Wireless Weekly, 26 April 1935, pp. 9–10; Eyebrow, ‘A Question of Mental Plane’, Wireless Weekly, October 1934; editorial ‘Where the Films Often Fail’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 1934; editorial, Australasian Phonograph Monthly and Music Trade Review, 25 June 1930. ‘The Cinema and Crime’ Good Film Bulletin, No. 3, January 1927, p. 13; ‘No Evidence to Justify Vicious Attack on Films’, Everyones, 6 May 1936, p. 4. Editorial, ‘The Cinema and the Child’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June 1934. B. Tildesley, ‘The Cinema in Australia’, Australian Quarterly, 15 December 1930, pp. 89–103. ibid., p. 101. ibid., p. 95. ibid., p. 102. B. Tildesley, ‘International Aspects of the Cinema’, Australian Quarterly, 14 March 1934, pp. 107–111.
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44 ibid., p. 107. 45 Quoted in Costello, ‘Report on Agitation Against American Films in Australia’, 12 August 1926; (microfilm T1190, roll 6); Record Group 84: NA 2. 46 P. Hunter, Radio talk over 2GB, ‘Motion Pictures’ Mission’, Everyones, 27 May 1936, p. 10. 47 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, 1891–1939, p. 230. 48 R. Windeyer, K. C., Letter, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 May 1934; Everyones, 6 May 1939, p. 4. 49 D. Modjeska, Exiles at Home. Australian Women Writers 1925–1945, Angus & Robertson, Australia, 1981, p. 52. 50 ‘The Pope’s Encyclical’, Everyones, 12 August 1936, p. 8. 51 Report of Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, Australia, Parliamentary Papers vol. 71, 1926–28, no. 42, pp. 121–29; Ina Bertrand ‘Not Suitable for Children: A Survey of Movements in Australia to Protect Children from the Harmful Effects of Films’ Cinema Papers 2, April 1974, pp. 117–21. 52 B. Tildesley, ‘International Aspects of the Cinema’, Australian Quarterly, 14 March 1934, p. 110; ‘The Far East’ Film Year Book, 1928, p. 943. 53 ‘The Pope’s Encyclical’, Everyones, 12 August 1936, p. 8. 54 Report of Address Delivered by Sydney Censor W. Cresswell O’Reilly before the Good Film League in the Education Building, 20 July 1926: O’Brien Legal File, UA (Australasia) Ltd. Correspondence 1923–26, United Artists Records, Group II, Archives Division, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 55 Commonwealth Film Censorship. Report for the Year 1926, Australia, Parliamentary Papers – General Session 1926–28, vol. 5. 56 For example, complaints about film critics by theatre exhibitors: Mel. G. Lawton, Film Weekly, 4 June 1931, p. 27; J. Stiles, Everyones, 23 June 1937, p. 3. 57 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989. 58 M. Hansen, Babel and Babylon. Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 92. 59 ibid., p. 14. 60 Report of the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, Australia, Parliamentary Papers vol. 71, 1926–28, no. 64.
AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH Pam Peters Few topics generate more heat and indignant calls to talkback radio than the ‘Americanisation of Australian English’. With all the emotion it’s often unclear whether the complaint is a kind of patriotism, an instinct roused in defence of cultural purity, or a pre-emptive salvo against imminent military invasion. What is always surprising is the paucity of linguistic evidence on which the claim is based. The fraught business man, taunted by the office lift to ‘Have a nice day’ is disposed to find American economic imperialism and the American language as the cause of his troubles, though that may be the only fragment of American English in his day. And the mother hearing her child chanting VWXYZee long after Sesame Street has been turned off, may begin to worry about American TV influences on her child’s language development. Complaints about how ‘American’ Australian English is becoming are often based on no more evidence than Have a nice day and zee, though they are the perceived symptoms of a much larger malaise. Linguistic viruses must of course be eradicated, according to the ‘verbal hygienists’, as Deborah Cameron calls them.1 The language is seen as infected, and concerted action needed to combat the health hazard. If the American English infusion were confined to highly contextualised and repetitive sources like those just mentioned (the lift and Sesame Street), there would be little to challenge the linguist, or for the verbal hygienist to worry about. The complaint would indeed seem stronger if the Australian businessman were beginning to say Have a nice day in an American accent to his secretary. There is no evidence
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that Australians at large are adapting their vowels and using postvocalic rs in line with the dominant North American accent. And if Have a nice day is said with an Australian accent, is this evidence of the ‘Americanisation’ of Australian English, or the Australianisation of a fragment of American English in the antipodes? Talk of the ‘Americanisation’ of Australian English does not come to grips with the very process of change it purports to be talking about. The comment is like a single frame taken out of a movie which purports to represent the whole story. Or, to paraphrase Amanda Vanstone, it presents a snowflake as if it were a view of Antarctica. A broader review of the language is needed to examine these recurring claims of American influence, taking in all levels of language, phonology, grammar and the lexicon. The time dimension also needs to be taken into account to see how ‘influence’ can become neutralised. The notion of one English dialect ‘influencing’ another also needs to be problematised in terms of the exclusiveness of that influence, since Englishes worldwide share a heritage which is reconfigured in new regional and social contexts. Some things dubbed ‘influence’, as if they were external, may indeed come from or be supported by, resources close to home. The ‘American influence’ commonly associated with the use of gotten needs careful evaluation in these terms, since it remained part of Scottish dialect after disappearing from the south of England. Its reappearance in southern Britain speech, and in Australia, may owe something at least to the emigrant Scot. Another factor in such a case is the support provided by the common language, where forgotten (past participle (pp) of forget) is standard everywhere, and provides a firm analogue for gotten as the pp of get. These other factors are difficult to calibrate, but not to be ignored in considering the forces involved in linguistic change. We should not assume that new linguistic phenomena are simply a manifestation of trans-Pacific influence. Whatever that amounts to, it may prompt rather than dictate internal reaction. The actual channel or direction of external influence is also sometimes unexpected. In some cases of lexical borrowing which I shall go into, Australia’s use of an ‘American’ term was mediated through Britain, and it’s then a moot point whether it counts as American influence. Let me first review the various levels of language at which American influence would be registered, if one is to make a comprehensive claim for the Americanisation of Australian English.
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PHONOLOGICAL EVIDENCE I have already drawn attention to the fact that it would be difficult to claim wholesale American influence on the Australian accent. We don’t show any signs of using vowels with the rather longer durations of American English, nor of reducing our set of back vowels from three to two as do the various American dialects; nor are we tending to reintroduce the postvocalic r in imitation of the general American accent (pronouncing the r in words like car, work, and service). It may be true that TV commercials use American accents for some parts of the voiceover, as Sussex found:2 and certain kinds of popular music (including country and western) are sung with a generic American accent. These are still highly contextualised styles of speech, geared to particular industries, and do not reflect ordinary Australian speech habits. Claims about the influence of American speech on ours are often made more narrowly about the pronunciation of particular words, such as the vowel in progress and project; the advancement of stress in words like defence and research; and the use of secondary stress in a rather larger group of polysyllabic words such as secretary and primarily. Examples like these are the recurrent stuff of letters to the ABC’s Standing Committee on Spoken English (SCOSE) and are cited to demonstrate that the ABC’s broadcasters are becoming hopelessly Americanised (with a capital A). Only the third set of words suggests anything like a systematic principle and direction of influence. In the first case we already use the o vowel in other prowords like problem and product, and so if we’re inclined to adjust the pronunciation of progress and project, there is internal systemic support for it, apart from the external influence. The second case turns on finding American influence in the advanced stress of words like defence, research, and many others according to Sussex3. The claim is complicated by the fact that some American pronunciations are more ‘backward’ than our own, witness detail and ballet, among others; and so the differences don’t all work in the same direction. The placement of stress is a somewhat fluid aspect of contemporary English everywhere, because of our mixed heritage of Germanic, Romance and classical vocabulary. Stress is later and more mobile in words borrowed from French, Latin and Greek, whereas the Germanic tendency is to have fixed stress early in the word. The stress in non-Germanic loanwords in English is continuing to adjust over the centuries, and a general tendency to advance it to the fore has been observed over the years4. Words like confiscate and contemplate were stressed on their middle syllable up to the nineteenth century, and the variability of exquisite in this century is a further example. Thus any such advancement of stress in Australian
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pronunciation cannot be exclusively attributed to American influence. The question of adding secondary stress to polysyllables like secretary and primarily is more intricate. The slightly elongated American vowels mean that the ‘weak’ syllables are not all reduced, either to the indeterminate vowel (like the second syllable in butter) or to zero, and they thus lose a syllable, as in British and Australian pronunciation of words like se-cre-try, (going from four to three syllables). The problem is even greater with words of five or six syllables such as necessarily or congratulatory, where Australians in fact do tend to use a secondary stress, as Taylor has noted.5 So once again there are pressures in English at large to use secondary stress, though American English resorts to it more often (for words of four syllables). Again the issue is not simply ABC announcers and programs giving in to American styles of speech, as the angry letters to SCOSE would suggest. (I do wonder if commercial radio and TV stations get letters like these!) The fact that the ABC announcer may be wrestling with the indeterminate syllables of long words – and trying to disambiguate them – needs to be communicated back to the correspondent. So, to summarise the phonological evidence, American influence is matter of extensions to the existing patterns of stress and distributions of sounds. It does not amount to fundamental changes to Australian speech.
GRAMMATICAL EVIDENCE If it’s difficult to prove the case for wholesale American influence on Australian pronunciation, the same is true of American influence on our grammar. We use the same syntax and word order, and the differences noted are often ambivalent. Sussex tries to argue for American influence in ‘creeping transitivity’6 as well as ‘creeping intransitivity’ (in protested the decision v nominating for a position); but I do not think he can have it both ways. Taylor argues for an American model in the syntax of Go jump, Go fly a kite (not Go and ... ) but admits that the structure is still highly constrained (only found in abusive pseudo-imperatives like those).7 My own study of American influence on Australian verb inflections showed that there was little to suggest that we were falling into line with the American practice of using the regular -ed endings on verbs such as burn, dream, light, smell, but varying between regular and irregular endings.8 If we put lexical morphology (patterns of word formation) under the heading of grammar, there’s a little more to discuss in terms of American
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influence. Both Sussex (in 1985) and Taylor (in 1989) drew attention to the American penchant for what linguists call ‘zero derivation’, that is the adaptation of a word to a new grammatical role without any derivational suffix. It typically creates new verbs out of nouns (e.g. access, impact, source), though colloquial verbs may harness the umph of exclamations from comic-book conventions, as with wow, vroom and zap. Although the English language facilitates zero derivation, and Shakespeare was past master of it, dictionaries outside America are much more reluctant to accept and legitimise such formations. Even Americans have their limits, as shown in the local (Newsweek 1982) parody of ‘Haigspeak’, the idiosyncratic zero-derived vocabulary which littered the off-the-cuff remarks of General Haig (Secretary of State to Ronald Reagan). Yet in the compilation of IERT (the International English Reference Tool) which I shall describe, we have found Webster much more accommodating of zero-derivations than either Oxford or Macquarie. American influence on this point of grammar could therefore be seen in greater use and tolerance of zero-derivation – in so far as we can separate it from the general facility of the language to support it. Another derivational area in which American English is believed to be productive is the use of hyperbolic prefixes such as hyper-, super-, megaand macro-, though the latest Oxford lists numerous formations from outside North America. What may be distinctively American is the tendency to combine these classical prefixes with non-classical stems, in linguistic hybrids such as hyperstore, megadeath. But the latest Macquarie Dictionary shows no sign of hybrid local creations of this kind, so the ‘influence’ of this type of word formation is not yet systemic. In terms of their systemic impact, one or two American suffixes do seem to be more influential in Australia. Particularly notable is the creation of words ending in -wise, such as healthwise which serve to topicalise a new focus for conversation. Being often ad hoc, these words do not get a guernsey in the dictionary very quickly, but their censure in Australian usage books, such as Stephen Murray-Smith’s Right Words, suggests that they are impacting on verbal hygienists here. Having no reason to doubt that words ending in -wise are being freely invented by Australians, we have one small item of grammar in which an American English practice has embedded itself in the language system here. Another, proposed by Taylor is the creation of compounds with -in, on the American model of sit-in, associated with protests against the Vietnam War.9 A flurry of local Australian creations including love-in, teach-in and phone-in was to be observed in the 1980s, but has since, I think, died down. The contribution of American English to Australian English grammar is therefore very limited.
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LEXICAL EVIDENCE Lexical derivation brings us to the vocabulary itself, and we should now focus on the range and extent of words borrowed from American English, as possible evidence for ‘Americanisation’ of Australian English. Borrowing from American English began early in the nineteenth century, according to Ramson, although his examples of pre-gold rush loans such as block, bush, squatter, township do not seem to have been mediated directly from the New World, but rather by the British colonial administration.10 So although they are documented earlier in American English than in Australia, they do not constitute American influence for the purposes of this argument. The first loanwords acquired direct from America arc those which came with goldrush immigrations across the Pacific, notably digger, diggings, dirt, prospect. They too are symptomatic of the way in which loanwords are assimilated in Australia, losing their American flavour within decades of arriving here, and adjusting their denotation so that the digger could become the archetypal Australian soldier of World War I. This is certainly the story of twentieth century borrowings from American English. At regular intervals from the 1930s on, Australian observers comment on Americanisms impacting on antipodean English, but each decade the list consists of an almost entirely fresh set of expressions (see Appendix I). Only one item, OK, is to be found both early (in Baker’s list of 1945) and late (in Sussex’s of 1995).11 I wonder how many would feel it still had American connotations. Colloquial Americanisms such as to chip in, hitched (‘married’), tough luck were among those listed in the Sydney Telegraph newspaper in July 1936 as a force to reckon with. All those have become unremarkable elements of Australian idiom, and perhaps this was already true by the end of World War II. At any rate none of them reappears in Baker’s immediate postwar (1945) list of Americanisms having wide currency. Twenty years later, Baker asks the rhetorical question: how many of those (from the 1945 list) survive today, and implies that many did not.12 Yet checking out that list, I would say that about 70 per cent are now established in ordinary Australian speech, so much so that they are no longer felt to be Americanisms. And though Baker thought that few of his 1966 list of ‘recent filchings’ would endure, all have passed into ordinary usage. He perhaps assumed that Australians were taken with the voguish qualities of these words, (for example, their allusions to space exploration), and that once their voguishness had faded they would disappear. Instead it seems many have filled lexical gaps or serve uniquely to express something, colloquial or otherwise, and add usefully to the Australian
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repertoire. Gunn too expressed scepticism about whether Americanisms such as alfalfa would replace their OZ counterparts.13 Although that has not happened, several of them now stand as alternatives. Later observers and commentators on the borrowings from American English (Sussex 1985, Taylor 1989, Sussex 1995) continue to list newly acquired words and expressions from both colloquial and standard styles of communication. Again it is remarkable how many different Americanisms their inventories contain, in spite of their closeness in time. Taylor’s 1985 list includes rather more by way of colloquialisms (now pretty well assimilated), while Sussex’s later list included plenty of standard terms in various domains of life where Americanisms are to be found. Both Taylor and Sussex draw attention to the way in which American forms of address and discoursal tags have been adopted here. I note particularly the way in which the word buddy has been nativised in very quick time, in the ‘buddy systems’ established to help novices settle into schools here; and the way in which the label ‘buddy movie’ is readily attached to Australian products like Gallipoli. I doubt if terms like jerk, gay and dyke are felt to be American by the average Australian user. Phrases like You’re welcome and Have a nice day have also been swiftly nativised because Australian English had no similar courtesies to voice to persons with whom one was not acquainted but wanted to maintain good social relations. With the advantage of hindsight, we see that American loanwords and sayings, though numerous, are subject to rapid assimilation in Australia. Their American connotations generally seem to fade within a decade or two.
THE PROCESSES OF ASSIMILATION Assimilation processes help to explain two of the paradoxes of the American influence on Australian English: 1
why most people are unaware of the enormous volume of American expressions that have been taken over during this century, and
2
why the annexation of all this material does not seem to amount to the ‘Americanisation’ of Australian English.
Taking the second point first: the fact that American English has had so little impact on the essential systems of Australian English (i.e. its grammar and phonology) shows how slight and temporary the
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‘Americanisation’ is. Though we have taken on many words and phrases from American English, they serve to fill lexical gaps, or to extend our lexical resources for specifying the details of a particular domain. Take movie for example, the American word for a feature film, which now helps to distinguish the fictional from the documentary type of celluloid stimulation. The word ‘film’ has become superordinate of an enlarged semantic domain, with movie as one of its hyponyms, and in the restructuring process its American connotations have swiftly evaporated. Likewise vacation, the ordinary American word for a person’s holiday. In Australian English it sits alongside holiday as the word for a luxury escape to far north Queensland ... ‘Dream of a vacation in Hayman Island’, whereas your holiday may take you no further away than Avoca. Where American terms contribute like this to the heteronymy of Australian English, they acquire an Australian function, and quickly lose their American identity. In work on ‘international English’ for the International English Reference Tool (IERT) we have been compiling a database of English terms from Australia, Britain and United States of America that express or converge on the same semantic concept. We call them ‘sense units’, and the IERT database (December 1997) contains over 1000 of them. The sense unit for the number zero/0 (see Appendix II) shows more than one American loanword in the Australian set, put to use in specific contexts. Zip for example, is mostly used when quoting sports scores; while zero has an emphatic role and is selected instead of nought/naught or ‘O’ when saying numbers aloud for other people (its two syllables serve to underscore its identity). Notice that nil too is somewhat specialised in its uses, mostly used for reporting sports results, and in technical jargons: a nil (tax) return; nil by mouth. Synonyms are rarely exactly the same in their contexts of use, and English enjoys a richness of heteronyms with subtly different uses, to which her array of dialects and registers contribute mightily. The IERT database provides other interesting insights into the relationship between varieties of English, that is Australian, American and British. Through IERT we can identify semantic areas where there is an ‘international term’ common to all three varieties, and where terms are shared by only two out of the three. So far the number of sense units where Australia shares vocabulary with America is only about a third of that which it shares with Britain: compare 26 per cent with 60 per cent. This too could be used as evidence that Australia cannot really be said to be ‘Americanised’ when you try to get a hold of the bigger picture.
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TERMS SHARED BY AUSTRALIAN, AMERICAN AND BRITISH ENGLISH Totals
AM/AUS
AUS/BR
AM/BR
Common AM/AUS/BR
Total no. of different
2942
terms in IERT database
Total no. of shared terms
309
760
96
463
11%
26%
3%
16%
No. of shared standard terms
269
648
76
No. of shared informal terms
37
103
20
No. of shared formal terms
3
9
0
No. of shared major terms
236
624
73
No. of shared minor terms
73
136
23
270
630
64
393
26%
60%
6%
38%
% of shared terms
Total number of sense units1042 No. sense units containing common terms % sense units containing common terms
Source: Data from the international English Reference Tool (IERT). Note: I would like to acknowledge the very substantial work of Adam Smith, my research assistant, on the International English Reference Tool.
AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH
41
Let us revisit the original question as to why people complain about the Americanisation of Australian English so often on the basis of just one Americanism. Why should an instance of zee produce such a reaction? American linguist Labov theorised that linguistic change may take place below and/or above the level of consciousness, according to whether the variable is invested with a social value or not.14 Changes ‘from below’, as he puts it, take place without attracting any particular attention, and it seems as if much of Australia’s acquisition of Americanisms is in that class. The changes from above the level of consciousness will only take place if they carry some prestige value, and of course American terms may be positively trendy in some social sectors. For others the same terms may have negative value and become ‘stereotypes’ of reprehensible linguistic behaviour. For those people, zee is a stereotype, and if its linguistic future depended on them alone, it would never get a guernsey in Australian English. But for the growing child it’s just an item in the foundations of literacy, to be built into her education and adulthood. Labov demonstrated that it was the usage of the younger members of the community that determined the direction of language change. The value they put upon a candidate for change is salient. I hope to have shown why linguists could not agree with the notion that Australian English has become ‘Americanised’, because the essential systems are still more or less intact. Has Australian English become as relexified as is known to happen in the history of creoles that pass from one superpower to another, and totally renovate their vocabulary in the process? That too must be answered in the negative, since the Americanisms taken on by Australians during the last century have rarely replaced the equivalent Australian/British terms – rather they have been restructured into Australian paradigms and denationalised. I would venture to say that Australian English is no more likely to become Americanised than English English became ‘Frenchified’, as a result of 300 years of occupation. Enormous amounts of French vocabulary were absorbed, but English is still Germanic in its systems. The host language or dialect simply neutralises the aliens.
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APPENDIX I – Recorded borrowings from American English 1936–95 SYDNEY TELEGRAPH, 14 JULY 1936 biff bluff boss to chip in dago hitched (married) a peach tough (luck) to turn or be turned down
BAKER 1945 to ballyhoo belIyache bleachers blind tiger boloney cinch claypan coke corny crackerjack dodger eyewash gone coon to gyp to high hat jane jive lowdown lay off okay pash poppycock scram to sell a pup slick stooge zoot suit
BAKER 1966 blastoff breakthrough crash programme dig escalation gas gimmick image in orbit 64-dollar question
GUNN 1969 alfalfa bite boner booboo bull high rise hobo jerry to kangaroo court kick malarky scalper scrub slot machine stag party stash trunk
SUSSEX 1985 apartments bug (‘insect’ or ‘error’) drapes downtown expressway fabric fall elevator elective fastfoods fries French fries freak out franks flashlight fix (‘I’ll fix you a drink’) garbage hood ketchup Mid-East overly 6-pack sneakers thread
APPENDIX II – IERT DATABASE LISTING 249 NOUN THE NUMBER ZERO (0) AM Standard Major nothing WARN None AM Standard Minor 0 WARN Yes in a sequence of numerals, especially when spoken AM Standard Major zero WARN None AM Informal Minor zip WARN Yes especially in sports scores AM Standard Minor naught WARN None AM Standard Major nought WARN None AM Standard Minor nil WARN Yes especially in sports scores AUS Informal Minor zip WARN Yes especially in sports scores AUS Standard Minor nil WARN Yes especially in sports scores
AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH TAYLOR 1989 GREETINGS & EXCLAMATIONS (ah) gee have a nice day hi huh (aw) shucks sure take care wow yuk PEOPLE buddy chick chicken dame doll dude dyke folks gang gay girl guy jerk Ms pal queer you guys
CURRENCY billion buck cent dollar grand FOOD candy cookie French fries HEALTH & MEDICINE deliver health/nurs ing care director of nursing internship paramedic TRANSPORT (no) gas rig semitrailer service station truck gear shift gas (‘step on the gas’) lube
43 SUSSEX 1995
SAYINGS Have a nice day Hi Great It’s going right down to the wire OK Yoh! You’re kidding You’re welcome CLOTHING sneakers jeans sweatshirts baseball caps FOOD sub frankfurter hamburgers fries cookies TRANSPORT freeway
PEOPLE dude chick dweeb guy nerd SPORT draft rookie salary cap turnover bug game high five HOUSING apartment elevator drape garbage/trash
249 NOUN THE NUMBER ZERO (0) AUS Standard Major nothing WARN None AUS Standard Major zero WARN None AUS Standard Major nought WARN None AUS Standard Minor O WARN Yes in a sequence of numerals, especially when spoken BR Standard Minor O WARN Yes in a sequence of numerals, especially when spoken BR Standard Minor nothing WARN None BR Standard Minor zero WARN None BR Standard Major nought WARN None BR Standard Major nil WARN Yes especially in sports scores
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1 D. Cameron, Verbal Hygiene, RKP, 1995. 2 R. Sussex, ‘North American English as a Prestige Model in the Australian Media’, Talanya 5, 1978 and revised, ‘The Americanization of Australian English: prestige models in media’, in P. Collins and D. Blair (eds) Australian English: The Language of a New Society, University of Queensland Press 1989, p. 164. 3 R Sussex, ‘Linguistic evidence on the Americanization of Australian English’, in J. E. Clark (ed.), The Cultivated Australian: Festschrift in honour of Arthur Delbridge, Helmut Buske Verlag, 1985, pp. 396–97. 4 E. Eckwall, A History of Modern English Sounds and Morphology, Blackwell, 1975, p. 6–8. 5 B. Taylor, ‘American, British and other foreign influences on Australian English since WWII’, in P. Collins and D. Blair, Australian English: The Language of a New Society, University of Queensland Press, 1989, p. 229. 6 R Sussex, 1985, pp. 398–99. 7 Taylor, 1989, p. 239. 8 P. Peters, ‘American and British influence on Australian verb morphology’, in U. Fries et al, Creating and Using English Language Corpora, Rodopi, 1993, pp. 155–57. 9 Taylor, 1989, p. 235. 10 W Ramson, Australian English, Australian National University Press, 1966, p. 135. 11 The lists of Sussex 1985/1995 and Taylor 1989 are much closer in time, and have a few more in common. 12 S. J. Baker, The Australian Language, Currawong Press, 1966, reprinted 1978, p. 401. 13 J. Gunn, ‘Twentieth Century Australian idiom’, in W Ramson (ed) English Transported, Australian National University Press, 1969, p. 57. 14 W. Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns, Blackwell, 1978, pp. 237, 314.
POPULAR CULTURE Richard Waterhouse
INTRODUCTION Before World War I concern that Australian culture was becoming. Americanised was voiced only intermittently. Indeed, during the course of the nineteenth century many colonials, including such political leaders as Parkes and Deakin, argued that Australia was the United States of the future; although the United States was further advanced this meant it could provide lessons for Australians. Many colonials looked with envy at America’s public school system, its philanthropically based institutions of high culture, its federal constitution.1 This is not to say that there weren’t areas of dispute, rather that these mostly centred on economic and resource rather than cultural issues. In 1803–1804 there were several incidents involving conflict between local and American sealing gangs on the Bass Strait islands. The most notorious of these confrontations took place on King Island in 1804 when the crews of the American sealers Perseverance and Pilgrim kidnapped two members of a colonial sealing gang, tied them to a tree, and beat them with clubs. According to one of the victims, Joseph Murrell, the Americans told him that they were determined to ‘... take such satisfaction of me as should make me dread the sight of an American, if I lived’.2 At the same time, it was not uncommon for the captains of US ships visiting Sydney to smuggle useful convicts’, that is, those with manual skills, out of the colony.3 In the late nineteenth century, when fears were raised that American influence might become too powerful it was invariably by conservatives who feared the consequence might be a weakening of
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political and constitutional ties with England. In the wake of the visit of the Great White Fleet in 1908 the Sydney Mail called for a visit from an even more powerful British fleet arguing that this would be a demonstration of the greater power of the British Navy and would be greeted with even more fervent enthusiasm.4 There is little evidence in this era of a concern with American cultural influence on Australian society despite the fact that the Australian popular stage at least was already dominated by American genres.5 ‘At the present day an Australian is looked upon as a Britisher,’ suggested the Theatre magazine in 1907, ‘but far away in the mists of the future we can see a time when an Australian will be regarded as an Australian as a sort of distinct species of the Britisher’.6 Neither this nor other journals even considered the possibility that a future Australia might properly be labelled ‘Austerica’. Between the wars, however, strong resistance to American culture and its influence developed in Australia. On the Right P. R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen’s Fellowship of Australian Writers condemned American comics which it claimed: encouraged belief in demonology, witchcraft, voodooism, and a Superman inspired ‘raving mad view of the universe’; American wireless programs featuring crooning which was described as the ‘execrable moaning and groaning Negro slave noise’; dramas which focussed on such unacceptable topics as Tarzan, for ‘the Negro and his African jungle form no part of our national heritage and consciousness and we will not have him here’; American cinema with its emphasis on crime, sex and the humour of ‘wise-cracking American Jews’; and, finally, American magazines which were dismissed as ‘wastepaper’.7 On the left, the radical nationalist writers, who argued that there were special features of the Australian historical experience that set this country apart, and that the bush-workers, the diggers at Eureka, and the Diggers of World War I had created a folk culture which served as a basis and inspiration for the establishment of a unique Australian character and culture, criticised American culture in similar terms. ‘Deluged with cheap Yankee songs, films and novels the mass of Australians are careless of the fact ... that fellow-countrymen of theirs can compose good music, make pictures, write admirable books’, fulminated the Bulletin in 1922 and in subsequent years these sentiments were echoed by Vance Palmer, Louis Esson and others.8 Denouncing contemporary Australian culture as the product of the United States and suburbia these radical nationalist writers sought alternative inspiration in the folk culture of the nineteenth century frontier, a ‘primitive form of art’, expressed through songs, myths and stories.9
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Conservative intellectuals abandoned their anti Americanism in the aftermath of World War II for the onset of the Cold War led its members to believe that American culture, despite its shortcomings, was far preferable to the totalitarian alternative and that the external threat demanded Free World solidarity.10 However, the Left continued to agonise over what it saw as an ever increasing American influence not only through the traditional means of comics, wireless and cinema but also through the newly introduced institution of television. Indeed, given the Australian Government’s refusal either to place a quota on imported television programmes or provide any assistance to establish a local television drama industry, television became the medium in which American content and influence were most evident.11 Left wing intellectuals became pessimists, doubting that Australia would now be capable of developing a culture of its own. ‘We have been making the transition from a British colony to an American province,’ lamented the historian Geoffrey Serle in 1967, ‘with only a fleeting glimpse of independence on the way’.12 In the end, of course, this pessimism has proven unjustified. In the 1990s there are aspects and institutions of Australian culture more influenced by American values than they were in the 1960s but the last 30 years have also witnessed the emergence of Australian television and film industries and their products have proven popular not only in Australia but overseas – including the United States (see P. Bell’s chapter later in this volume). There were few institutions of high culture in Australia before the 1950s but we now possess not only national ballet and opera companies but it is the policy of these troupes regularly to commission Australian works. The corpus of Australian literature is far more extensive than it was 30 years ago and the source of its inspiration extends far beyond the unique traditions of Australian folklore, far beyond what the Lindsays dismissed as the tradition of ‘shearers and horses’.13
AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE AND AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY In the interwar period the influence of America popular culture extended to a whole range of Australian institutions. The majority of films shown in our cinemas before 1914 came from Europe but by 1918 the overwhelming proportion was imported from America.14 At first most films shown in Australia, even if they were made in Europe or America, came through London. But in 1913 Charles Spencer bought the largest exhibition and distribution network in Australia from J. D. Williams and proceeded to hire a buying agent in New York, thus establishing a direct supply of films from the
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United States. By 1917 there were 800 cinemas in Australia and 95 of the films shown on their screens came from the United States.15 Australian commercial radio, too, drew its form and programmes from the United States, with American popular music dominating the airwaves. At the same time, Australian stations, copying their American counterparts, sought to provide listeners with ‘middlebrow’ culture through programmes that provided condensed versions of well known pieces of classical music and Shakespearean plays.16 For the first time, American sports became widely popular in Australia. Harness racing, or trotting, blossomed as a night-time entertainment in Adelaide and Perth, developing a following that included people from a range of social backgrounds, women as well as men. In contrast, greyhound racing, introduced to Australia by the appropriately named American, ‘Judge’ Alfred Swindell (he was later accused in a Royal Commission Report of having attempted to secure passage of a bill legalising the sport through offering bribes to members of the NSW Legislative Council), developed a large but essentially working-class following that was, in any case, confined to New South Wales.17 But American influence on Australia predates World War I, although in this period it was confined to a narrower spectrum of cultural institutions. The popular stage, particularly the genres of minstrel show, circus, vaudeville and, to a lesser extent, melodrama, was dominated by American performers, acts and programme styles, shaped by the latest developments in advertising and publicity that came straight from New York. Some of the most popular melodramas performed on the antipodean stage came from England, but the most enduring melodrama staged on the nineteenth century Australian stage almost certainly was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The cults of sentimentalism and romantic racialism, it seems, were as popular with Australians as they were with audiences in the United States.18 This powerful American penetration of Australian theatre culture was made possible by the development of a regular and reliable shipping service across the Pacific in the 1870s. Touring American variety and drama companies became commonplace, especially in times when the American theatre industry was in a state of depression. American Presidential election campaigns, with their outdoor meetings and processions, became theatrical performances in themselves, resulting in a decline in theatre attendances. The usual response was a rush of show folk in the direction of Australia.19 By the mid-1880s local performers complained that capital city theatres were fitted out with ready made American plays, scenery and actors, and that the major entrepreneurs like Garner and Williamson despised colonial performers
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and performances. So local companies were forced to tour the backblocks to survive. But even here they weren’t safe, for American theatre companies were also extending their operations to ‘the bush’ as the development of extensive railway networks allowed the creation of rural theatrical circuits. ‘Kindly let me know what cities outside Sydney and Melbourne would be advisable for me to make good money in’, wrote the American theatrical agent W. A. Brady to the Australian melodrama entrepreneur, Bland Holt, in 1895, reflecting a growing Yankee awareness of the realities of the rural entertainment market in Australia.20 Indeed, already by the 1880s American circus, melodrama and minstrel outfits were as commonplace on country as they were on capital city circuits. Apart from melodramas imported from the United States, local playwrights sometimes wrote plays with American themes and characters, which starred visiting actors from across the Pacific. One example of this was a play written by Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch in 1891 as a vehicle for the visiting American Wild West performer, ‘Doc’ Carver. Entitled The Scout its characters included the obligatory cowboys and Indians and it featured several spectacular scenes involving men and horses falling from cliffs and bridges into rivers. This moved the Bulletin to describe it as ‘a wild aquatic hippodrama in four acts, ten yells, three plunges and a piercing shriek.’21 In the nineteenth century melodrama was also the vehicle for the creation of an Australian folk theatre. Local playwrights, from the 1830s onwards, produced a whole series of plays, usually set in the bush, which featured recognizably local characters, squatters, selectors, miners, bushrangers, and fiercely independent women. Yet American influence even penetrated these ‘indigenous’ texts. One extraordinary example of this can be found in Walter Cooper’s 1872 melodrama, Hazard; or, Pearce Dyceton’s Crime. The hero of the play is a squatter, Harry Worthe, described as ‘Stout, rough voice, tawny hair and beard, short tweed coat ... red crimean shirt, belt with knife and tobacco pouch, cabbage-tree hat, bluff manner’.22 But it also features ‘Jubilee Jake’, played by the American minstrel performer, Frank Hussey, representing the classic American minstrel show stage ‘negro’: Fo’ I can dance an’ I can sing I’se turn my hand to any ting I’se a pure bred nigger from de toe nails to de hair, Jubilee Jake boys dats de name I bear!23
And so melodrama was a vehicle for the transmission of American, and the expression of an indigenous, culture. Yet these cannot be
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separated as involving distinct processes, for American values even shaped attempts to create texts that contained Australian characters and stories. An even more outstanding example of this than the one cited above can be found in the way in which Aboriginal characters in Australian melodramas took on some of the characteristics of the American minstrel show stage negro. Thus in M’Lachlan’s 1849 melodrama, Arabin, or the Adventures of A Settler, the Aboriginal character, Warren Warren, performs a song that is vintage ‘Jim Crow’: Merrijig me sing, When de birds are on de wing And me laugh at him whitefellow too – Him preach, and him pray, An him go de debil way, While him black fellow hunt kangaroo. 24
Geebung in To the West (1896) and Billy Nulla in The Squatter’s Daughter (1907) speak in a similar dialect, and generally behave in childlike and deferential ways, at least towards their European employers.25 Yet in other ways these characters were less passive than their stage negro counterparts. Billy Nulla, it turns out, is really putting on the mask, for he reveals himself to be brave by saving the life of the play’s hero. In other Australian melodramas too, such as Melville’s The Bushrangers (1834) or Darrell’s The Sunny South (1883), the Aboriginal characters are strong and brave, capable of taking terrible retribution on those who have murdered their women and children.26 What this reflects is that colonial playwrights recognised that an imported American stage stereotype was a useful convention but that it could not encompass the full or even partial range of Aboriginal characters or their experiences. The manner in which the playwrights added strength and bravery to Aboriginal characters was an implicit acknowledgment that the European occupation of Australia involved violence, bloodshed and resistance. In the end, what this brief examination of melodrama has also revealed is the complexity of the cultural processes that were taking place in late nineteenth century Australia and the manner in which American influence was both direct and obvious but also sometimes piecemeal and less visible. In this context of the extensive American influence upon Australian popular culture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the lamentations of Australian intellectuals in the 1960s that Australia was suddenly moving from a British to an American shaped culture were
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simply misplaced. From 1850 onwards American popular culture was already prominent in Australia, already influencing Australian values and institutions. During the interwar period Australian intellectuals like Stephensen lamented that it was only American popular culture that was exported across the Pacific. Many years later the historian Richard White, in an important and influential article, repeated this argument, claiming that from the early twentieth century Australian popular culture became increasingly Americanised while our high culture remained determinedly British.27 This proposition requires two major qualifications. In the first place, many of the values and institutions of Australian popular culture, especially those related to sport, were and are English in origin. The most important and popular sport in Australia, horse racing – in terms of the number of people employed and the money invested it is the nation’s third largest industry – is organised by amateur clubs, takes place on grass tracks, allows on-course bookmakers, includes a respectable number of distance races, and features as its most prestigious events (the Melbourne Cup excepted) Derbies, Oaks, St Legers and Quality Handicaps.28 In all these aspects it follows English precedents. In contrast, in the United States horse racing is conducted by profit-making companies on (mostly) dirt tracks and the programmes consist mainly of sprints. Other popular Australian sports like cricket, rugby league, rugby union and soccer all have English provenances. Certainly, Australian Rules football was created in Melbourne in the 1850s and 1860s by T. W. Wills and H. C. A. Harrison, but in developing a set of local rules they were simply following English precedent, for it was precisely at this time that folk football was giving way to the codified Rugby and Eton Rules.29 For the most part American influence on Australian sport has related to changing the character of originally English games. The four tackle rule introduced to rugby league in 1967 (which became the six tackle rule in 1970), clearly derives from the four down rule in American football, although it was first adopted by the English rather than the Australian Rugby League and so the borrowing was second hand.30 The Packer ‘cricket circus’ of the late 1970s, which featured players in colourful uniforms, a white ball, night matches, and a shortened playing time, drew its inspiration from American baseball.31 Harness and greyhound racing were the only American origin sports to attract a widespread following in Australia, at least until recent times. The growing popularity of basketball and baseball in recent years, however, may signal a new development in the constitution of Australian popular culture. Baseball, of course, has a
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long history in Australia, but in the past it was regarded as a secondary game, used by cricketers to keep fit in the off-season, or providing half time entertainment at Australian Rules football games.32 Now it is a major summer game and the national competition includes farm teams belonging to the Major League American clubs. The second qualification relates to Richard White’s suggestion that Australians have always equated the United States with popular culture. Yet there is considerable evidence to suggest that critics of American influence were careful to acknowledge that there was much to admire in American culture and to express a sense of frustration that the best values and institutions were not transmitted across the Pacific, that is, the passion for education, political idealism (at least in the ages of Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy), a spirit of self help and patriotism, a philanthropically supported set of high culture institutions.33 Indeed, in the period before the ABC and the Elizabethan Theatre Trust institutionalised high culture in Australia in the form of permanently established orchestras, opera and ballet companies, Australia’s would be guardians of Kultur looked enviously across the Pacific to America’s philanthropically funded orchestras and art galleries. They also lamented that men of wealth in Australia were more committed to the culture of the Thoroughbred than that of Die Walkure. The example of stockbroker Henry Lee Higginson in founding the Boston Symphony was cited as an example of the generosity of America’s wealthy citizens, and contrasted to the absence of a tradition of cultural philanthropy in Australia. ‘It is difficult to realise’, claimed the Australian Musical News in 1922, ‘that while we have many wealthy people who pride themselves on being patrons of the turf, we have none who pride themselves on being art patrons’.34 Still, American high culture and its institutions were not without influence in Australia. A number of American orchestral and operatic performers, including Eugene Ormandy, toured Australia in the 1940s and 1950s. American writers, performers and composers were held up as examples for Australians to emulate. In the aftermath of the international success of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Ray Lawler was acclaimed as the antipodean Eugene O’Neill, although his work was probably more indebted to Tennessee Williams. The Arts Council of Great Britain was ostensibly the model for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust when it was established in 1954, but its funding depended primarily on philanthropy, along American lines. The Trust’s initial capital consisted of one hundred and thirty thousand pounds, only thirty thousand of which came from the federal government. Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1949 had rejected the Guthrie Report which had
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53
advocated the establishment of a Government funded national drama theatre, precisely because he believed its blueprint for supporting ‘the Arts’ promoted socialism. His support for the Trust was based on the understanding that most of its funds would come from the private sector.35 Essentially, the problem with Richard White’s interpretation relates to his categorisation of Australian culture simply into high and low. Not only has Australia possessed a range of gender, class and ethnically based cultures, all of them to some extent influenced from America, but there is also considerable evidence to suggest that there was constant interaction between them. For example, the Australian temperance movement was strongly influenced by its American counterpart and support for that movement was to be found both among the middle and the working classes.36 In this context too there is the issue of American derived middle brow culture, which began to appear in Australia in the interwar period. In this era commercial radio stations provided regular programmes with such titles as Great Plays in Half-an-Hour-and Cream of the Classics. Here is yet another example of American influence extending beyond the popular.37 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards British, Australian and American cultures became increasingly intertwined. At the same time they underwent similar processes of urbanisation and industrialisation. As a result the task of identifying what was and is unique to each culture has become more and more problematic. In this context it is worth noting that in their recent study of the American impact on Australia Roger and Philip Bell suggest that the ‘Americanisation’ of Australian society is really ‘modernisation’. ‘It is possible’, they write, ‘to see Australia ... as following the United States along a similar, if slightly retarded, road towards postindustrial status’.38 Because Australia was and is undergoing changes common to many nations, they argue, the influences to which we are subjected are by no means uniquely American.39 One of the merits of this approach is that it allows historians to understand the cultural processes taking place without becoming involved in value laden arguments about whether American influence is beneficial or detrimental. At the same time, this framework suggests some interesting comparisons. In his study of the history of sport in nineteenth century New York Adelman applied a modernisation model that incorporated the development of organisational structures, standardised rules, new technology, professionalism, statistical measurement of performance and a specialist sporting press-, to explain the changing characteristics of his subject over a 50-year period.40 There is evidence for similar processes taking place in nineteenth century Australian sport. But what were the sources of Australian
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modernisation? The evidence suggests that in this period, at least, they were English rather than American. The enclosure of Australian race courses in the 1870s, which involved building fences around the perimeters and charging admission fees to patrons, followed closely on the enclosure of England’s Sandown track in 1875, while such Australian sporting newspapers as Bell’s Life in Sydney and Bell’s Life in Victoria were modelled on English rather than American counterparts.41 The modernisation model also helps explain why Australia experienced some difficulty in developing an export industry in Australian culture, for the fact was that our artefacts were technologically primitive compared to their American equivalents. The Sentimental Bloke (1919) was a pathbreaking film by Australian standards but in comparison with sophisticated American filming techniques it was outclassed, dismissed by New York critics as an anachronism.42 Only in the 1980s and 1990s, as the Australian film and television industries have developed technologies that are equal and even superior to that available in the United States, have Australian films (like Babe) and television programmes found overseas markets that extend beyond art house and cult followings. The modernisation model also has implications for the history of Australian work culture. Because there were few large factories employing the latest technology in nineteenth century Australia work practices here remained more traditional than they did in the United States: the pattern of labour was determined by the pastoral cycle rather than the clock and taskwork, too, remained commonplace. Shearers, for example, were required to work a certain number of hours per week but they were paid in terms of the numbers shorn. Certainly, employers sought to inculcate modern work practices in their workers, but drinking in working hours, and the observance of St. Monday remained as Australian traditions.43 At the same time, just like England’s preindustrial workforce its nineteenth century Australian counterpart remained extremely mobile in geographic terms. During the shearing season workers flowed out of the cities in search of work in the shearing sheds, and then flowed back again as employment became available in the flour mills and the docks. In the essays in his Work, Culture and Society in Industrialising America, Herbert Gutman has studied that nineteenth century moment when a pre-industrial immigrant workforce encountered the modern American factory.44 In Australia large scale and advanced production techniques were not introduced on a widespread scale until the 1920s. Perhaps instead of simply dismissing these changes as Taylorism and exploitation Australian labour historians ought to think about this interaction
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between ‘traditional’ workers and a ‘modern’ factory system in terms similar to Gutman. Did the workers develop a culture of resistance expressed through sabotage of machinery, absenteeism and constant changing of employment? If they did then they were simply following the precedent set by shearers in the 1880s, who responded to the introduction of machine shears with a campaign of sabotage and defiance. Thus, when shearing machines were introduced onto Samuel McCaughey’s station on the Darling in 1888 the shearers attempted to sabotage the experiment by cutting the endless rope that transmitted power from the steam engine to the shears, whenever the boss was not looking.45 Or did twentieth century workers quickly adjust, take pride in their work, and see themselves as creating a new culture, what might be called working class Australianism?46 In other words, was this the period, rather than the 1890s, when an Australian urban working-class consciousness emerged?47 Again, in the 1950s, first generation immigrants to Australia, largely unaccustomed to a regulated factory environment, frequently changed jobs, organised strikes in defiance of bosses and unions, destroyed equipment. The comparison with nineteenth century America is inviting, illuminating, but of course complex and difficult.48 What a modernisation model does not explain, and indeed does not pretend to, is why Australians chose some works of American culture and rejected others. In the 1930s Australians flocked to American movies that were based on English and European classic novels, David Copperfield, for example, but rejected those with specifically American themes. Gone With the Wind was a flop the first time it was released here because it was seen as peculiarly American.49 Apart from Westerns, those films with an American context that proved most popular with Australian audiences were those that spoke to what Kathy Peiss has called heterosexual modernity. These particularly included films made by Cecil B. De Mile and included such titles as Forbidden Fruit and The Adventures of Anatol. Their plots began rather than ended with marriage as one partner discovered glamour and excitement outside the home, while the other clung to domesticity. The result was divorce although when the couple accidentally met again happiness resulted because, in the meantime, the domestic partner had achieved liberation by discovering the erotic rather than the parenting primacy of marriage.50 In the Australian cinema trade magazines managers and distributors ridiculed the notion that American films were imposed on a passive and unsuspecting audience. ‘After all, any picture showman worthy of the name keeps his finger on the public’s pulse all the time’, wrote one exhibitor. ‘Country of origin is nothing’.51
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Again, when television was introduced into Australia in the 1950s, the public was quick to express its programming preferences. The initial domination of commercial television programmes by shows dealing with American families (The Donna Reed Show), war heroes (Combat), private detectives (Peter Gunn) and frontiersmen (Daniel Boone) led to such vocal opposition that the Senate held an inquiry into television content in 1962–63: the federal government buried its report recommending the imposition of quotas on imported programmes, but soon after the Broadcasting Control Board introduced such a quota system anyway.52 The result was that more and more local programmes went into production, and in 1967, for the first time, an Australian made drama, Homicide, reached the top of the ratings. The comparison between the campaigns against American domination of the film industry in the 1920s and 1930s and against its television counterpart in the 1950s is in fact instructive. What had muted the outcry against American films was that many of them were neither about nor set in America. What sharpened the protest against American television was that so many of the American programmes shown here focussed heavily on distinctively American themes and characters. Once again what this suggests is that what appealed to Australians was the modernity of particular cultural values and institutions; and if they also possessed distinctively American traits, that was not necessarily an advantage.
CONCLUSION Closely connected to the issues relating to the American influence on Australian culture are questions relating to what in any case constitutes Australian culture. Historians of Australian culture have often taken a genealogical approach, seeking to identify those values and institutions that have contributed to the development of a unique Australian identity and culture, and ignoring those works of culture that are clearly imitative of British and American originals. Historians of early Australian cinema, for example, have focussed on those works that were usually set in the bush and featured convicts, bush workers, selectors and bushrangers. Yet other types of films that deliberately imitated American genres were also made here. P. J. Ramster’s Should A Girl Propose?, featuring girls who flirted and smoked clearly owed its inspiration to De Mille. Australia’s first full sound movie, Showgirl’s Luck, imitated another American genre, the show business story. Its plot focussed on the competition between two showgirls for the leading role in Australia’s first sound movie. One of the most interesting features of the Australian film revival of the
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1970s was that the new wave directors felt obliged first to genuflect in the direction of Australian film and cultural tradition through such films as Sunday Too Far Away and Gallipoli before turning to films that were more internationally oriented or leaving the country altogether in search of fame and fortune in the United States. Which then is more quitessentially Australian? Sunday Too Far Away, with its authentic Australian story, characters, and location? The Mad Max trilogy, which is set everywhere and nowhere, and which features an isolated strong and essentially asexual hero, in the mould of Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones? Or Strictly Ballroom, which on one level has international appeal because it is a homage to Hollywood dance movies of the 1930s and 1940 but which local audiences can also understand as a parable, telling the story of the transformation of Australian culture from one dominated by Anglo-Saxon conformity into one characterised by multi culturalism? At the risk of labouring the point let me take an example from another cultural genre, musical comedy, to indicate how defining texts, artefacts, institutions, as particularly Australian is not easy. When the Elizabethan Theatre Trust staged the locally written musical, Lola Montez, in 1958, it promoted the piece as ‘the first Australian musical’ and as a ‘gay, virile Australian musical’. Yet with its melodramatic plot, boisterous male chorus songs (There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills) and its obligatory love song (Be My Saturday Girl) Lola Montez not only reflected a strong Broadway musical influence, but unintentionally came close to parodying the genre. One critic was even moved to suggesting it be retitled, Annie Get My Fair Damned Okladoon Game.53 And so here was a musical, written and largely performed by Australians and set, of course, in Ballarat. Yet its form was so derivative of the Broadway musical that both critics and audiences remained confused about its true provenance. Perhaps, however, they should not have been, for it belonged to a hybrid Australian American cultural tradition which stretched back to The Scout and beyond. It is certainly the case that the bush and its products no longer serve as the central inspiration for Australian films, novels or poetry. But that is not just the result of American influence. In a multicultural society the symbols, villains and heroes of an Anglo-Celtic past no longer seem so vital nor so relevant. At the same time, in the wake of the establishment of national opera and ballet companies, of capital city based repertory theatre companies, the flowering of local literature and painting, the establishment of our television and film industries, Australia has accumulated such a rich set of cultural artefacts that there is no longer the need to hide behind a claimed distinctiveness. In any case, what I
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have sought to demonstrate in this article is that our cultural relationship with the United States has a long and complicated history and that the impact of American popular culture on our society cannot simply be classified as detrimental or hegemonic, rather it was direct and indirect, multi-faceted, complex and sometimes inchoate. 1 N. McLachlan, ‘The Future America’’: Some Bicentenial Reflections’, Historical Studies, vol. 17, April 1977, pp. 361–83. 2 Sydney Gazette, 4 December 1803, 1 January, 11 November 1804; Joseph Murrell to Messrs. Kable and Underwood, 21 October 1804, Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 5, p. 519. 3 Mitchell Library, Bonwyck Transcripts, Box 27, Bigge to Goulburn, 31 October 1821 4 Sydney Mail, 2 September 1908. 5 R. Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1990. 6 The Theatre, 1 June 1907. 7 Mental Rubbish from Overseas, no publisher, no place of publication, 1935, pp. 5–7. 8 The Bulletin, 22 February 1922. 9 V. Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties. MUP, Melbourne, 1954; D. Walker, Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, pp. 59, 95, 151, 155, 164. 10 R. White, ‘‘‘Combating Cultural Aggression’’: Australian Opposition to Americanisation’, Meanjin, 39, 1980, p. 284. 11 R. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788, Longman, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 212–16. 12 G. Serle, ‘Godzone: Austerica Unlimited?’ Meanjin, 26, 1967, p. 249. 13 R. Waterhouse, 1995, p. 140. 14 D. Collins, Hollywood Down Under: Australians at the Movies: 1896 to the Present Day, Angus and Robertson, North Ryde, NSW, 1987. 15 K. Thompson, Exporting Entertainment America in the World Film Market, 1907–34, BFI Publishing, London, 1985, pp. 42–43, 71. 16 R. Waterhouse, 1995, p. 183; Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1992. 17 The People’s Heritage, Western Australian Trotting Association, Perth, 1935, no pagination; Progress Report From the Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly on the Conduct and Administration of Trotting in New South Wales, Parliament of New South Wales, 1938–40, vol. 8, pp. 39, 69, 72, 74, 82, 85, 89, 166; Sydney Morning Herald, 4 July, 20 and 26 August 1927, 7 June 1928, 5 February 1932. 18 R. Waterhouse, 1990, pp. 98–115. 19 Lorgnette, 26 January 1884. 20 W. A. Brady, to Bland Holt, 28 December 1895, Australian National Library, Bland Holt Papers, MS 2244, Series 1, folder 10. 21 Quoted in M. Williams, Australia on the Popular Stage, 1829–1929: An Historical Entertainment in Six Acts, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 169. 22 W. H. Cooper, Hazard; or, Pearce Dyceton’s Crime, F. Cunningham & Co.,
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23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31 32 33 34 35
36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
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Sydney, 1872, p. 11. For a brilliant study of Australian melodrama see M. Williams, 1983. Walter H. Cooper, Hazard, p. 15. Quoted in R. Waterhouse, 1990, p. 100. A. Dampier and K. Mackay, To the West, Mitchell Library MS B 751, microfilm reel CY 479, pp. 388–501 E. Duggan and B. Bailey, The Squatter’s Daughter: or, The Land of the Wattle, National Library of Australia, Bert Bailey Collection, MS 6141. H. Melville, ‘The Bushrangers; or, Norwood Vale’, Hobart Town Magazine, vol. 3, April 1834, pp. 82–95; George Darrell, The Sunny South, M. Williams (ed.), Currency Press, Sydney, 1975. R. White, ‘ ‘‘Americanisation’’ and Popular Culture in Australia’, Teaching History, vol. 12, August 1978, pp. 3–12; ‘A Backwater Awash: The Australian Experience of Americanisation’, Theory Culture and Society, vol. 1, no. 3, 1983, pp. 108–22. M. Painter and R. Waterhouse, The Principal Club: A History of the Australian Jockey Club, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992: Harold Freedman and Andrew Lemon, The History of Australian Thoroughbred Racing, vol. 2, Southbank Communications Group, Melbourne, 1990. Geoffrey Blainey, A Game Of Our Own: The Origins of Australian Football, Information Australia, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 32–48: Leonie Sandercock and Ian Turner, Up Where Cazaly? The Great Australian Game, Granada, Sydney, 1982, pp. 22–31. Waterhouse, 1995, p. 226. R. Benaud (ed.), Lights, Camera, Action!: An Illustrated History of the World Series, Hamlyn, Port Melbourne, 1990, p. 6. Baseball matches were commonly played at half-time during Melbourne VFL games in the interwar period. ‘Mental Rubbish From Overseas’, the Bulletin, 22 February 1922, p. 11. Australian Musical News, 1 August 1922, 1 March 1923, 1 September 1924 R. Waterhouse, ‘Lola Montez and High Culture: the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in post-war Australia,’ Journal of Australian Studies, no. 52, 1997, pp. 148–58; J. Andrews and K. Brisbane, ‘Guthrie Report’, in P. Parsons (ed.), Companion to Theatre in Australia, Currency Press, Sydney, 1995, pp. 255–56. However, once the precedent for state funding was established government contributions to ‘the Arts’ increased dramatically, largely because contributions from the private sector remained far from sufficient to cover the costs of maintaining opera, ballet and drama companies. I. Tyrrell, ‘International Aspects of the Women’s Temperance Movement in Australia: The Influence of the American WCTU, 1882–1914’, The Journal of Religious History, vol. 12, June 1983, pp. 284–304. R. Waterhouse, 1995, pp. 183–84. For the history of middle brow culture in America see J. S. Rubin, The Making of Middle Brow Culture. P. Bell and R. Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 7. ibid., p. 8. M. L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820–70, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1986. W. Vamplew, The Turf: A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing, Allen Lane, London, 1976, p. 36. Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, Minutes of Evidence, 7 November 1927, cited in I. Bertrand (ed.), Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1989, p. 92. C. Fox, Working Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991, pp. 56–57, 59–60, 64–65.
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44 Vintage Books, New York, 1976. 45 P. McCaughey and S. McCaughey, A Biography, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1955, pp. 62–69; R. Waterhouse, ‘The Culture of Work in Rural Australia, 1813–1913’, unpublished seminar paper, University of Sydney, 1997. 46 For the American equivalent see Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labour in a Textile City, 1914–60, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 47 There is certainly strong evidence that a sense of working-class solidarity developed in the Bush in the 1890s, as the shearers’ strikes demonstrate clearly enough. This implies that class consciousness may have developed earlier in rural than urban Australia. 48 J. Wilton and R. Bosworth, Old Worlds and New Australia: The Post-War Migrant Experience, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1984, p. 98. 49 The Australasian Exhibitor, 9 May, 6 June, 4 July, 1940. 50 L. May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, p. 205: R. Waterhouse, 1995, p. 177. 51 Film Weekly, 16 June 1927. 52 Report From the Select Committee on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for Television, Parliamentary Papers, 1962–63, vol. 4, pp. 80–82, 94: M. Armstrong, Broadcasting Law and Policy in Australia, Butterworths, Sydney, 1982, pp. 41–42, 81. 53 Australian National Library, Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust Papers, Box 113, playscripts, Lola Montez; R. Waterhouse, ‘Lola Montez and High Culture: the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in post-war Australia’, pp. 148–58.
SUBURBIA Mark Rolfe
Both suburbia and Americanisation have been subjects of considerable opprobrium in Australian history. Yet a common thread to both types of abuse is the dismissive depiction of ordinary Australians as a passive, pliant mass conforming to the imperatives of suburbia or Americanisation which are imposed upon them. In the process they betray some supposedly higher purpose such as national identity, socialism or high culture. For example, some Marxists have portrayed suburbia as simply the ‘domestic annexe’ of capitalism, imposed by the capitalist class and its ideology to pursue its own interests and obscure class conflict. Some have dismissed the ‘stupor’ and complacency of suburbia.1 Some have portrayed Americanisation as cultural imperialism imposed upon Australia by a reified ‘America’, sometimes with the help of a comprador class, and diverting Australians from their true national identity.2 Despite his admiration for America and suburbia, John Howard nevertheless drew upon an old topos of Australian rhetoric for the 1996 elections when he posed the threat of ‘global American monoculture’ to our national identity.3 These are simplistic positions, as I hope to make clear from the threefold argument of this chapter. First, arguments against Americanisation often pick on the most obvious elements such as McDonalds, baseball caps and television programs. But one can observe that the least noticed aspects of Americanisation have contributed to Australian suburbia over the last century and more. Secondly, Americanisation has not been simply imposed on Australians by ‘America’ or by a local capitalist class. Certainly, groups of elites straddling the divide between the state (which is central) and civil society have led the different stages of Americanisation and suburban
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development. However, other Australians were not simply passive recipients but active participants in processes that filtered through society. Australians have loved whatever is ‘modern’, which has often meant ‘American’. In fact, Americanisation is part of the story of the modernisation of Australia. Thirdly, this least-noticed Americanisation has been a boon rather than a threat to Australian identity by contributing to ‘the Australian Dream’ and ‘the Australian way of life’. Such phrases are part of the history of Australian political discourse in which many have made an association between the spread of democracy, the spread of suburban homeownership and the progress of the nation. This discourse has taken the enthymeme form of argument based on one major premiss: in a democracy ‘the people’ are paramount. Aristotle defined eudaimonia – happiness – as the prime objective of any persuasive rhetoric. Hence, in a democracy the happiness of the people has been the prime objective of political discourse. However, this rhetoric in Australia has often conflated political and economic factors. The spread of prosperity into the working class, especially through the acquisition of property, has been equated with the fairness of democracy. There have been variations to this discourse as any term of political discourse is always set within a framework of values of the time. The framework constitutes a vocabulary of beliefs enjoying a particular logical status and influences political discourse towards certain directions and conclusions but not towards others.4 From its first appearance in ancient Athens, democracy was conceived as class rule by the ‘common people’. By the nineteenth century this had shifted slightly to rule by the ‘working class’.5 Since Plato many have considered such rule to be by the worst groups in society. Yet before World War I there were also positive arguments for democracy by Australian advocates of ‘working class’ achievements. After World War II this rhetoric gradually shifted to ‘ordinary Australians’ or ‘Mainstream Australia’ and the democratic egalitarianism attained through widespread consumer affluence.
COLONIAL LAND BOOMERS Nineteenth century Australia is often thought to be the glorious age of the bush legend which represented our true essence. Yet this is also the time when Australia acquired a reputation for suburbia. Australians are indebted to many middle-class English who invented suburbia as a semi-Arcadian retreat to escape the urban ills of the Industrial Revolution. But Australians are also obliged to many of their own
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predecessors who gradually transformed suburbia into an ideal for all during the second half of the nineteenth century. Many in the working and lower middle classes held ambitions for property and respectability.6 Others sought their own houses because rents were high, housing was in short supply or land was cheap. Whatever the motive, home ownership came within the grasp of many during the suburban boom of the 1870s and 1880s when high wages and steady employment provided opportunities.7 Most important were the colonial governments which led development by organising immigration from Britain, borrowing funds in London and then spending the money on infrastructure. This was frequently spent by government ministers supported by backbenchers on new rail or tram lines that increased the value of new suburban developments in which they held interests. Most premiers, ministers8 and backbenchers9 in Victoria throughout the 1870s, 1880s and into the 1890s were at the same time directors of property, finance and banking companies. Politicians and prominent businessmen, including the elite of the building industry, had ‘close-knit pattern of social and business connections’ that stretched across the suburbs.10 Thus began the era of the ‘public transport city’ which lasted until World War II The radial star shape of the city dictated a relationship of outer, middle and inner (working class) dormitory suburbs linked by trains and trams to the city centre and surrounding areas which contained commercial, retailing, manufacturing and residential properties. Davison makes clear that the small-scale and the elite of the building industry were responsible for the blossoming of bungalows across the suburbs. Both types employed architects to design housing, mostly to English influence. It was in the 1890s that American design was principally adopted with the American Queen Anne and the American Shingle styles. This was joined to English Queen Anne to form a ‘British American’ hybrid that became truly Australian as the Federation style.11 The other prominent American contribution to suburbia were frequent imports of trams from San Francisco, first in appearing in Melbourne in the 1880s.12 In political discourse many identified home ownership as one of a bundle of accomplishments by the workers in colonial democracy. In 1879 the Sydney Morning Herald claimed the ‘working man’: owned his own home, ‘especially in the suburbs’; worked ‘less hours’ and enjoyed better wages, diet, clothing, holidays and amusements than the English. He belonged to trade unions; and possessed the right to vote and stand as a candidate in parliamentary elections.13 In 1890 English radical Sir Charles Dilke depicted‘Colonial Democracy’ through a similar list of
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working class achievements.14 The gathering union movement and nascent Labor leagues vehemently disputed the notion of the workingman’s paradise.15 Certainly, there was considerable inequality in this age of reputed egalitarianism. Home ownership rates in 1891 were about 50 per cent across Australia but only 30 per cent in Sydney and 41 per cent in Melbourne.16
A FEDERATED, ORDERED NATION However, the new Australian Labor Party (ALP) wanted to ensure fully the promises of the workingman’s paradise in the new federation. The Brisbane Worker observed that ‘the keynote of Australian provincial progress has been Democracy’. If Australia was to avoid the hordes of ‘paupers’ and ‘teeming slums’ then it was up to the ALP to give ‘a full, complete, and happy life to the people.’17 The Federal ALP was preoccupied with other things than urban affairs. First, it manoeuvred in the new arena of national political parties that regulated the class relationships. Class had become more clearly defined at this time, particularly the now apparent urban wage-earning working class18 that resided in the increasingly dominant metropolises. By 1911 Sydney and Melbourne contained just under 50 per cent of their states’ populations. Australia and the ALP were gradually changing. Yet in 1912 Louis Esson was one of a number who feared their vision of socialism based in the bush was disappearing. He crankily demanded that ‘The suburban home must be destroyed’ and romanticised the slums as having ‘more character’ because people had ‘passions’ and lived ‘dangerously’19. Second, Federal Labor was preoccupied with what Castles called ‘the politics of domestic defence’: tariff protection, a centralised industrial relations structure guaranteeing minimum wages for men and the White Australia Policy.20 At the state and local government levels the ALP pursued democracy and home ownership21 to provide for the urban and country workers what was available to others. In 1910 the first Labor government in New South Wales, under James McGowen, aimed to promote land settlement, decentralisation and cure the housing shortage for workers through land, finance and railway reforms.22 In 1912 several bills, including one for the creation of Daceyville, were passed for rental properties and for those ‘who desire to own homes of their own’,23 explained Treasurer Dacey. The opposition seemed to think, objected one minister, that there is no ‘such a thing as a workingman’s suburb’ when there are many, unlike Britain.24 In 1910 the Labor government in South Australia introduced a home ownership scheme for workers, (in accordance with its platform),25
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as did the governments in Queensland and Western Australia in 1909 and 1911.26 Both Dacey and McGowen recommended the garden cities movement as an example of the benefits of ‘Peace’, ‘order’ and ‘healthy conditions of living’ to be gained for the workers and for the nation.27 This movement aimed to eliminate the chaotic urban development resulting from laissezfaire liberalism through planned model communities. Desperate urban conditions such as slums shaped people and led to moral decline. The state could create an improved, ordered environment that would create improved human beings.28 The leading exponents of this movement in Australia were Walter Burley Griffin, John Sulman, Jack Fitzgerald, Richard Stanton, Robert Irvine, Sir Allen Taylor and R. D. Meagher who launched the important Town Planning Association of New South Wales in 1913.29 These people exhibited the tendency to traverse divisions between political and civil society30 and pursued reforms which flowered most fully during the suburban boom of the 1920s. In Australia, as in Britain, the movement was deflected away from grandiose ambitions for whole cities ‘toward the most natural form of urban development – suburbia.’31 In 1912 Irvine was commissioned by the McGowen government to investigate housing for ‘workmen’ in Britain and in the United States of America, where he spent most of his time. His report advocated decentralised suburban expansion along garden city lines. The Perth Town Clerk and a Victorian Commissioner also travelled to America for inspiration. Between 1914 and 1917 American garden suburbs were celebrated often as inspiration for Australian emulation. The first garden suburb in Australia arose in 1904 at Haberfield, Sydney, as a private venture by Richard Stanton, whose company financed, designed and built this suburb of 1500 houses. He banned terraces and houses of weatherboard construction, instead opting for Federation houses with their American influences.32 During the 1920s suburbia was so frequently denounced it became a pejorative, while nationalists and anglophiles fulminated against the evil effects of Hollywood films, jazz music and Model-Ts.33 Ironically enough, a less noticed wave of Americanisation came in on the back of suburban development and the British investment which was crucial to the development programs of the National-Country Party coalition governments of William Hughes (1918–23) and Stanley Bruce(1923–29). During 1921–22 British and Dominion prime ministers reaffirmed an imperial division of labour that they hoped would revive the British
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Empire after the effects of war and American international competition. Britain planned to export its people and sterling to the white progeny who would export their produce in return. This plan became the centrepiece for policies to develop Australia. The government readily accepted a strong role for the state, particularly in immigration, rural development and infrastructure construction. This also meant recruiting important men from rural and urban capital to state agencies. Herbert Gepp, general manager of the Collins House group’s Electrolytic Zinc Corporation, was appointed chair of the Development & Migration Commission in 1926. He was a great admirer of American welfare liberalism. The Tariff Board appeared in 1922 under Herbert Brookes, a past president of the Associated Chamber of Manufacturers of Australia (ACMA), and rural industry representatives. In 1924 the Commonwealth Bank was placed under a board drawn from business and chaired by Sir Robert Gibson. A housing shortage resulting from wartime restrictions spurred the Hughes government to action. The federal government initiated the Commonwealth War Service Homes Commission in 1918 to provide homes for ex-servicemen, in addition to the state housing programs. These schemes and readier credit made home ownership more accessible to ‘workers’ but not necessarily to the poorest groups.34 Sterling investment mostly went into urban infrastructure such as water supply, sewerage and electrification.35 Electrification allowed the natives of suburbia to acquire elementary consumer goods which were often produced in Australia by American subsidiaries.36 Cars were now middle class luxury items instead of prewar oddities. The proselytisers for the nascent consumer society were in a young advertising industry that learnt its techniques from America.37 Middle class and working class suburbia blossomed with bungalows in the American Californian and Spanish Mission styles, sometimes set in cul-de-sacs which had been long popular in Britain but only became acceptable to Australian planners because of American developments. In Queensland both of these styles were perched on stilts. Tasmanians constructed some Californian bungalows in timber. But mostly there was a standard set of details that gave a consistency. The architectural firm commissioned by the New South Wales government to design the cottages in Daceyville was directly influenced by the Californian style through one of its partners who resided in Pasadena. In 1916 Stanton began Rosebery as a ‘model and industrial suburb’, attracting both home buyers and manufacturers to adjoining industrial sites. Stanton erected in Rosebery the imported Californian bungalow as a display home. Matraville in Sydney was commissioned by the New South Wales
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government, overseen by Fitzgerald, and designed by Sulman as a garden suburb for ex-servicemen, as were several suburbs in Adelaide. Gepp and Sir John Monash, war hero and head of the Victorian Electricity Commission, were responsible for garden suburbs. Of course, Australia’s greatest garden city is Canberra, designed by the American Walter Burley Griffin, who also designed Castlecrag in Sydney. Griffin’s work was greatly influenced by the Chicago Prairie School and Frank Lloyd Wright.38 Australians flocked to the cinemas appearing in their suburbs and in the city centres. By 1927 there were over 1250 cinemas, many owned by Hoyts. Many were converted sheds but many were adorned in the American art deco style, such as the Parramatta Roxy, the Randwick Ritz and the State Theatre in Sydney.39
THE GOLDEN AGE OF SUBURBAN SPRAWL The Great Depression from 1930 put paid to the suburban boom and to much building activity for the rest of the decade, bequeathing a shortage of dwellings that was exacerbated by World War II. It was only with the gradual mobilisation of total war that Australia and its economy finally recuperated and entered the Long Boom that lasted until the 1970s. Like many countries during this time Australia industrialised as it militarised due to the development of heavy industries such as steel, engineering and chemicals.40 Victory in 1945 left the United States overwhelmingly dominant in the world and a model for others. ‘The American Way of Life’ became the call to arms for Americans spreading their formula in Europe in the late 1940s through the Marshall Plan.41 The astonishing abundance churned out of the factories was associated with the country’s triumph and disciples inside and outside America declared this to be the result of a new form of capitalism completely different to the discredited capitalism before the war. But the nineteenth century habit of conflating democracy and fairness with the diffusion of prosperity continued. Democracy reigned through a vast dispersion of ownership and affluence so that, as the editors of Fortune noted, ‘the capitalist system has become intimately bound with the political system’ in which ‘all Americans have a share–Main Street has replaced Wall Street as the dominating factor.42 Such rhetoric quickly travelled to Australia during this period of greatest influence of America upon Australia, which coincided with the greatest period of suburban development. The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) was a typical apostle of ‘the American Way’ which it proposed as ‘the accepted way of life of the Australian people’.43 But ‘the Australian way of life’ was notoriously fluid in meaning, according to Richard
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White. Amongst other applications, the term followed American practice by becoming embroiled in the Cold War as something to be defended against communism. It also accommodated American cultural transmission to Australia and in the process became identified with the suburban home, with the car and with other consumer goods supplied by manufacturing.44 However, apart from the new international economy created foremostly by America, there were a number of local reasons for postwar affluence, which explain both the suburban sprawl and the acquisition of Americana. Some had been longstanding policies for decades, such as the ‘politics of domestic defence’. There was also the traditional link to Britain as an export market for primary produce, although the war cut the flow of its people and sterling to Australia and fatally harmed its role as protector. These traditional policies were reconfigured in a new consensus that had its origins in the late 1930s but only consolidated with the trials of war. People in the major political parties, the sectors of manufacturing, farming, commerce and their representative organisations, and the trade unions formed an historic bloc, a consensus of certain dominant and subordinate organisations which support a set of policies. The people and their organisations; occupied positions in both the state and civil society (thus blurring any distinction between these two concepts) and formed the political and social institutions that ensured the stability of capitalism during its Fordist stage from World War II to the 1970s. The name Fordism derives from Henry Ford who first employed mass assembly lines with the scientific management of Taylorism. But mass production also requires mass consumption, as proved by the overproduction of the 1920s. After the terrible hiatus of the Depression stability did not return until a balance between mass production, productivity, high wages and mass consumption was provided by the political and social institutions of a new consensus traversing political and civil society.45 This bloc was composed of men such as Herbert Gepp, Essington Lewis and Ian McLennan of BHP, John Storey Charles McGrath of Repco, Norman Myer and George Coles of the eponymous retail chains, Arthur Warner (television manufacturer and TV station owner), Ian Potter, Theo Kelly of Woolworths, John Allison of Permewan, Aurel Smith of Email, and William Queale of Kelvinator. The most prominent men were from manufacturing, retail, banking and farming, and belonged to ACMA, Associated Chambers of Commerce of Australia or the farming organisations. They also belonged usually to the Australian Institute of Management, the Australian-American Association or the
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Institute of Public Affairs. Importantly, they also occupied important positions on state agencies handling capital and labour such as Immigration Planning Council, Immigration Advisory Council, Import Licensing, Capital Issues Board, Ministry of Labour Advisory Council, Reserve Bank Board, National Security Resources Board and various defence industry advisory committees.46 The patriotic project of these men was development of Australia through a program of industrialisation, full employment, immigration, housing, public works, stable markets for a mechanised agriculture, social security and a central interventionist role for the state. Their model of modernisation, as for others around the world, was the American Way. So it was these men who promoted the introduction and adaptation of American Fordism in the fields of manufacturing, management, advertising, selling and distribution. There was a ‘great trek’47 of men and women from Australian companies, including those named above, to Europe but more often to America to seek the experts and designs. By 1956 Australian companies were linked for the most part through licensing agreements to 696 US companies.48 The efforts of modernisation found a focus in the expanding lowdensity suburban sprawl of the 1949s and 1960s. The success stories of the 1950s and 1960s; were the manufacturing industries of steel, motor vehicle, chemical, oil, food processing and electrical goods50 that produced for the expanding suburbia. Low density suburbia was not central to all countries that experienced Fordism. However, it was central to America50 and to Australia where it stretched across most cities but reached its apogee in those metropolises that benefited most from the development program – Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. As always state intervention by both tiers of federation was central to a ‘coalition of circumstances’, as Greig calls it. In fact, governments were responding to the huge housing shortage of the 1940s and 1950s. A lack of some 400 000 dwellings helped to agitate middle-class voters against the Chifley government in 1949. The general urban policy was decentralisation to the new outer suburbs that grew for a variety of reasons. As inner city slums and city residences were cleared people fled to the suburbs. The Menzies government continued Chifley’s Commonwealth State Housing Agreement that provided financial assistance to state governments for new housing which only occurred in the new suburbs. Similarly, the War Services Homes Scheme only provided funds for veterans to buy new homes. The government provided subsidies to home owners through tax benefits and there were also historically low interest rates from banks for
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mortgages that were only given for new housing. This was, of course, only in the suburbs.51 Due to development, manufacturing industries sprouted in these urban frontiers,52 and often were supplied with the desired labour when migrants trooped off the ships. Migrant hostels in the cities were placed, after consultation with the IPC, in close proximity to the manufacturing, making them points of entry into Australia for new citizens to find jobs and housing. 53 Thus, New Australians became additions to the burgeoning mass consumer market and enthusiastic adherents to ‘the Aussie Dream’. Furthermore, the government’s constitution of the Reserve Bank and the Banking Act in 1959 required the banks to keep 50 per cent of their funds for housing loans. For all of these reasons the fringes of Australian cities were working class suburbs, not middle class like American suburbs. At the State government level plans for Sydney (1948), Melbourne (1954), Adelaide (1962) and Perth and Fremantle (1955) all emphasised decentralised suburban expansion involving bungalows on a quarter-acre block, manufacturing industries and shopping centres54 and transport policies which favoured roads and highways over mass public transit. The garden city idea still flourished and the new city of Elizabeth, north of Adelaide, was the most ambitious example. It was planned with a town centre of civic and public buildings, theatres, business and professional premises and shopping centres conforming ‘to the latest developments in Britain [and] the United States’.55 In deals between state government and large manufacturing corporations the government promised to import and house migrants through its own South Australian Housing Trust which provided a labour force for the factories of General Motors Holden, Chrysler, Kelvinator, and BHP. On a less grandiose scale the governments of Victoria and New South Wales did the same sort of deals providing housing for workers in factories erected by BHP, GMH, Ford and Chrysler on the outskirts of Melbourne and Sydney. In addition, the housing policies of these two governments generally favoured the outer metropolitan areas.56 In the 1950s many couples yearned for their own homes in these suburbs to raise families. They were sick of the housing shortages and the accompanying high rents, so much so that owner-builders were responsible for 30–40 per cent of homes constructed. Their ideas incorporated some aspects of Modernism, which had apostles such as Harry Seidler and Robin Boyd who were heavily influenced by American practice. But these couples were somewhat resistant to the full onslaught of Modernism due to their ideals of domesticity. Meanwhile, the ‘organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and other American West Coast
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architects had its exponents, particularly in Sydney. By the 1960s ‘contemporary’ had replaced modern, however the trend of opening the Australian home to light and open planning continued. Hallways were reduced and kitchens became the centre of open family areas. Under licence from American companies, A. V. Jennings and Wunderlich manufactured aluminium windows which allowed large picture windows like houses in California. It was possible to merge the inside and the outside of the home, particularly in the manner of organic architecture, Cape Cod, Beachcomber and other American house designs proliferated in the 1960s.57 A. V. Jennings sent its staff to America to acquire house designs and followed the American marketing innovation by creating estates of display homes back in Australia.58 In accordance with decentralised city plans, State governments promoted car use and roads ahead of public transport, which received declining expenditure throughout the 1950s.59 In 1959 the Menzies government first joined the states in providing funding for highways and roads. In the early 1960s the transport departments in New South Wales and Victoria employed the same American firm of freeway consultants for transport plans for Sydney and Melbourne. The predictable solution was more highways and less public transport to cater for the increasing numbers of office employees working in the CBDs but living in the suburbs. In partnership with an Australian firm the American consultants also came up with the transport plans for Adelaide and Canberra.60 By the early 1970s American approaches dominated transport studies in Australia.61 The sweeping curves of cars and highways were associated with the modernity of America and appeared to be more exciting than the clanking antiquity of trams and trains. By the early 1960s trams disappeared from all Australian cities apart from Melbourne. The changes proved beneficial to the cars and trucks that rolled out of the complex process of steel, vehicle and parts manufacturing that dominated the Fordist consensus. With the rapid rise in car ownership Australians also came to enjoy the freedom Americans associated with cars, driving to the beaches dotted along the coast, or to the drive-in cinemas, which first arrived from America in Burwood, Melbourne in 1954 through Hoyts and several partners. By 1968 there were 20 in that city alone.62 Australians could also drive to Kentucky Fried Chicken or Pizza Hut, which first appeared in the thriving western suburbs of Sydney in 1969 and 1970. McDonalds followed suit in 1971.63 An important part of this decentralised development were shopping centres and supermarkets, the vital distribution links to consumers in the Fordist circle of mass production, productivity, high wages, mass advertising, mass distribution and mass consumption. ‘The suburbs are
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becoming Australia’s new mass market’, exclaimed one excited writer in 1960.64 During the 1940s and 1950s there was a ‘ceaseless flow’ of Australians from Woolworths and Coles to the United States to learn ‘the gospel’ on supermarkets.65 The first shopping centre in Australia opened in Chermside, Brisbane, in 1957, designed by a young architect who trained in America. The second opened at Top Ryde, Sydney, in the same year. However, the major shopping centre developer of the 1960s was the Myer company of Melbourne. Ken Myer visited America in 1953 and brought out a Los Angeles agency to design the company’s first centre in the then outer Melbourne suburb of Chadstone.66 By 1966 there were 86 centres developed by Myer and other companies that joined the race. In 1986 Chadstone shopping centre became the site for the first suburban eight-screen cinema complex owned by Hoyts and CIC, starting a trend for this American drawcard around Australia.67 Such developments had a great impact on the Australian woman of the 1950s whose experiences paralleled those of her American counterpart.68 With consumption given glory equal to production in Fordist society, the Australian woman was to be a shopper for her family, and this role overwhelmed her previous duties of production in the home. Her life would be supposedly easier with the ‘labour-saving devices’ of ‘modern living’ which originated in America. The Australian advertising industry worked on the American assumption that women made 80 per cent of all purchasing decisions.69 Shopping centres were designed as ‘selling machines’, as one architect put it, for directing the traffic of female consumers, Another described the store interior of a department store in a shopping centre as ‘like a stage’ around and through which ‘the audience moves’.70 Supermarkets were also selling machines highly dependent on the American idea of impulse buying by women, which was evident in one 1952 article by Norman Tieck who later created the widespread Franklins chain. The ‘whole purpose of the exterior’ of the supermarket was ‘to attract attention [of the female consumer] to the interior’. This strategy continued in the choice of interior colours, decorations and fixtures, checkouts and notices.71 The rhetoric of democracy and spreading prosperity shifted with consumer society. In 1964 Donald Horne celebrated Australia as the first suburban nation and ‘one of the first nations to find part of the meaning of life in the purchase of consumer goods’. The ‘central ... position’ of home and family was encapsulated in the ‘Fair Go’, the Australian translation of Liberty, Egality and Fraternity.72 Similarly, Max Harris took ‘the central facet of Australia’s social structure to be a vast affluent,
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reasonably classless suburbia’.73 J. D. Pringle believed this spread of wealth amongst the workers had made Australia ‘one of the most democratic and egalitarian countries the world has ever seen’.74
THE LEADEN AGE OF URBAN CONSOLIDATION Such optimism has since withered along with the Golden Age of Affluence that engendered it. The rhetoric connecting home ownership to democracy and Australian identity is still extant but has suffered. In the 1996 federal election the overwhelming thrust of Howard’s campaign was to ‘Mainstream Australia’, forgotten by the Keating government which no longer fulfilled ‘the great Australian dream of employment and home ownership’.75 ‘Mainstream Australia’ has vague associations with the majority of society and hence by inference to democracy itself. But Howard’s charges only resonated because of the perceived threat to the dream itself. Since the 1980s we have been stuck in an increasingly pressured world of restructure and convulsion that promises a better life in a liberalised, competitive global market. The rise in favour of free markets has drastically diminished the support for state policies of tariff protection, government business enterprises and government spending. Deregulation of the finance sector and reduced government spending during 1983 to 1986 initiated a trend that continues. Since the 1970s the politics of ‘domestic defence’ have collapsed. Manufacturing and agriculture have lost their previous importance to information technology, finance and banking, tourism, construction, retailing and property. These ‘producer service’ industries rose in importance as world trade and finance flows rapidly escalated from the late 1970s onwards. In combination with the state and with new sources of foreign investment from Japan and Southeast Asia these sectors were responsible for a boom in commercial construction leading to a surfeit of offices and hotels in the early 1990s.76 The state is still important. Major corporations, particularly in manufacturing, supported the Hawke government in its restructuring plans and in its accord with the ACTU. Relevant companies participated in industry plans for steel, cars and other industries and in various state agencies. As a result of the National Tourism Strategy of 1988, representatives of the state and of tourist companies and organisations have come together on the statutory Australian Tourism Commission and on the Tourism Task Force as a means of facilitating state strategic direction in this industry.77 The Howard government has appointed its own favourites to state agencies instead of the Keating appointees it
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abhors. The services sector has benefited greatly from privatisation fees and bargain share prices for the sale of government businesses such as Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, QANTAS and state utilities. State governments have enjoyed considerable overlaps with civil society. In the 1980s the Cain Labor government in Victoria formed an alliance with developers through the Committee for Melbourne, a club of powerful business, professional and local government people chaired by John Elliot.78 The current Kennett Liberal government forged extensive links with business. The Liberal Party treasurer, Ron Walker, is a director of the Grand Prix and the Melbourne Casino, which have both enjoyed considerable government incentives.79 These alliances have been in the forefront when state governments have acted as urban boosters through ‘mega projects’ such as the Melbourne dockland scheme, the Brisbane Expo, the ASER in Adelaide and Darling Harbour in Sydney. These are large developments mixing office, residential, hotel, leisure and retail business that appeared on government-owned land such as railway or port facilities. They are geared towards consumption and tourism, which find their apotheosis in that ultimate mega-project, the Sydney Olympics. The ‘Olympic Corridor’ from the Sydney CBD to Homebush begins and ends with extensive state involvement. The New South Wales government uses extensive planning powers80 and a number of important agencies to promote urban development: the Sydney Cove Authority, the Darling Harbour Authority, the City West Development Corporation, and the Sydney Olympic Organising Committee (SOCOG). SOCOG has repeatedly drawn people from business into its ranks. Highways are somewhat tainted icons of modernity compared to the rapture they engendered in the 1960s. But they are still worshipped for their capacity to move us quickly around cities. Even those who sometimes curse the car and mourn better public transport are nevertheless dependent on it because of the irrevocable legacies of previous decades. Thus the American contribution lives on. The Kennett government has commissioned the biggest roads project ever with the $1.8 billion Melbourne City Link Project and provided funding of $266 million plus contracted obligations for compensation to the winning consortium.81 In New South Wales Coalition governments commissioned tolled highways from private enterprise and provided either government loans or guarantees of no new public transport. Over the 1980s housing affordability dropped due to rising costs
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and interest rates, which caused a decline in housing construction. This trend was endorsed by many – including the Labor government’s National Housing Strategy, the Industry Commission, a House of Representatives report and various economists – who advocated a redeployment of resources away from housing towards more ‘productive’ areas of the economy. Meanwhile, cutbacks in Federal government spending were often at the expense of financial transfers to state governments, which in turn sought ways to reduce spending.82 One proposal is to reduce suburban sprawl and so reduce government expenditure on infrastructure. Hence state governments have become enthusiasts for urban consolidation. People are living in the CBDs in apartments often converted from the oversupply of offices or are gentrifying the old inner suburbs, thus changing the demography from working class to the white-collar middle class employed in the service industries in the CBD. Sydney’s ‘Olympic corridor’ has medium and high-density redevelopments totalling thousands of homes built on defunct industrial estates.83 Hundreds of them are in areas under the direct control of the state government or the Darting Harbour Authority, as are the thousands constructed for the Olympics and to be sold afterwards. The already lucrative inner suburbs have been given improved transport through the light rail partially financed by the Keating government’s Building Better Cities program. This urban consolidation has been a perfect entree for the New Urbanism movement that arose in the 1970s in the United States where exponents seek to recover the ‘American Dream’.84 Rather than the postwar model of the single-purpose low-density suburb, exponents of New Urbanism seek to revive prewar notions of traditional community through the small neighbourhood. They emphasise just a few medium density blocks where the edge is no more than 400 or 500 metres from the centre. Within this area, even within the same block, is a diverse range of land uses involving residential, employment and retail properties plus amenities. Roads and cars have a reduced place in comparison to the past to make way for the revival of public spaces of paths and greens. One redevelopment in the Olympic Corridor is by the Rosecorp company at Cabarita. It is constructing a $160 million development designed on the principles of New Urbanism, with over 300 homes and units, theme gardens, heated pools and tennis courts on the waterfront.85 The Dee Why, Mosman and Liverpool councils in Sydney are pursuing New Urbanism to recreate ‘traditional community’ through retail strips rather than large shopping malls, redesigning streets, widening footpaths
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and other features.86 The Gold Coast council turned to New Urbanism for a development project near Coomera after the storm of protest over the southeast freeway proposal. The mixed-use development covers 5000 hectares with extensive green spaces, three railway stations and bus lines for about 60 000 people.87 But the arguments against the New Urbanism arc also those against urban consolidation. These ideas are not the simple panaceas to our problems. Consolidation in the inner, gentrifying suburbs drives lower income people to the fringes and does not stop urban sprawl.88 Few know that the great icon of the bush – the old tin and iron windmill – was originally an American import. Few know that Fosters beer carries the name of the American brothers who brought a German process for making beer to Australia last century. These things – along with American architectural styles, the supermarket, the shopping centre, the drive-in and the highway – enjoyed exciting reputations for modernity when they first arrived but their subsequent familiarity in our lives soon dulled the memory of their origins and cachet. They were brought, for the most part, by Australians and then absorbed into Australian life with little sign that they harmed our identity. On the contrary, such selection and adaptation to our ways have been part of a complex and pervasive process of development in Australia in which many have taken part but with varying degrees of importance according to political and economic rank. 1 A. Gilbert, ‘The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism’, Australian Cultural History, S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (ed.) Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988. 2 See T. Wheelwright, ‘The Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism’, Economics as a Social Science, F. Stilwell and G. Argyrous (eds) Pluto Press, Sydney, 1996; H. McQueen, Australia’s Media Monopolies, VISA, Camberwell Victoria, 1978; L. Churchward, Australia and America 1788–1972: an alternative history, APCOL, Sydney, 1979; G. Turner, Making It National, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. 3 J. Howard, Politics and Patriotism: A reflection on the National Identity Debate, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Melbourne, 13 December 1995, The Electorate Office of the Hon. J. W. Howard, p. 7. 4 M. Oakeshott, ‘Political Discourse’, Rationalism in Politics (2nd edn), Liberty Press, Indianapolis, 1991, pp. 76, 77. 5 R. Hanson, ‘Democracy’, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, T. Ball, J. Farr and R. Hanson (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985. 6 C. N. Connolly, ‘The Middling-Class Victory in New South Wales, 1853–62: A Critique of the Bourgeois-Pastoralist Dichotomy’, Historical Studies, vol. 19, 1981; G. Davison, ‘Australia: The First Suburban Nation?’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 22, no. 1, November 1995, pp. 54–55.
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7 P. Williams, ‘The Politics of Property: Home ownership in Australia’, Australian Urban Politics, J. Halligan and C. Paris, (eds) Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1984; E. C. Fry, ‘Growth of an Australian Metropolis’, The Politics of Urban Growth, R. S. Parker and P. Troy (eds), Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1972. 8 Some of them were: James Service, Premier 1883–85, (director of a bank and a property development company); Duncan Gillies, Premier, Treasurer and Minister for Railways from 1886–90; several of Gillies ministers were directors of property and finance companies involved in suburban speculation, such as Alfred Deakin, Chief Secretary and acting Premier, who had close ties to the speculating mayor of Prahran; F. T. Derham, Postmaster-General; the Minister for Public Works and his successor in the portfolio; the Minister of Defence. The next Premier, James Munro (1890–92), did more than any other to ensure the collapse of the land boom – while he was a director of investment banks. M. Cannon, The Land Boomers (2nd edn), pp. 53–56. 9 Cannon named 24 backbenchers, such as the four who owned a property company and persuaded Gillies to build a railway station near their acquisitions which were then auctioned by another backbencher (ibid., pp. 56–62, 150). Alexander listed still more in 1888, such as the boards of the Australian General Assurance Company and the Australian Mortgage Land and Finance Company, which included the speaker of the Legislative Council. Alexander Sutherland, Victoria and its Metropolis: Past and Present, Today’s Heritage, Melbourne, 1977, vol. IIB, 1888, pp. 542–43. 10 G. Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1978, pp. 81, 514–15. The building industry was dominated by a small elite that received government and council contracts. 11 R. Irving, The History and Design of the Australian House, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 65, 83–85, 92–99. 12 Sutherland, Victoria and its Metropolis, vol. IIA, 1888, p. 18; F. Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents, Wren, Melbourne, 1973, vol. 1, p. 89. 13 Sydney Morning Herald, International Exhibition Supplement, 17 September 1879, cited in Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents, pp. 64–66. 14 C. Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain, vol. 2, Macmillan, London, 1890, p. 248. See also p. 232. 15 R. White, Inventing Australia: images and identity 1688–1980, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981. 16 K. Buckley and T. Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in Australia 1788–1914, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 161. 17 Worker, Brisbane, 5 January 1901, cited in Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents, pp. 5–6. 18 S. Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: The Succeeding Age 1901–42, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986, chaps 2, 3. 19 Cited in D. Walker, Dream and Disillusion, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, p. 24. 20 F. Castles, Australian Public Policy and Economic Vulnerability: A Comparative and Historical Perspective, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988. 21 R. Connell and T. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, (2nd edn), Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1992. 22 P. Loveday, ‘New South Wales’, Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia 1880–1920, Queensland University Press, St. Lucia, 1975, pp. 78, 80. 23 New South Wales Parliamentary Debates, 4 December 1911 to 4 March 1912, vol. 44, p. 3249. The bills were the Housing Act, the Sydney Corporation Act, the act for Daceyville. There was also an abortive bill for savings bank amalgamation.
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24 New South Wales Parliamentary Debates, vol. 44, p. 3088. 25 M. Jones, Housing and Poverty in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1972, p. 116; B. Dickey, ‘South Australia’, Labor in Politics, p. 262. 26 M. Jones, Housing and Poverty in Australia, p. 117. 27 New South Wales Parliamentary Debates, vol. 44, pp. 3251, 3265. 28 M. Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1984; P. Ashton, The Accidental City, pp. 29–30. 29 Ashton, The Accidental City, p. 45. 30 Taylor was a member of the NSW Legislative Council and Meagher became the first Labor Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1916 and enthusiastic promoter of housing for workers. Stanton was an auctioneer, real estate agent, planning enthusiast and member of the NSW Town Planning Advisory Board. Fitzgerald was Chairman of the NSW Housing Board (1912–17), Labor politician and Minister for Local Government (1916–20). Irvine was a professor of economics at Sydney University, whose close ties to Labor led to his appointment to the NSW Public Service Board in 1910. Sulman was a leading architect and a leading figure in town planning. 31 R. Freestone, Model Communities: The Garden City Movement in Australia, Nelson, Melbourne, 1989, p. 17. 32 ibid., pp. 62, 81–82; Roe, Nine Australian Progressives, p. 255. 33 R. White, ‘Combating Cultural Aggression’, Meanjin, 39, October 1980; R. White, ‘ ‘‘Americanisation’ and Popular Culture in Australia’, Teaching History, August 1978. 34 M. Jones, Housing and Poverty in Australia, pp. 116–18. 35 P. Cochrane, Industrialization and Dependence, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1980. 36 D. Brash, American Investment in Australia, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1966, pp. 289–316. 37 A. Stephen, ‘Agents of consumerism: the Organisation of the Australian advertising industry, 1918–1938’, Media Interventions, J. Allen et al (eds), Intervention publications, Leichhardt, NSW, 1981. 38 R. Irving, The History and Design of the Australian House, pp. 118–25; Freestone, Model Communities, p. 183. 39 G. O’Brien, ‘The end of Cinema Paradiso’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 December 1991, p. 44. 40 S. Butlin, Australia in the War of 1939–1945: War Economy 1939–1942, vol. 3, Canberra. 1955, p. 254. 41 M. Hogan, ‘American Marshall Planners and the search for a European neocapitalism’, American Historical Review, vol. 90, no. 1, February 1985; R. Kuisel, Seducing the French, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1993; M. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. 42 Anonymous, ‘The permanent revolution and the continuing revolution’, Rydges, pp. 163–64. 43 Anonymous, ‘Triumph – or Disaster!’, IPA Review, vol. III, no. 1, January-February 1949. 44 R. White, ‘The Australian Way of Life’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 73, October 1979; White, Inventing Australia, p. 162. 45 For fuller explanations of Fordism see A. Noel, ‘Accumulation, regulation and social change: an essay on French political economy’, International Organization, vol. 41, no. 2, 1987; B. Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990; B. Jessop, ‘Regulation theories in retrospect and prospect’, Economy and Society, vol. 19, no. 2, 1990. 46 For the Immigration Planning Council see Australian Archives (Vic): MP
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47 48 49 50 51
52 53
54
55 56 57
58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65
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598/1 Boxes 1–4 Immigration Planning Council. For the National Security Resources Board see Australian Archives (ACT): A5954 1120/12 National Security Resources Board; A4940 C117 National Security Resources Board – minutes of meetings, 1950–51. For defence committees see Australian Archives(ACT): A5954 1498/5 Formation of Industry Advisory Committees on Defence Production, 1951–54, and Manufacturing & Management between September 1952 and April 1954. For import licensing committee see Australasian Manufacturer, 5 April 1952, p. 20. Australian Institute of Political Science, Productivity and Progress, Sydney, 1957, p. 178. Australasian Manufacturer, 14 January 1956, p. 17. E. Boehm, Twentieth Century Economic Development in Australia (2nd edn), Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1979, p. 166. M. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, Verso, London, 1986, 191; R. L. Florida and M. Feldman, ‘Housing in US Fordism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 12, no. 2, 1988. A. Greig, The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: Housing Provision in Australia 1945–60, Melbourne University Press, Carlton Vic., 1995, pp. 114–19; C. Allport, ‘Women and suburban housing: postwar planning in Sydney, 1943–61’, Urban Planning in Australia: Critical Readings, J. Brian McLoughlin and M. Huxley (eds), Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1986. P. Spearritt Sydney Since The Twenties, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978. I. H. Burnley, ‘Settlement Patterns in Sydney’, The Australian People, J. Jupp (ed.), Angus & Robertson, North Ryde, NSW, 1988, p. 950. AA (Vic): B142 SC53/74, 2nd IPC, Annexures C & D to Agendum no. 3/1950. Special provision of housing was made for migrants allocated to BHP in Newcastle, Wollongong and Whyalla. L. Sandercock, Cities For Sale, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1977, chaps 7, 8; P. Ashton, The Accidental City, chaps 4, 5; I. Alexander, ‘Postwar Metropolitan Planning Goals and Realities’, Equity in the City, P. N. Troy (ed.), George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981. Australasian Manufacturer, 20 June 1957, p. 99. M. Jones, Housing and Poverty in Australia. R. Irving, The History and Design of the Australian House p.146; P. Drew, ‘Dwelling on the dream: The architectural vision’, The Australian Dream: Design of the Fifties, J. O’Callaghan (ed.), Powerhouse Publishing, Haymarket NSW, 1993; T. Dingle and S. O’Hanlon, ‘Modernism versus domesticity: The contest to shape Melbourne’s homes, 1945–1960’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 109, October 1997. D. Garden, Builders To The Nation: The A. V. Jennings Story, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 137–38, 159–63. P. Spearritt, ‘The privatisation of Australian passenger transport’, Australian Urban Politics. The company was De Leuw Cather. See L. Sandercock, Cities For Sale, pp. 156, 192– 93. A. Black, ‘Techniques of land use/transportation: Studies in Australian cities’, Transition, vol. 3, 1974, p. 78. G. Ivanoff, ‘Victoria’s suburban cinemas’, Victorian History Journal, vol. 66, no. 2, November 1995. D. Haselhurst, ‘Hot competition in the kitchen’, Bulletin, 30 November 1974, pp. 62–63; Bulletin, 23 January 1971, pp. 47–50. G. Farries, ‘Shopping centres: An important retail trend’, Rydge’s, 1 August 1960, p. 793. Anonymous, ‘Food for Survival’, Nation, 30 July 1960, p. 12.
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66 A. Marshall, The Gay Provider, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1961, pp. 228–30. See also M. Rolfe, The Role of America in Australian Politics, Australian Studies Conference, Budapest, 15–16 May 1992; M. Rolfe, America as Utopia and Dystopia in Australian Politics, New Worlds and Utopias Conference, Sydney, 6–12 July 1992. 67 G. Ivanoff, ‘Victoria’s suburban cinemas’. 68 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American families in the Cold War Era, Basic Books, New York, 1988, pp. 8–11, 165–68. 69 K. Hutchings, ‘Sweet and Lovely’ Australian Advertising and the Construction of Post-War Femininity 1955–65, unpublished honours thesis, University of Sydney, 1992, p. 3. 70 G. Farries, ‘Shopping Centres: An Important Retail Trend’, p. 795. 71 N. Tieck, ‘Better service/higher profits/lower costs’, Rydges, 1 March 1952, pp. 234–36. Also ‘Better business from a supermarket’, Rydg’s, 1 April 1952; ‘How to run a supermarket’, Rydge’s, 1 May 1952. 72 D. Horne, The Lucky Country, Penguin, Ringwood, 1984, pp. 25–29. 73 M. Harris, ‘Morals and Manners’, The Australian Civilization: A Symposium, P. Coleman (ed.), Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962, p. 53. 74 J. D. Pringle, Australian Accent, Chatto & Windus, London, 1958, pp. 96, 111. 75 J. Howard, 1996 Election Policy Launch Statement, 18 February 1996. http://www.liberal.org.au/POLICY/LAUNCH/launch.html. 76 M. Berry and M. Huxley, ‘Big build: Property capital, the state and urban change in Australia’, in International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, vol. 16, no. 1, 1992; N. Low and S. Moser, ‘The causes and consequences of Melbourne’s central city property boom’, Urban Policy and Research, vol. 9, no. 1; R. Fagan and M. Webber, Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994. 77 J. Craik, ‘Australian tourism: The emergence of a state-coordinated consultative policy framework’ in S. Bell and J. Wanna (eds), Business-Government Relations in Australia, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Sydney, 1992. 78 Low & Moser, ‘The causes and consequences of Melbourne’s central city property boom’. 79 Another casino director was on a committee reviewing the position of auditorgeneral. 80 P. Williams, ‘Out-foxing the people? Recent state involvement in the planning system’, Urban Policy and Research, vol. 15, no. 2, 1997. 81 G. Costa, ‘A case study on competition and private infrastructure’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 2, 1997. 82 M. Mowbray, ‘Wealth, Welfare and the city’, Urban Policy and Research, vol. 12, no. 2, June 1994; B. Badcock, ‘The urban programme as an instrument of crisis management in Australia’, Urban Policy and Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 1993; B. Badcock, ‘Towards more equitable cities: A receding prospect?’, Australian Cities: Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia in the 1990s, P. Troy (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995. 83 A. Herbert, ‘Investing in Olympic real estate’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 1994; M. Russel, ‘Rezoning move signals residential plan for prize Balmain site’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1996, p. 11. 84 P. Katz, The New Urbanism, McGraw Hill, New York, 1994, pp. x, xxxv. 85 ‘Rosecorp clears way for Cabarita’, Australian Financial Review, 30 October 1997, p. 45. 86 ‘Stripping Away the shopping mall blues’, Sun-Herald, 10 August, 1997. 87 ‘New Age ghetto blasters’, Bulletin, 23–30 January, 1996, pp. 47–48. 88 L. Orchard, ‘National urban policy in the 1990s’, Australian Cities: Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia in the 1990s, pp. 72–76.
‘RACE’ / ETHNICITY Roger Bell
Most modern states are shaped by ethnic distinctions within their national boundaries. Cultural differences and competing identities are dynamic features of these societies. Indeed, less than ten per cent-of all nation states are overwhelmingly monolingual, and in over 40 countries the largest single ethnic community comprises less than half the total population. Diversity within the state is, on one level, a product of broad historical changes, especially conquest, colonialism, and immigration. Yet this diversity is also influenced by the particular dynamics of the modern plural society, within which ethnicity and identity are constantly redefined and mobilised by individuals and the cultural groups with which they empathise. Founded as fragments of Europe which struggled to dominate vast lands and diverse indigenous nations, modern Australia and the United States are today both culturally diverse liberal democracies. Their developments were fuelled by waves of immigrants – European and non-European, free and unfree – and by struggles to subdue and dispossess indigenous peoples colonised by immigration and settlers from abroad. Despite America’s image as a unique magnet of migrants – a ‘nation of nations’ born of unrivalled diversity – the relative impact of voluntary immigration is arguably less significant in the United States than in Australia. Both nations are defined fundamentally by their responses to issues embedded in their multicultural character; by their responses to such central realities as the persistence of racial and ethnic discrimination; inequality; uneven patterns of assimilation; and the consequences of cultural differences and social diversity.
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After World War II the political elites in both states were obliged to respond to a rising tide of protest from so-called ‘racial’ and ethnic minorities. Political discourses centred in the United States on demands for civil rights and resistance to coercive cultural practices also took root in Australia, helping to mobilise peoples struggling to claim economic equality and cultural autonomy. In the 1960s, especially, Afro-American and Amerindian mobilisations against the hegemony of Anglo-European cultural practices served as a catalyst for broadly similar challenges to the overwhelming power of Australia’s Anglo-European centre. This paper traces the influences of US example on the politics of ‘race’ and ethnicity in postwar Australia. These influences are significant, embedded in such broad historical processes as decolonisation; struggles for recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples; and contests over civil rights, ethnic revival, assimilation, resistance and cultural pluralism. While both Australia and the United States emerged as increasingly diverse modern societies under these influences, their formal political responses, and the discourses which sustained them, diverged considerably. Both states struggled to contain cultural pluralism within the boundaries of the liberal state. Yet the character of those struggles, and the implications of proliferating cultural diversity, remained largely distinct to each nation. While the political institutions and nationalist ideologies of each nation imply a fixed and consensual identity bounded by the physical limits of the nation, contests over ‘race’ and ethnic culture represent struggles over power within dynamic, fluid societies. In each society after World War II difference was increasingly politicised, constructed by resistance to an assumed ideological and political consensus – a consensus to be sustained ultimately by the assimilation of ethnocultural differences. The ethnic identities and groups within immigrant receiving nations are defined both within social boundaries mandated by the host society and by individual choices based on ancestry, history and culture. In other words, ‘one’s ethnicity is a composite of the views one has of oneself as well as the views held by others about one’s ethnicity’. Ethnic identity is not static. It is also multi-layered. Changing over time and place it is incessantly shaped and reshaped by the individuals’ circumstances and social context. As J. Nagle emphasises: ‘ethnic boundaries, and their identities, are constructed by both the individual and group as well as by outside agents and organisations’. In discussing multicultural societies and ethnic identities it must be remembered that community values, collective memories and the sense of ethnicity are ‘changing realities both within the group and the host society’. Ethnic communities are not
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tightly bordered, uniform or static cultural groups. Furthermore, ethnicity is perhaps best understood as’... a process of construction or invention which incorporates, adapts and amplifies preexisting communal solidarities, cultural attributes and historical memories.1 This discussion of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ accepts that both are cultural constructs which have assumed fundamental sociological importance regardless of their ‘objective’ existence. Concepts of ‘race’ and ethnicity exist within fluid, blurred boundaries, while both centre on notions of a shared history within a group. Thus race relations are here understood as a particular aspect of ethnicity – referring in Eurocentric terms to relationships involving people of colour, incorporated into diverse national societies by slavery, colonialism, dispossession and elaborate systems of social engineering embedded in policies promoting reservations, segregation, ‘protection’, and ‘assimilation’ into the ideological norms of the core society. Nonetheless, as M. Banton observes, ethnicity is a form of group identification concerned with ‘us’, the privileged European observer; ‘race’ categories are usually invoked to identify ‘them’, the subjects colonised and marginalised by the core society.2 Developments on the other side of the Pacific did not initiate the rise of Australian racism and ethnocentrism in the nineteenth century. But the social mix of the United States always provided a convenient warning that was exploited by those who feared diversity and wanted an homogenous new nation. US experiences of segregation, social tension, and the immigrant ‘ghetto’ generally reinforced white Australia’s already exaggerated fears of ‘racial’ and ethnic diversity. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the so-called ‘racial problems’ of the United States were cited by powerful interests in Anglo-Australia as a difficulty which must be averted in their nation. From the mid-1950s, especially, developments in the United States also stimulated liberal interventions by the Australian state which attempted to control contests growing out of ongoing social inequality confronting newly arrived migrant communities as well as indigenous peoples. And, at the same time, the struggles and aspirations of America’s so-called racial minorities touched the lives of many of Australia’s most disadvantaged peoples, helping to focus their rising political demands.
INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS Native American ‘Nations’ had won in the nineteenth century some recognition of ‘sovereignty’ under treaty arrangements. In contrast, when Aboriginal Australians were placed on reserves, these lands were not recognition of prior ownership or remnants of ‘treaty lands’. Nor did
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white Australia transfer ownership or control of reserves to indigenous families or their associations. Inhospitable parcels of ‘crown land’ were set aside under European administration. In contrast, under the Indian Reorganisation Acts 1934, 1938, ‘Indian title’ recognised mineral and timber rights and empowered local tribal councils with rights equivalent to those of municipal government.3 On the eve of World War II Australia adopted an explicit policy of ‘assimilation’ to replace efforts of ‘absorption’ of Aboriginal peoples, both physically and culturally, into an undifferentiated society. Like later attempts to promote a policy of ‘integration’, ‘assimilation’ was invoked following American practice. Yet as Rowley observed: ‘There seems, then, to have been no very widespread appreciation of the long and bitter history of “assimilation” programmes in the American Indian situation, up to the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934.’4 As late as the 1960s suppression of the rights and character of Aboriginal societies persisted under overt regimes of ‘assimilation’ and ‘protection’, the success of which were judged by the rates at which reserves were depopulated and Aborigines relocated into institutions which would improve their ‘assimilation’ as productive labour in the mainstream economy. In contrast, from 1928, US practices, developed under Lewis Meriam. and John Collier, were built on limited recognition of political sovereignty and empowerment though cultural revival. Until well after World War II, both societies were dominated by notions of European superiority which justified the exclusion of other ‘races’ – both spatially and politically – from their entitlements as citizens in the nation. Most Native Americans were accorded extended citizenship rights in 1924, while Aboriginal Australians won broadly comparable recognition only in 1967. Yet both peoples continued to live under qualified legal rights and to suffer acute social disadvantage. Just as the 1967 Referendum in Australia gave belated recognition to the rights of indigenous peoples, so in 1968 the US Congress enacted the Indian Civil Rights Act that symbolically guaranteed that the Bill of Rights extended to all people living on Indian lands. Not until 1975, however, did Congress approve the important Indian Self-Determination and Education Act granting significant autonomy in economic and cultural affairs. Given their sometimes overlapping histories of invasion and marginalisation, indigenous people in both Australia and the United States might have been closely linked in common political struggles. But it was the plight and politics of African Americans under the banner of civil rights, rather than Native America’s activism, which first attracted
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sustained attention in Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal activists were less aware of the aims and tactics of ‘Red Power’ than of ‘Black Power’ – at least until the symbolic seizures of Alcatraz Island 1969–71 and Wounded Knee 1973. Earlier, in 1966, formation of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the American Indian Movement (AIM) had passed with little recognition in indigenous Australia, while movements linked to civil rights for Afro-Americans were widely reported and influential. In both societies, from the late 1960s, indigenous groups increasingly resisted assimilation, arguing that it constituted cultural genocide. Political sovereignty and cultural autonomy through indigenous control of land were common aims of indigenous revival – even while Aboriginal leaders remained only vaguely familiar with the struggles and tactics of Native Americans. Postwar Australians were, until the 1970s at least, arguably more familiar with ‘racial’ politics in the United States than in Australia. During the Vietnam War, youth rebellion and feminist protests, the Australian media, intellectual circles, and popular culture were reoriented towards developments in the United States rather than in the United Kingdom or Europe. The changing constructions of ‘race’ in American film, television, music and news media were instantly recognisable in an Australian audience increasingly receptive to American cultural changes – both popular and political. News reports and editorial opinion increasingly discussed US ‘race questions’ – urban riots; the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; affirmative action in education; civil fights and the Black Power movements. At the same time, coverage increased of wider political developments, notably the decolonisation of much of Asia and Africa; struggles for indigenous rights and land; the persistence of institutional inequalities in mixed societies as different as South Africa and Malaysia; and the links between European colonialism, race, and war, especially in Indo-China. Yet as these stories circulated sharpening debate over ‘race’ and multiculturalism, they resonated differently in the two societies.5 Liberal opinion in Australia welcomed the 1954 US Supreme Court ruling paving the way for desegregation of public education. This decision was interpreted by the Age as ‘an important advance towards racial harmony in America. The Supreme Court action was also embraced because it would go a long way towards combating the Communist contention that Western concepts of democracy are hypocritical.’6 Three years later, efforts to implement school desegregation centred on the struggles in Little Rock, Arkansas, were
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also welcomed by liberal opinion in Australia – provided they proceeded under a policy of ‘gradualism’.7 Throughout the so-called civil rights years in the United States, influential Australian opinion overwhelmingly endorsed moderate programs and tactics. The Age, for example, responded to Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 by arguing that the United States ‘cannot much longer delay’ granting equal rights to all Americans. At the same time, it feared that the ‘white liberalism’ and ‘black moderation’ of the early civil rights movement were being ‘swamped by the ugly clamourings of Black Power and the obstinacy of white conservatism’.8 Alarm over a decline in ‘tolerance’, rather than concern with systemic inequality and discrimination, was the focus of much Australian commentary on US ‘race politics’ during the long hot summer of 1968. Earlier, some in Australia expressed concern that America’s ‘race problem’ at home was undermining its prestige abroad and thus reducing its authority in the Cold War.9 By 1968, these concerns centred on the negative impact of ‘racial disorders’ on US involvement in Vietnam. At the height of the urban rights which erupted after King’s assassination, the Sydney Morning Herald proclaimed editorially: ‘It is a civil war’10 The equation of ‘race’ with ‘violence’ could not have been more explicit, or more exaggerated. If so-called ‘race problems’ excited predictable fears in some sections of middle Australia, examples drawn from the politics of race and civil rights in the United States also helped stimulate activist programs and tactics in Australia. Black Australians now more confidently challenged the racist social order, articulating separate Black identities which rejected assimilation while celebrating cultural difference. Yet developments in the United States and Australia were fundamentally products of broader international changes linked to struggles against European colonialism and internal colonial structures built on racial exploitation and segregation. In 1964 – the year of President Johnson’s important Civil Rights Act and shortly after the dramatic ‘March on Washington’ in 1973 – Australian activists formed an organising committee for Aboriginal Rights. In the following months Abschol was formed at Sydney University; Student Action for Aborigines (SAFA) was setup with Charles Perkins as President; 2000 students demonstrated outside the US consulate in Sydney against ‘racial segregation’ in the United States; and Freedom Rides took the struggle against segregation to towns in rural New South Wales. Protests in the United States stimulated broadly similar tactics by activists in Sydney and Melbourne. Peter Read commented that the press sensationalised the story (of 2000 demonstrators outside the US consulate), highlighting ‘appalling displays of “irresponsibility” by
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protesters, but after a few days’ reflection, both students and members of the public began wondering why so little attention was given to the “plight” (not “segregation”, about which most were ignorant) of Aborigines’. The cultural contradictions reflected in this protest were acute. The demonstrators sang the US civil rights anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’, determined to promote strong public action, and explicitly recoiled from promoting demonstrations which might have been interpreted locally as ‘aping American students’. And American influences also had other perhaps more important consequences, as protests against the US role in Vietnam quickly eroded local student support for ‘movement’ on Aboriginal issues generally.11 Nonetheless Aboriginal leaders were not distracted and some sections of the press continued to give grudging approval to the aims, if not the tactics, of the Freedom Riders – although, as the Canberra Times was at pains to point out, New South Wales was ‘not Alabama’.12 From 1965 Aboriginal organisations focused increasingly on particular local issues, notably access to education, improved health care for remote communities, and legal services for rural and urban communities alike. Radical leaders within these organisations rallied around ‘Black Power’ symbols and rhetoric, but their debt to US ‘Black Power’ advocates was always tenuous. Following the 1967 Referendum, moderate Aboriginal leaders increasingly emphasised the need for political autonomy and self-reliance. As Kath Walker argued: ‘If black Australians are to become masters of their own destiny, white Australians must recognise them as being capable of formulating their own policy of advancement ... Black Australians ... must define what is best for their own advancement and then they can determine where white Australians can be of assistance.’ During the late 1960s the American ‘Black Power’ movement was discussed within Aboriginal organisations, including the umbrella association, FCAATSI, which carried a motion supporting ‘the principle of black power, without necessarily condoning all the ways by which it expresses itself’.13 The cultural separation advocated by Malcolm X was invoked by some Aboriginal activists, as was a language of Black Power and Black Movement. Yet as Black activist Roberta Sykes conceded, white Australia recoiled from references which resonated with radical Afro-American experiences. ‘When the media reports our demonstration, omits the reasons behind it, and tosses in the words ‘Black Power’, Sykes argued: ‘the unaware public is then free to interpret the demonstration as a “Black Power – Blood and Guts” demonstration, and the result is often a hysterical reaction of fear, and therefore
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a loss of support for our movement’. Sykes acknowledged the ambivalent connotations of ‘Movement’ in Australia, asking rhetorically: ‘Black Power in Australia – a spurious American import or a genuine movement expressing the frustration and anger of Black Australians? A path to violence or a viable means of uniting Australia’s dispossessed?’ In the Australian media, Sykes noted, Black Power was ‘synonymous with blood, fighting in the streets, murder, riots and looting’.14 Many Aboriginal activists rallied around this slogan as a symbol of unity and ‘race’ pride – even if they overwhelmingly rejected political violence. Bruce McGuiness, who like Sykes and Charles Perkins wrote articles under the title ‘Black Power’, argued that the rallying power of the imported slogan derived from fundamental similarities in the history of oppression of Blacks in the United States and Australia. ‘The similarities between oppressed coloured people in Australia and the United States are obvious’, he wrote: ‘Firstly, both come under the category – Black. Both have suffered oppression for two hundred years. Both know the full significance of squalor, hunger and degradation. They are both made to feel inferior from the very first days of comprehension.’15 Sykes and Perkins were anxious to refer to developments in Black America while simultaneously emphasising the particular struggles of local Blacks as part of a broader movement of colonised ‘Third World’ peoples. Ultimately, as Sykes argued, ‘“Black Power”, because of the unique and difficult circumstances which exist here, can be said to have its own interpretation’.16 Perkins conceded the American roots of the term Black Power and acknowledged that the Freedom Rides in Australia were ‘a reaction to what was being done in America at the time’. But he was fundamentally hostile to what he termed ‘the American Disaster’, and in 1968 bemoaned the extent to which ‘Australia is gradually becoming a duplication of America ... in the handling of the [race] situation’.17 Other Aboriginal leaders, and some younger activists, were more sympathetic to developments in America – especially those few like Bruce McGuiness who visited the United States during 1968–72 and displayed sympathy for the programs of Black Power advocates, especially those built on Black control of Black affairs. In 1972 a Black Panther Party was formed in Brisbane. As M. A. Franklin has noted: ‘At this stage its platform and rhetoric were almost wholly derivative’. Indeed, its manifesto concluded with nine lines from the American Declaration of Independence.18 In contrast, the most lasting symbols of Aboriginal resistance – the Gurindji’s strike for rights at Wave Hill Station in 1966, and the tent Embassy established outside Parliament
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House in early 1972 – were demonstrably local responses to dispossession. They marked the rise of a pan-Aboriginal movement built increasingly around demands for land rights and local political struggles. From the late 1960s indigenous groups in both nations intensified their challenge to state authorities and the cultural assumptions which sustained deep patterns of institutional disadvantage. Significantly, at the same time, Native American protests centred on efforts to enforce uncertain land rights claims in the face of threats in the proposed Indian Omnibus Bill of 1967. And in 1972 Indian protests came to a head in the powerful reenactment of the Trail of Broken Tears and protracted occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These actions were set against broadly comparable domestic circumstance confronting indigenous peoples in both the United States and Australia. And these peoples were joined through awareness of the plight of so-called ‘indigenous minorities’ (or in terms common in the 1960s and 1970s, awareness of the shared Third World conditions suffered by colonised people of colour everywhere). The politics of Aboriginal resistance were broadly paralleled in changing academic discourse where, occasionally, indigenous voices were now heard. The important multivolume works of C. D. Rowley and Frank Stevens, for example, drew heavily on themes of colonisation and institutional discrimination applied by Robert Blauner, Stokely Carmichael and others to analyses of ‘race relations’ in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing of official efforts at assimilation – which he equated with Anglo Australia’s desire for the ‘disappearance’ of Aboriginality – Rowley argued: ‘The policy itself, and the arguments advanced to justify it, are interesting anachronisms, as a cursory examination of the history of the Amerindian and Maori affairs will show’. And, he observed: ‘the Meriarn Report of 1928 indicated clearly enough the disastrous consequences for Indian society of several decades of intensive “social engineering” to promote assimilation’.19 Increasingly, comparative history embracing North America informed interpretations of local experience. Rowley cited Amerindian cultural assertiveness as a model which Aboriginal Australians might emulate, but he conceded that the ‘political time’ of the United States ‘was quite different from that which marked Aboriginal affairs’20 Many of the US examples adapted by Australian social scientists focused on particular Black experiences growing out of slavery and segregation, rather than the shared indigenous experiences of conquered peoples. Yet at times, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these shared histories were used to support comparable legislation. For example, the
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‘Aboriginal Children’s Research Project’ in New South Wales highlighted the US Federal Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), arguing that its extension to Australia would promote: 1 2 3
Aboriginal control over Aboriginal children; recognition of the Aboriginal extended family and Aboriginal values; and transfer of resources to Aboriginal control.
And, it concluded: ‘Whilst there are significant differences and similarities between the Aboriginal and the Indian situation, the Indian Act is a model that needs serious consideration by Aboriginal people and policy makers’. Such uncomplicated references to indigenous American example were rare, and they declined as local struggles overland rights and identity came to dominate ‘race’ politics in Australia.21 In general, comparative study – like the political rhetoric of some Aboriginal activists – linked the plight of indigenous Australians to that of both Amerindians and Afro-American. ‘The Aboriginal communities are thus rather comparable with those Indians of the United States who lost their tribal lands’ Rowley observed (in language typical of the early 1970s): they inherited the worst of both worlds, that of the Amerindians and that of the American Negro’. For a long time, as with the Indian, the Aboriginal’s proper place was considered to be within a reserve and away from the dominant social group: but this reserve was never conceded to be part compensation. As happened with the poorest Indian groups, Aborigines obtained no property from legal settlements. The Aboriginal, as legally defined, remained suspended like a migrant in a white society, like the Negro; and so long as he remained recognisably Aboriginal (again, like the Negro) he faced social rejection. Only now, within the last few years, has the process of reestablishing his legal equality begun.
Given the shared histories of oppression and separation of Black minorities in both the United States and Australia, Rowley concluded: ‘The Aboriginal minority in “settled” Australia was left, at the end of all this, in a situation more comparable with that of the American Negro, or the Metis of Canada, than with that of the Amerindian or the Maori’.22 From the late 1960s, the quests for civil tights and sovereignty for indigenous groups were sustained in Australia, as in the United States, by a language which legitimated ‘race pride’ and ‘ethnic consciousness’, and by shared tactics centred on freedom rides, civil disobedience and
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‘movement’. Yet it was the Gurindji strike of 1966 and the Referendum contests in 1967, far more than overseas example, that invigorated Aboriginal action. Land rights, as Weaver argues, ‘which included treaty rights in Canada, became the central symbol of the emerging self-identity of Indians and Aborigines and the focus of their political movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s’. Confronted with ‘resistance to these demands, they intensified their protest activities’. As disparate Aboriginal communities sought to organise on a national scale, the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada provided a viable model. Fundamentally, however, the origins and character of Aboriginal political movements were rooted in Australian soil. ‘The normal categories of social policies – race, poverty and immigrant minorities’, Weaver argues, ‘did not secure the Aboriginal demands for recognition of their unique Aboriginality and the resources they wanted to flow from this recognition’.23 Aboriginal Australians redefined their own ethnicity, and largely developed their own programs and tactics in ways appropriate to their distinctive traditions and aspirations. From the mid-1960s self determination, cultural empowerment, and the end of discrimination increasingly defined the broader programs of diverse Aboriginal communities and organisations. Yet some academic commentary continues to confuse historical differences with political backwardness, suggesting that Australia remains ‘vulnerable to the repetition of North America’s mistakes’.24 The American model persists, but it survives more in the arguments of white experts than in the practices of local indigenous communities. In contrast, Sykes writes: ‘Because indigenous peoples, such as Australian Blacks and Native Americans, have a very different history, their struggle has not developed in the same way’.25 This is not to imply, however, that indigenous people do not share internationally recognised rights. Nor is it to deny that a large international alliance of indigenous peoples has emerged which is united by a broadly shared ‘Alternative Vision’ which emphasises ‘the character and universality of their circumstances’.26 Aboriginal Australians, like other indigenous peoples in so-called settler-societies, have focused attention on their bitter history of exploitation and demanded both symbolic and material recognition of their status as founding ‘First Nation’ peoples. A strikingly assertive cultural renaissance (especially in dance, painting and sport), along with broad politicisation and some acknowledgment of prior ownership and land rights, embody important changes in race relations within Australia. The High Court’s rulings on Mabo and Wik, along with the role of ATSIC, confront European Australia in the 1990s with fundamental political and moral difficulties rooted in local historical conflicts. The
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concerns of Aboriginal Australians are central to the nation’s formal political agenda, and challenge white Australia’s efforts to construct a national identity built on myths of toleration and equity within a recognisably plural state. In this sense, at least, the position of Aboriginal Australians is comparable to that of Blacks in American society. Yet questions centred on land, sovereignty, recognition and compensation link the politics of Aboriginal Australians more closely to indigenous peoples generally than to Amerindians or Afro-Americans. Until the mid-1970s, rightwing racist organisations opposed equally to immigration reform and civil rights for Aborigines, owed much to British organisations like the National Front and white-settler extremists resisting democratic change in Southern Africa. Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, along with Great Britain’s contests over so-called ‘Asian immigration’ and the claims of white supremacists in Rhodesia and South Africa, initially provided much of the rhetorical ammunition used by an informal coalition of racist organisations in Australia.27 Increasingly, it was the periodic outbreaks of urban conflict in the United States which attracted the interest of those in Australia determined to discredit social pluralism. Media representations in Australia have since the first days of civil rights movement equated urban protests with social disorder which Australia’s cities must avoid. To quote Sykes again: ‘When the American black summer riots first broke out in the Sixties, newspaper and television coverage seized on the opportunity to air the fearful “Black Power” slogan at every chance, to instil fear of takeover by blacks into the hearts and minds of whites. Thus, news of riots combined with a new and fear-inspiring slogan, “Black Power”, became a highly acceptable presentation for the media – regardless of the repercussions’.28 Thirty years later, Australia’s conservative media, at least, remained predictably hysterical in its response to urban conflict in the United States. The Bulletin cover story on the O. J. Simpson murder trial proclaimed, ‘Race Hate: How Vulnerable Is Australia?’, while it allegedly ‘exposed’ for its Australian audience the threatening implications of ‘a society riddled with colour cancer’.29 Fear of the ghetto and of Black activism growing from the ghetto was not restricted to conservative white opinion. In Viewpoints (1975), Aboriginal leader Chicka Dixon warned of a growing ‘racial divide’: ‘this situation contains the seeds of race riots’. He wrote: Right now in this State, there are groups in Sydney who are advocating Black Power, they’re reading literature from the Negro people, they’re wearing soul-brother and soul-sister shirts, they’re combing their hair
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up in ‘Afro’ style, and they’re shaking clenched fists. Now this could be prevented.30
More recently, Hanson’s ‘One Nation’ xenophobia was rationalised by references to American language and experiences of ‘ghettos’ inhabited by those who allegedly ‘do not assimilate’. A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united, Hanson pronounced: ‘The world is full of failed and tragic examples of such experiments, including America and Great Britain.’31 Such concerns are not restricted to the extreme right of politics. Recently, Craig McGregor has also revisited American urban experiences, comparing changes in Australia with ‘racial ghettos’ – with ‘ghettos of poverty, unemployment and distress’. In his analysis, the typical US city symbolises the brutality of the modern city generally, while capturing Australia’s fate as its cities are incorporated into global patterns of urban life. For Australia, as for America, the ghetto foreshadows urban dystopia. In the 1990s, as during the urban riots in the 1960s and 1970s, experiences in the United States remain a warning of impending chaos and social decline. The Bulletin headline cautioned its Australian audience in the aftermath of the riots growing out of the Rodney King verdict in 1992: ‘No, not a movie, this could be the future?’ In some corners of Australian society, fear of ‘undigested minorities’ and ‘self perpetuating enclaves’ persisted more than a generation after the end of ‘white Australia’. America’s so-called ‘racial problems’ were still implicated deeply in the rhetoric and images which sustained this insecurity.32
ETHNICITY AND MULTICULTURALISM A broad desire to maintain ‘racial’ and cultural homogeneity, along with social isolation from the peoples of the Pacific and Asia, defined white Australia’s insularity until well after World War II. This conflict broke Australia’s isolation and ethnic exclusiveness. Cautiously at first, post-war Australian governments opened the nation’s borders to increasing numbers of migrants from increasingly varied nations and regions. Initially, increased numbers of migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe entered, along with almost 200 000 refugees. This wave of post-war immigrants was broadly equivalent, in composition, and social impact, to the so-called ‘new’ migrants who reached the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Increasingly, Australia’s post-war immigrants were drawn from Southern and Eastern Europe, from non-English speaking countries as well as non-Protestant or non-Christian religious communities. By the late 1960s, on the eve of greatly expanded migration from Asia, Australia accepted newcomers from over 100 different ethnic communities,
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speaking more than 80 different languages. By the early 1990s, almost 40 per cent of Australia’s population of 18 million were immigrants or children of immigrants (a proportion not exceeded in the United States, even at the height of its ‘new’ immigration influx at the turn of the century). Approximately half of those who arrived annually in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s were from countries in Asia. The proportion of overseas-born from areas which traditionally had dominated Australia’s immigrant intake – the United Kingdom and Ireland – fell to about 30 per cent. Yet it was the increased social complexity of its population, rather than its numerical growth, which was the most significant feature – and determinant – of the fundamental transformation of modern Australia. From the late 1960s the twin pillars of Australian immigration and settlement policies – preference for Europeans and overt pressures for assimilation – crumbled with unexpectedly little resistance. The transformation of Australian society and culture embodied in these ethno-demographic and policy changes was linked in complex ways to developments in the United States and the Asia-Pacific generally. Paradoxically, perhaps, the example of America’s struggle to contain the consequences of persistent internal diversity helped to shape political interventions in Australia which were designed to manage and control the consequences of pluralism. These policies coalesced under the phrase ‘multiculturalism’. Inherent in the reasons for abandoning its Eurocentric immigration priorities were equally powerful incentives for Australia to modify its efforts to assimilate all communities, whether they were immigrant or indigenous, into an homogeneous national society. From the mid-1960s, especially, Australian discourses on ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ increasingly incorporated the language and symbols of the United States. But when transplanted abroad, the distinctive character of the receiving society transformed the US example in unpredictable ways. Efforts to encourage the seemingly natural process of assimilation of minority peoples dominated politics and scholarship in the United States and Australia before the watershed of the civil rights movement and the resurgence of ‘ethnic consciousness’ (the so-called ‘ethnic explosion’) in the late 1960s. Previously it was assumed by the core society that all migrant groups should be assimilated into the broader national community. At the heart of this drive was a claim that gradual social acceptance, acculturation, and wider socio-economic opportunities are ultimately afforded to all groups in an increasingly undifferentiated society. As John Higham wrote of the United States in 1968: ‘... we come finally to a paradox in assessing the impact of immigration ... in general it
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has enhanced the variety of American culture, yet the diversities seem in the long run to give way to an irresistible pressure towards uniformity’.33 Thus, immigrant-receiving democratic states were assumed to respond equitably to the needs of all citizens – regardless of ethnic differences. While the cultural pluralities of the society were acknowledged, these were assumed to be impermanent and to be mediated fairly by an open, competitive political system and economy. Cultural pluralism, in this context, was unproblematic as it did not contradict broad processes of assimilation. However, as developments in both Australia and the United States during the post-war years starkly revealed, attempts to apply rigid assimilation models to the actual dynamics of intergroup relations in societies made up of diverse ‘racial’, ethnic or cultural groups could not succeed. Indeed, in the area of ‘race’ and ethnic relations, ‘pluralism’ was increasingly used to describe fairly permanent patterns of cultural division, inequality and stratification, as well as informal ‘racial’ segregation. In the absence of clear patterns of emerging assimilation and equity in mixed society, ruling elites were obliged to confront the segmented and unequal nature of social relations. Throughout the turbulent 1960s and 1970s US experiences were constantly invoked to warn Australian officials of the likely consequences of a laissez faire approach to immigration and migrant settlement. For example, M. L. Kovacs and A. J. Cropley cautioned that assimilation pressures alienated newcomers and their children, leading to social marginalisation and psychological trauma. ‘[T]his throwing of the immigrant into the mainstream of American life, without concessions or support’, they argued, was a ‘model for receiving immigrants’ that Australia must not follow. If Australia was to avert the growth of ‘prejudice’, ‘discrimination’, ‘segregation’, ethnic ‘stereotypes’, and the ‘alienation’ of ethnic communities, Kovacs and Cropley asserted, Australian politics must not only accept but actively encourage cultural pluralism. ‘Multiculturalism’, a strategy promoting ethnic group ‘social uniqueness and diversity’, was invoked as a vehicle for preventing immigrant-receiving Australia from becoming a mirror image of US experiences. As multicultural policies developed in Australia, many bureaucrats, scholars and commentators accepted that it was ‘highly relevant to examine the American experience’.34 If those contesting Australia’s prescriptive assimilation aims looked to trends in the United States, so too did the proponents and opponents of immigration law reform. Even some who welcomed immigration reform from the late 1960s were, like those opposed to change, adamant that they did
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‘not want to see any Little Rock in the country’. Donald Horne observed perceptively: ‘Australians tend to argue from extreme examples of interracial disturbance and they say it mustn’t happen here. Only a madman would want to cause racial disturbance deliberately, but the examples given by apologists are irrelevant to Australia. Absurdly their usual example is the United States.’ Social conflicts symbolised by ‘Sharpville’ and ‘Notting Hill’ also exacerbated the concern of Australian conservatives, even if the United States remained the center of their alarmist fears.35 The roots of Australia’s formal acceptance of multiculturalism lay in a growing belief that the assimilation of ethnic communities was neither natural nor necessary. The policy acknowledged the informal preferences of immigrant groups to live within their traditional communities and family patterns – patterns reflected in the neighbourhoods and broader social geography of immigrant-receiving nations. At the same time, multiculturalism symbolised a growing recognition internationally that social equity and civil rights were implicitly denied by efforts to assimilate ethnic communities and erase cultural differences. In short, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, in both North America and Australia, assimilation was widely interpreted as unworkable and unjust. Equally unacceptable were efforts to use immigration restrictions to avert social or cultural diversity within the nation – especially that rooted in ‘racial’ categorisations. Governments in the United States and Australia were obliged to dismantle immigration policies built on racist premises which unashamedly privileged social homogeneity over ethnic and social diversity. In the US the challenges of the ‘new ethnicity’ of the 1960s and 1970s were not translated into a broadly institutionalised political response. In contrast, on a formal level at least, growing recognition of ethnicity in Australia resulted in an explicit and more coherent political response, ‘multiculturalism’ – a response designed partly to contain the manifestations of competitive pluralism so evident in the United States. North American example was an important influence, helping to break down barriers to open immigration in other race-conscious nations. In 1965, the US immigration Act ended restrictions on entry by peoples from beyond Europe – restrictions which had mirrored discriminatory practices under the so-called ‘White Australia’ policy. It was not merely coincidental that, beginning in the following year, the racist Australian policy was progressively dismantled. The erosion of restrictive immigration laws by the late 1960s opened Australia’s borders to more diverse waves of migration. At the same time, it challenged the nation to develop more tolerant and equitable settlement policies than
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those promoting assimilation which had confronted the various immigrants arriving from South and Eastern Europe who made Australia their home after 1945, By the late 1970s, the celebratory label of multiculturalism symbolised the adaptation of Australian cultural and political life to ethnic and demographic changes which were eroding its insularity. The acceptance of cultural pluralism and its formal political reflection, multiculturalism, developed symbiotically with the pressures to end ‘White Australia’. And the origins of Australia’s multicultural policies lay partly in American experiences and precedents. However, in practice, the two states have followed different ‘multicultural’ initiatives. Scholarly and political discourses over multiculturalism have also followed increasingly different paths in the two societies. In the mid-1960s the Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism adopted the term ‘multicultural’ to describe that nation’s poly-ethnic society. By 1972, the Whitlam Government in Australia had initiated a range of measures which merged into an explicit policy known as ‘multiculturalism’. Some conservative politicians, commentators and many from the so-called Anglo-Australian (or ‘core) culture resisted these initiatives, claiming they were an unwarranted assault on assimilation and the cultural cohesion essential for national survival. Typically, critics cited US experiences, arguing that ‘Australians do not want self-perpetuating enclaves and undigested minorities’, and that Australia ‘should not support policies aimed at permitting – or actively encouraging – the migration of substantial groups of different ethnic origins’. Hostility to pluralism never disappeared. Indeed, it resurfaced periodically throughout the 1980s and 1990s in bitter contests over immigration, ethnic difference, ‘race’, and Aboriginal rights. However, the view that Australia should remain ‘cohesive’, ‘undivided’, and without ‘permanent minorities’ failed to defeat the formal acceptance of multiculturalism, just as it had earlier failed to maintain racist immigration laws.36 Yet official multiculturalism sought, ultimately, to constrain ‘ethnic’ cultural and political expressions even as it ostensibly celebrated difference. Many proponents of multiculturalism conceded that diversity should be managed by the state if the social conflict evident in other mixed societies was to be averted. James Jupp, for example, obliquely cited American experience in his explanation of why Australia developed legislative programs to shape its emerging multicultural character. ‘Australian governments have adopted multiculturalism because it makes sense, not because the cities were burning’, he claimed. Fear that uncontrolled diversity would foster ghettos and urban violence remained
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central to the arguments of those liberals anxious to foster government interventions in the name of multiculturalism. It was also a central concern for those conservatives hostile to a widening migrant intake and to the very prospect of a multicultural state.37 In official discourses, references to the United States were often oblique, invoking images of tragic division in societies unable to contain ‘racial’ and cultural contests. The Office of Multicultural Affairs offered such a justification in marketing ‘multiculturalism’: ‘Overseas experience has shown the often tragic consequences that occur when societies are unable or unwilling to integrate newcomers, especially in situations in which some minority groups find themselves restricted by barriers of prejudice or culture from enjoying the same opportunities as the host society’.38 Yet political interventions by Australian governments designed ostensibly to abandon assimilation and promote integration through cultural pluralism, differed markedly from those pursued in the United States. Under the watershed US Civil Rights Act 1964, especially Article VII, employment discrimination based on ‘race’, colour, sex, religion and national origin was outlawed. Seven years later this clause was, in effect, amended by Congress, forming a central part of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. By the late 1970s the politicisation of issues growing out of civil rights legislation focused bitterly on affirmative action (and conservatives’ claims that such action legitimised preferential treatment of ‘racial minorities’ and women). Unlike most debates over critical moral questions, as Michael Rosenfeld points out: ‘Both the most ardent advocates of affirmative action and its most vehement foes loudly proclaim[ed] their allegiance to the ideal of equality’.39 In Australia, broadly similar contests emerged. Yet here they focused largely on discrimination based on gender, rather than ‘race’ or ethnicity. As Sykes astutely noted in 1987: In Australia the term ‘equal rights’ has been hijacked by the women’s movement, and where ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘equal rights’ refer to equitable participation of Blacks in the United States, they refer only to the rights of women in this country.40 While the titles of some antidiscrimination legislation in Australia borrowed from US acts, the substance of the Australian legislation did not closely mirror US practices. Nor did US initiatives quickly influence Australia. Apart from distinctive legislation aimed at individual acts of ‘racial discrimination’ or so-called ‘racial vilification’, significant Australian legislation was gender-focused, expressed in the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act 1984, and the Sex Discrimination Act 1986. Importantly, the 1984 Act specifically refuted the use
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of quotas by stressing that nothing in the Act should be interpreted as requiring a relevant employer to take any action incompatible with the principle that employment matters should be dealt with on the basis of merit. In Australia, efforts to reduce or remove systematic discrimination were essentially limited to ‘passive non-discrimination’ and did not extend to ‘affirmative action’ and preferential hiring of ‘minority’ groups or women – limitations reflected for example in the early South Australian Prohibition of Discrimination Act 1966. However, some exceptions must be acknowledged – especially in the field of state legislation in areas of Aboriginal public employment and education.41 Efforts to institutionalise ethnic political organisations, most importantly through the Ethnic Community Councils in 1974–76, derived from specific concerns over exploitation of Non English Speaking (NES) immigrant workers, especially unskilled women, and the failure of the Trade Union movement and ALP to recognise the exploitation and powerlessness of so-called ‘ethnic’ Australians. The Whitlam Government’s Racial Discrimination Act 1975 made unlawful discrimination on the grounds of ‘race’, colour, descent, or ethnic or national origin, but was directed particularly at discrimination confronting migrant workers who the Commission of Community Relations acknowledged as ‘the largest single group of workers in the community which has claimed it suffers general pervasive and widespread discrimination.42 Subsequent Acts directed explicitly at racial discrimination or racial vilification applied equally to the conditions experienced by members of different ethnic communities, as well as Aboriginal communities. In official discourses, at least, ‘race’ often unproblematically encompassed ‘ethnicity’. In contrast, popular discourses implicitly separated questions of ‘race’, centred particularly on indigenous and ‘Asian’ communities, from labels of ethnicity associated with communities descended from post-war immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. If Australian political culture referred to Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity legislation in the United States, the implementation and trajectory of such programs differed in the two societies. Most significantly, US programs focused far more on institutional ‘racial discrimination’ than did Australian laws. Education and job quotas based on proportional access for ‘racial minorities’ were central to US practices – at least until 1996 when California and Texas initiated referenda outlawing affirmative action by proscribing the use of ethnic, racial or gender preferences in the activities of state government. Australia’s various anti-racism Acts were directed at expressions of individual prejudice and discrimination, stopping short of elaborate
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group-based affirmative quotas (referred to pejoratively by critics in both the United States and Australia as ‘reverse discrimination’). Unlike the broader debate over so-called Political Correctness (PC), the assault on affirmative action in the United States in the mid-1990s passed with little comment in Australia – although some conservatives still attempted to dismiss programs seeking equality for indigenous Australians as unacceptable evidence of reverse discrimination and special treatment. The different formal expressions of multiculturalism, along with the virtual absence of controversial ‘racial quota’ legislation in Australia, robbed local opponents of PC of a target exploited by their US counterparts. In Australia opposition to multiculturalism did not strongly resonate, as it did in the United States, with complaints about reverse discrimination or ‘race-based’ quotas which allegedly contradicted fundamental notions of individual equality under the law. Recently, however, Pauline Hanson’s ‘One Nation’ party has assaulted Aboriginal Australians as privileged by special legislation and exceptional recognition of their rights as distinct from those of so-called middle (European) Australians. Aware of the opposition to PC in the United States, Hanson’s rhetoric plays heavily on references to the ‘inequality’ of the white majority which is allegedly denied the advantage of ‘reverse’ discrimination.43 Visiting Americans, with links to extreme right antigovernment groups, including the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, fuel One Nation’s rhetoric and rallies with the so-called lessons of rampant multiculturalism and PC in the United States. Before Hanson’s party was formed, Sneja Gunew concluded that: ‘The “political correctness” (PC) controversy in the United States is beginning to intrude on Australian debate, but there seems to be little awareness of the controversy’s origins and specific resonances within North America’.44 America’s ‘culture wars’ were fought largely across intellectual divides. Australia’s cultural contests were more pragmatic and conventionally political. In both nations, however, the debate encoded an ongoing struggle by an old core culture to retain hegemony through a social consensus that disempowered and marginalised others. In legislative and managerial terms, at least, Australia has pioneered domestic initiatives which accept a level of cultural pluralism. In contrast, the United States has not felt obliged to develop equally elaborate social, economic or cultural policies under an official rubric of multiculturalism. Indeed, the very concept of multiculturalism and the privileging of ethnic differences are more strenuously resisted by a powerful alliance of conservative groups in the United States than in Australia. In the United States, far more than in Australia, ‘multiculturalism’ has been submerged
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in vitriolic disputes over PC. As Joan Scott has observed of the United States: ‘if “political correctness” is the label attached to critical attitudes and behaviour, “multiculturalism” is the program it is said to be attempting to enact.’45 In sharpening contrast to Australia’s institutional efforts to manage diversity through ‘multiculturalism’, in the United States ‘multiculturalism’ is an ill-defined term employed especially by those hostile to groups viewed as unsympathetic to European cultural norms and the so-called Western intellectual cannon. These allegedly disruptive groups include prominent ‘social’ or ethnic communities, especially Afro-Americans, Hispanics and Asians, as well as a broad alliance of movements promoting ‘identity politics’ and/or politics critical of the consensual Anglo-American centre (especially gays, ecologists, feminists, and intellectuals linked to post-colonial and poststructuralist enterprises). Despite the very different institutional and polemical trajectories of ‘multiculturalism’ in Australia and the United States, debates over cultural pluralism and empowerment have become central to political discourses in both nations. Gunew concludes her discussion of multicultural multiplicities appropriately: questions of cultural/racial difference raised under the banner of multiculturalism have provided an impetus to challenge the traditional production of knowledge, with all its institutional boundaries and its universalist propositions and truth-claims. It has also become clear that if questions of cultural difference are not linked to analysis of power inequalities – both in access to resources and in structures of legitimation – then we are lost in the maze of liberal pluralism that Todd Gitlin calls ‘the shopping center of identity politics’.46
A body of Eurocentric scholars, led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, has attacked multiculturalism as a threat to ideals that bind the United States and Americans together. ‘Pressed too far, the cult of ethnicity has unhealthy consequences’, Schlesinger argued: ‘the balance is shifting from unum to pluribus. Group separatism crystallises differences, magnifies tensions, intensifies hostilities’.47 Other commentators hostile to ‘political correctness’, notably expatriate Australian Robert Hughes, have argued that while the United States has ‘always been a heterogenous country’, the pursuit of multiculturalism endangers national cohesion and purpose, causing ‘The Fraying of America’. Like Schlesinger, Hughes fears that multiculturalism means ‘cultural separatism within the larger whole of America – a Balkanized culture’. Formal political recognition of cultural difference defies, in Hughes’ view, the fundamental unity of the nation state and contradicts consensus.48
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In Australia, also, the ‘cult of multiculturalism’ is criticised by some ever-anxious to preserve the privileges of the ‘core culture’. As might be expected, some Anglo-Australians do remain disturbed by their nation’s accelerating diversity. And, like their relatively more influential counterparts in late nineteenth century Australia, these critics often cite the deep social fissures and periodic public violence in the United States as emotional warnings of Australia’s possible future. Conservative commentators in Australia still routinely use the spectre of US ‘race relations’ to attack cultural pluralism at home. ‘We must learn from US Divide’, B. A. Santamaria argued in the aftermath of the O. J. Simpson trial: Although nothing even remotely approaching the racial problems of the US exists in Australia, the never-ending insistence on multiculturalism has created incipient problems that should be taken in hand early rather than late. In a potentially hostile geopolitical environment, Australia cannot afford to encourage threats to national unity that come from constant insistence on racial and cultural differences.49
Commentators hostile to Australia’s increasing plurality conveniently ignore historical and demographic differences between their nation and the United States, conflating colour, ethnicity and Aboriginality into categories of incipient separatism and inevitable conflict in both societies. Indeed, many proponents of multiculturalism embraced it as a policy for managing diversity and constraining the possible consequences of so-called ethnic tribalism. Official policy betrays the qualified agenda of multiculturalism. It emphasises that all residents ‘should have an overriding and unifying commitment to Australia’, and carefully defines the maintenance of ethnic identity as ‘the right of all Australians, within carefully defined limits, to express and share their cultural heritage, including language and religion’.50 The contradictions growing from global integration and the postcolonial revival of ‘racial’ and ethnic differences are mirrored within the self-consciously ‘multicultural’ Australian state. As Steven Castles et al. observe: The Australian model of multiculturalism, with its complex and ambiguous balance between separatism of the varied groups, and cohesion of society as a whole, is one – relatively successful and peaceful – way of managing this contradiction. Yet it is inherently unstable, because the institution on which it is premised – the nation-state as the fundamental human collective – has itself become questionable. This is apparent on three interrelated levels: the economic, the cultural and the political.51
It would be facile to attribute either the particular role of the Australian state in managing ethnic diversity, or the dynamic manifestations of ethnic cultural invention, to imported models. The
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roots and fundamental character of these processes he in the particular and shared histories of the various communities and individuals who continue to give expression to their cultures within Australia. And in the 1990s the discussion and politics of multiculturalism feed overwhelmingly on local circumstances – not on commonalities with the ‘racial’ or ethnic histories of the United States, or other multicultural projects like those of Canada or Brazil. US examples continue to influence debate and politics centred on cultural pluralism in Australia. But these examples are very often rejected or modified by a largely unsympathetic Australian nation. Today, US experiences have relatively little bearing on domestic Australian practices or policies. Australia’s overriding economic links with Asia have significantly deflated debate over ‘race’, ethnic differences or the future of multiculturalism. It is an index of Australia’s new-found national maturity and independence that US experiences and examples exert far less influence on contemporary Australia than they did in the debates over ‘race’ and immigration a century ago, or in the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. The discourses and practises of multiculturalism and indigenous rights in contemporary Australia increasingly reflect its distinct social patterns, separate national interests and particular cultural expressions. Contemporary Australia’s embrace of elaborate programs to promote multiculturalism is not without irony. A nation defined as recently as the 1960s by ‘racial’ and ethnic exclusiveness, now formally defines itself as tolerant and plural. The realities of Australia’s social practises often fall well short of the pluralist rhetoric and legislation which sustain them. Yet there can be little doubt that ideologies of multiculturalism, in their many manifestations, are the central feature of contemporary Australian life and collective identity. They are accepted by an insecure core society to contain cultural differences within the state, while simultaneously projecting the nation abroad as distant from its distinctly racist past and from the social conflicts of other mixed societies. Acknowledgment
The author thanks Andrew Honey for his assistance with research for this paper. 1 J. Nagle, ‘Constructing Ethnicity: Seating and Reseating Ethnic Identity and Culture’, Social Problems, 41:1, November 1994, pp. 154–55. 2 M. Banton, Racial and Ethnic Competition, Cambridge University Press, 1983,
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11 12 13
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p. 106. See also J. Hutchinson and A. D. Smith (eds), Ethnicity, Oxford University Press, 1996, especially chapter 1. C. D. Rowley, ‘Aborigines and Other Australians’, in I. Hogbin and L. R. Hiatt, Readings in Australian and Pacific Anthropology, Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp. 79–85. ibid., pp. 81–85. S. Gunew, ‘Multicultural Multiplexities: US, Canada, Australia’, in D. Bennett (ed.), Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory, University of Melbourne, Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 2, 1993, pp. 52–53. The Age, 25 May 1954, p. 2. The Age, 27 September 19–57, p.2 Editorial; the Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September 1957, p. 2, Editorial. The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 April 1968, p.2, Editorial. The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 1968, p. 2, Editorial. The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 1968, p. 5, Editorial. The Age, 24 May 1961, p. 2, Editorial. The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May 1961, p. 1. The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 April 1968, p. 2, Editorial. The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 1968, p. 2, Editorial. For examples of newspaper Editorial opinion, see: The Age, 16 April 1965, p. 2; 23 April 1965, p. 2; 6 May 1968, p. 11; 8 May 1968, p. 5; and 6 April 1968, p. 2, 8 April 1968, p. 2. P. Read, Charles Perkins: A Biography, Viking, Ringwood, Vic., 1990, pp. 97–98; M. A. Franklin, Black and White Australians, Heinemann Educational Australia, Melbourne, 1976, pp. 198–212. Canberra Times, in Read, ibid., pp. 111–12. Walker, in A. B. Pittock, Beyond White Australia, Race Relations Committee of the Society of Friends in Australia, Sydney, 1975, pp. 32–48; B. McGuinness, ‘Black Power In Australia’, in F. Stevens (ed.), Racism: The Australian Experience, Vol. 2, ANZ Book Co., Sydney, 1972, p. 155. See also: C. Jennett, Black Power as AntiColonial Discourse, Ph.D dissertation, Sociology UNSW, 1996, esp. pp. 330–58. R. Sykes, in A. Turner (ed.), On Trial: Black Power in Australia, Heinemann Educational Australia, 1975, pp. 8–11, 22. McGuiness, Black Power, p. 155. R. Sykes, in Turner, pp. 8–11. Perkins, in Franklin, pp. 202–204. Franklin, p. 207, n. 18. C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1972, p. 3; Outcasts in White Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1972, pp. 181–83, 248, 283– 84; The Remote Aborigines, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic, 1972. Rowley, Outcasts, p.191, also 231n., 248, 275, 275n. Aboriginal Children’s Research Project, ‘Assimilation and Aboriginal Child Welfare’, NSW, 1981, p. 27. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, p. 13; Outcasts in White Australia, pp. 178, 154–95, 383–86, 449. M. Weaver, ‘Struggles of the Nation-State to Define Aboriginal Ethnicity: Canada and Australia’, in L. Gold (ed.), Minorities and Mother Country Imagery, Social and Economic Papers no. 13, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1984, pp. 192–93. See, for example, R. L. Barsh, ‘Indigenous Policy in Australia and North America’, in B. Hocking, International Law and Aboriginal Human Rights, Law Book Company, Sydney, 1988, pp. 95–109. R. Sykes, Black Majority, Hudson, Melbourne, 1987, p. 215.
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26 See P. Julle, Australian Nationland and Outback Indigenous Peoples, North Australian Research Unit, Casuarina, N.T, Discussion Paper no. 1, November 1991, esp. pp. 28–34. 27 A. Curthoys and A. Markus, (eds), Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Working Class in Australia, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1978, pp. xxii–xix. 28 Sykes, Black Majority, p. 215. 29 Bulletin, 17 October 1995, Cover. 30 C. Dixon (also Chicka Dickson), ‘Chicka Dixon’, in C. Tatz (ed.), Black Viewpoints: The Aboriginal Experience, ANZ Book Co., Sydney, 1995, pp. 32–38. 31 P. Hanson, ‘Australia: WAKE UP’, Maiden Speech, Australian Parliament, 10 September 1996, http://www.ozemail.com.au/-hill/. 32 Craig McGregor, ‘The New Ghettos of Sydney’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1997, p. 13; Bulletin, 30 June 1992, p.1; J. Lack and J. Templeton, Bold Experiment: A Documentary History of Australian Immigration Since 1945, Melbourne, 1995, p. 48. 33 J. Higham, ‘Immigration’, in C. Vann Woodward (ed.), The Comparative Approach to American History, Oxford University Press, NY, 1968, pp. 102–103. 34 Kovacs and Cropley, Immigrants and Society: Alienation and Assimilation, McGraw Hill, Sydney, 1975, pp. 121–24. No study of US example and influence on Australian practices in the field of immigration policy or immigrant reception and multiculturalism has been written. However, some comparative work has been undertaken. See, for example. G. Freeman and J. Jupp, (eds), Nation of Immigrants: Australia, the United States, and International Migration, Melbourne Oxord University Press, 1992; R. Bell, (ed.), Multicultural Societies: A Comparative Reader, Sydney, Sable, 1988; A. Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada and New Zealand, UBC Press, Vancouver, 1995. 35 Donald Horne, in S. Brawley, The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America 1919–1978, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995, pp. 364–65. 36 Lack and Templeton, p. 48. 37 Jupp, in Office of Multicultural Affairs, Responding to Diversity: The People of Australia, Canberra, 1990, pp. 1–2. Compare Hanson, ‘Australia: WAKE UP’. 38 Office of Multicultural Affairs, National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia...Sharing Our Future, Canberra, 1989, pp. 1–52. 39 M. Rosenfield, Affirmative Action and Justice, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991, pp. 1–7, 8–51. Compare L. Thurow, ‘Affirmative Action in a Zero-Sum Game’, in R. Takaki (ed.), From Different Shores, Oxford University Press, NY, 1994, esp. p. 235. 40 R. Sykes, Black Majority, p. 215. 41 C. Ronalds, Affirmative Action and Sex Discrimination, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1987; C. Larmour, Affirmative Action Legislation in Australia, Legislative Research Service, Australian Parliament, Current Issues Brief 5, 1985–86, Canberra, esp. p. 8. 42 J. Martin, ‘Forms of Recognition’, in Curthoys and Markus (eds), pp. 198–200. 43 Hanson’s ‘One Nation’ rhetoric routinely made such claims. See ‘Australia: WAKE UP’. 44 S. Gunew, ‘Multicultural Multiplexities...’, p. 53–56, 60–62. 45 J. Scott, ‘Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity’, October 61 Summer: 1992, 13, quoted Gunew, p. 54, n. 11. 46 Gunew, p. 60. 47 A. M. Schlesinger Jr, ‘The Cult of Ethnicity: Good and Bad’, Time 8 July 1991, p. 21. See also, Schlesinger Jr, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a
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Multicultural Society, Knoxville, Whittle Direct Books, 1991. Compare, generally, Takaki. Hughes, ‘The Fraying of America’ (extract), Time (Australia), 3 February 1992, pp. 82–87. Santamaria, ‘We Must Learn From US Divide’, Weekend Australian, 14–15 October 1995, p. 27. See also, P. P. McGuinness, ‘Australia’s Aborigines Have Much To Learn’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 1994, p. 14. Office of Multicultural Affairs, Responding to Diversity. (1990), pp. 2–4 (italics added). S. Castles, et al., ‘Australia: Multi-Ethnic Community Without Nationalism?’, in Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, p. 359.
POLITICAL CULTURE Elaine Thompson Americanisation has multiple meanings in most fields to which it is applied and Australian political culture is no exception. At times it is used as a metaphor; at other times as a short-hand for the importation from the United States of political ideas or techniques; and at other times again it is short-hand for globalisation. Australian politics picks up ideas as enthusiastically as it takes on new technologies. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, the Australian way of doing politics remains uniquely Australian. Once in Australia ideas and techniques are modified, if not transformed, by Australian political culture, political practices and political institutions. A long time ago I described the Australian political system as a ‘Washminster mutation’. I argued that while there had been a strong American influence along with the British influence, the system that developed in Australia was its own unique species – a mutation. I would suggest that something similar happens with most imports in politics. They may have been born in the United States but are so mediated by the Australian political culture that they become barely recognisable. For example, the idea of affirmative action and EEO came from the United States. Yet when the Australian version is looked at, there are no legally enforceable quotas and no legally enforced sanctions to be invoked. An Australian carrot has replaced the American stick. This chapter explores the Australianisation of American ideas in a number of areas. They are by no means exhaustive. Rather they are areas where claims have been made about Americanisation and are illustrative of the talent of Australian culture to adopt, absorb and change outside influences.
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PRESIDENTS AND PRIME MINISTERS Whenever Australian prime ministers behave in high handed ways, comments are made about the presidentialization of our system. It is certainly true that the prime ministership, like the presidency, has grown more imperial in style. Like US presidents, prime ministers now travel on their official jets, surround themselves with an entourage of sycophants, minders and spin-doctors, play favourites with journalists, and have a Praetorian guard of security men. Style, however, is not substance and Americanisation is weak in Australia when it comes to actual executive power. The American system was designed as one of weak and divided government and American presidents have for a long time looked with envy at the power of prime ministers. A US president has no party discipline to call on and the Congress and President are locked into an adversarial relationship. He has no power over Congress other than his skill to build coalitions around issues. A president’s national agenda is easily thwarted through ideological coalitions across parties and trans-party coalitions around regional politics or interest group politics. What then of an Australian prime minister? Simply put, prime ministers usually get their way. Iron-clad party control and party discipline have ensured that, by and large, the Legislature is under the direction of the Executive. Indeed we are so used to hearing that the Prime Minister is acting in highhanded and unilateral ways that we forget there are checks. These checks emerge partly from the separation of powers in our Constitution – the part that is American influenced – especially the position of the Senate. But mainly they emerge from our own politics: our party system and the system for electing senators that we have chosen. Our parties remove leaders who are seen as weak and unpopular at the polls. To retain leadership prime ministers must ensure cross-factional support in the party room. The introduction in 1949 of proportional representation for electing the Senate has meant that it is usual for independents and/or minor parties to hold the balance of power in that House. These are very far from American-style checks. The Executive needs to build coalitions but they are with the minor parties and independents, not with members of the other major party.
THE BUDGET PROCESS AND THE SENATE Like an American president, an Australian prime minister has to negotiate more or less in the open with senators who hold the balance of power. American-style pork-barrelling with independent Senator Harradine, from Tasmania, won support for the Howard government in 1997 with respect to the privatisation of Telstra. When Paul Keating was
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prime minister, he was forced by the Senate to back down publicly over a number of budget positions. Despite these similarities between Australian and the United States there remains a profound difference. The Australian process gives considerable leverage on specific issues to the handful of senators who hold the balance of power; in the United States the entire budget is open to negotiation, Nonetheless there is some evidence of enhanced parliamentary influence over the Executive. In the 1990s the parliament’s review activities resulted in the dismissal of a number of ministers (Labor’s Ros Kelly; the Coalition’s Geoff Prosser, John Sharp, Peter McGauran, John Moore, David Jull and Michael Wooldridge). This list recalls the list of Clinton’s Cabinet casualties at the hands of the Congress. What then can we say about the Australian system? It is still a long way from the weak system of the United States. A prime minister, despite his frustration with the Senate, has far greater powers through party discipline and Executive dominance than any American president. He can always call at election at will, something an American president can never do. We should never describe a highhanded, dominant prime minister as ‘presidential’ – especially when we mean ‘imperial’ or ‘autocratic’. Perhaps when a prime minister is under siege as John Howard was in the face of the travel rort allegations in 1997 – when the prime minister looks weak and not in control – the word ‘presidential’ is more appropriate!
THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION AND FEDERALISM It is stating the obvious to say that the Australian federal constitutional system was drawn in part from the American model. Justice Michael Kirby (now a member of the High Court) pointed out that the Australian founders were ‘so fascinated by the United States model that their own originality became dampened ... in particular provisions they even followed the precise language of the United States precedent’.1 For example, the first enumerated legislative power in the Australian constitution was adapted from the US Constitution’s commerce clause.2 However, Australian federalism is far from a clone of the American. For example, while our State premiers, particularly those from Queensland, Western Australia, and more recently Victoria, talk of State Rights (such talk makes very good politics), the history of Australian federalism only serves to point out the difference between Australia and the United States.3 The 1997 judgment in the cigarette, liquor and petrol excise tax case,4 like the judgments in the Koowarta and
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Tasmanian Dams cases,5 best illustrate the differences. In the Koowarta and Tasmanian Dams cases the High Court found that the foreign affairs powers in the Constitution gave the centre the power to overturn State laws if they conflict with treaties to which the federal government is a signatory, including United Nations covenants to do with the environment and human rights. The use of foreign affairs powers to interfere deeply into State laws would not be tolerated in the United States. Differences are even greater in the realm of Australian and American financial powers. In the United States, the individual States levy income taxes and sales taxes. The Australian Court went in the opposite direction and changed permanently the fiscal balance of the Australian tax system by giving the Commonwealth a virtual monopoly over the raising of revenue. In the United States, the States have political independence based on financial independence. The result is a system of strong State governments and vast differences among the States in income levels, and levels of state support for education, health, transport, and welfare. Australia has been called a ‘quasi-federation’ because the States lack an independent financial power base. In the words of Alfred Deakin, the States are ‘financially bound to the chariot wheels of the Commonwealth’. The centre, over a long period, has called the financial tune, and the differences between States are much smaller than in the United States. Moreover Australian practice has been directly opposed to those of the United States in that Australian political expectations were that the central government would redistribute income and resources to ensure equalisation of living standards across the nation. It was also expected to provide facilities across Australia such as roads, health facilities, and communications so as to minimise State differences. While those expectations have been under challenge politically over the past 15 years with the rise of a more individualistic economic ideology, an ideology more akin to that which has dominated the United States, our Courts have in the 1997 cigarettes and liquor decision reinforced the Australian, not the American tradition. Thus a federal system, copied more or less directly from that of the United States by Australia’s founding fathers, was transmuted into a uniquely Australian version of federalism.
THE JUDICIAL POWER Despite the differences in Australian and American constitutional arrangements, there are great similarities when it comes to the judicial power itself. The Australian High Court, like its US equivalent, the Supreme Court, has acted as the great overseer of power and as the linchpin of the constitutional system. Its decisions, like its US
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counterpart, have had and continue to have a profound influence ‘in shaping the Australian nation in ways that affect the political, economic and social lives of the people’.6 In the United States, the Supreme Court’s decisions have dramatically shaped politics: for example the Brown desegregation decision of 1954; the Roe v Wade abortion decision of 1974; the various decisions in the 1970s over the death penalty; the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. In the past 15 years (1982–97) the Australian High Court has started to play a role more similar to that of the US Supreme Court, and, in its decisions, to refer directly the American experience. The High Court broke from the founders’ intent and began to restrict Commonwealth legislative power. Moreover the Court declared itself, the High Court, to be the bulwark against undemocratic impulses within the Legislature. The Australian Court drew the Australian system closer to the American by talking, really for the first time, of the Australian system as one of representative government7 and of the fact that sovereign power in Australia today resides in the people, and not from the ‘sovereign will of the imperial Crown-in-Parliament’.8 Popular sovereignty is the hallmark of the American Republic. In 1992, as D. Tucker argues, the Australian Court embraced ‘some of the opinions of the late Justice Lionel Murphy, who, in turn, took ideas that were forged in the United States by the Supreme Court when it was dominated by liberals’. Murphy argued, and in 1992 the High Court was persuaded, that the Australian Court was not bound by the English doctrine of parliamentary supremacy but could draw on the creative route of the US Court to argue that the Court’s role is to reinforce notions of representative democracy, even at the expense of parliamentary sovereignty.9 One of its justices, Justice Toohey, declared that the Court’s role was to frustrate the will of parliamentary majorities in order to protect and promote individual liberty. He also argued that it may be possible to construct an implied Bill of Rights in the Constitution. This doctrinal shift ended (at least for a time) the disdain for US-style popular sovereignty which began in the debates on responsible government for the New South Wales colony in the 1840s and 1850s where Yankee republicanism and indeed Yankee popular sovereignty were viewed with distrust and hostility.10 While the McGinty decision of 1995 signalled that the Australian High Court would no longer draw on expansive notions of representative democracy, the Court has continued its pattern of judicial activism. The Wik decision for example is clearly within the American mode of ‘making public policy from the bench’.
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The Australian High Court then, in terms of its own role, has been increasingly convinced by a ‘world view’ enunciated by the American Supreme Court. While the ‘style’ may be similar to the US Court, the issues on which the Court declares are uniquely Australian. In the Franklin Dams decision the Australian Court used the foreign affairs powers combined with international treaty obligations to give the central government power to interfere into the heart of the decisions of State governments; in the Mabo and Wik decisions on Aboriginal land rights, it reached back beyond the construction of the Australian constitution for its interpretations. These decisions respond to Australian problems in an Australian political environment. The Court may use US precedent, but it does so because it suits its purposes, not because it is Americanised.
THE COURT AND CONFLICT While the Australian Court clearly and unambiguously has seen its role as a Constitutional Court of Judicial Review – like its American counterpart – it has been less willing to accept the consequences. The American Court has acknowledged its role as the third arm of government: that it is not somehow ‘above government’ and that its decisions have profound political consequences. The Court has also regularly acknowledged that its decisions are affected by the ‘great tides and currents’ that sweep through a society. The American Court has always understood that it will be attacked over its decisions and neither comments nor expects others to defend it. The Australian Court has been less willing to see itself in political terms and would like to be seen as above politics. Yet as it has become less legalistic and taken a more active role in Australian public policy the Court has come under attack.11 The conflicts following its 1997 Wik decision best illustrate this problem. When the Deputy-Prime Minister, Tim Fischer, attacked the Court over the Wik decision, the Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Gerard Brennan, the previous Chief Justice, Sir Anthony Mason, and Justice Michael Kirby, a present member of the Court, all made public comment accusing those who attacked the court of undermining the Court’s standing, the rule of law and threatening the stability of society.12 Whatever its desires may be, the Australian Court is now very much seen, as is the US Court, as a player in politics generally. To be fair, at least some of the Australian justices have openly acknowledged that the Court is part of politics. Even while he was head of the Court, Chief Justice Mason declared that ‘We live in an era in which what we are doing as Judges will be the subject of public attention and debate and we must accustom ourselves to increasing and closer public scrutiny’.13 The
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tension between the Court and the politicians occurs because the Court sees the centrepiece of our Constitution as being identical to that of the American Constitution, namely the separation of powers, and acts to protect that separation. The elected politicians believe in majoritarianism – that responsible government is centred on the will of the majority of elected politicians. Judicial Review is tolerated, so long as it does not start to dominate the political agenda. When it does so (as recently) its legitimacy is challenged.14 For better or worse, American-style activism has left an Americanstyle legacy. The genie is out of its bottle. In the words of Sir Anthony Mason, ‘the courts and their decisions are now part of the democratic debate.’15 Nonetheless the fight is distinctively Australian in that it is highly politicised and highly partisan, filled in forthright attacks on the Court and, indirectly, attacks by the Court back onto the politicians.
THE NEW POLITICS OF THE 1960S AND 1970S American influence at first looks very strong when the ‘new politics’ of the 1960s and 1970s is examined. Gays rights, women’s rights, black rights, student rights and the style of protest movements generally drew on US patterns. Despite superficial similarities of style there were deep differences, most particularly in that Australian activists generally rejected violence. That difference is particularly important in the Aboriginal Rights movement when contrasted with the black rights movements in the United States. There were also uniquely Australian protests, among the most successful of which were the ‘Green Bans’. These used trade union bans to fight for issues concerned with the urban environment. An idea about the effectiveness of protest then was taken from the United States and used in Australia in a way that reinforced the power of an organisation that was legitimate in Australia, while far less legitimate in the United States – the trade union movement. In the area of women’s rights, the development of WEL (Women’s Electoral Lobby) and the relatively rapid response by the Whitlam and Fraser governments in the 1970s meant women’s issues were institutionalised and bureaucratised in a form that is now recognised as ‘the Australian way’ of doing politics. Indeed, Australia has given the term ‘Femocrat’ to the world. US ideas about participatory democracy were taken up in Australia with reform governments accepting the American critiques of pluralism as lacking an understanding of the power of the State as an agendasetter, not an agenda-taker. Reforms were introduced by which government attempted to enhance citizen participation and government
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accessibility. The most successful ‘American’ influence in this area came with the passage of Freedom of Information Legislation. The first such legislation in a Westminster-style system, it drew Australia away from the British elitist tradition of the ‘government’s duty of conceal’ and towards the populist American notion of ‘the people’s right to know’. But it did not Americanise the Australian system. Instead an Australian system created an entirely new regime of quasi-judicial administrative accountability, The US notion of popular democracy based on open government and popular scrutiny was absorbed and developed into the Australian ‘new administrative law’ with the extensive use of Ombudsmen and with the Administrative Appeals Courts and Tribunals. The American idea was institutionalised in a special Australian variant.
PRIVATISATION AND THE ATTACK ON THE ROLE OF THE STATE With profound consequences for the entire definition of Australian politics, ideas about the nature and role of the State have been influenced, particularly over the past 25 years, by anti-Statist ideas coming out of the United States. The extent to which these ideas have been accepted across the partisan divide in Australia is all the more surprising because of our very different history to that of the United States. The State in Australia was, from the first, invoked as a paternalistic, interventionist agency used for mitigating the harsh consequences of economic competition and economic inequality. The State was looked to for the development of the community. Given Australia’s history, the impact of supply-side economics and anti-State ideas that spread out of the United States was remarkable. For the first time in Australia’s history the State was seen as parasitic and as antagonistic to the health of the private sector, rather than in partnership with it. Metaphors were taken from the United States and applied inappropriately to Australia. For example, it was claimed that Australia, like the United States, had seen the growth of the ‘special interest’ or ‘captured’ or ‘overloaded’ State. The ideas developed out of the American environment of weak and divided government. According to the overloaded state thesis, by the 1960s the capacity of American government to influence the direction of public policies was systematically abdicated to private groups.16 As a result the State had been captured by narrow special interests and was no longer capable of setting priorities.17 Representative democracy had been turned into special interest democracy. Such arguments may have made some sense in the United States with the system of separation of powers
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and a Congress essentially elected by, and beholden to, powerful special interests, with ‘networks’ of mutual interest and accommodation between members of Congress (and their staffs), lobbies and bureaucrats. Whatever else may be true of the Australian system, however, the political Executive can impose policy change on the system. The reforms to the public service, education, health, the financial system and industrial relations under both Labor and conservative governments over the past 15 years demonstrate that strength. Australia does not have a system of an overloaded State responding to every special interest by the creation of a new agency or sub-agency of government. Yet as a result of the blanket acceptance of American-derived critiques of the Australian system, the size and scope of government in Australia is being reduced. The result may well be that private-sector interests will come to dictate and define the ‘public interest’ and that what is destroyed is the strength of government to lead, to define the public interest and to resist private pressures.
THE PUBLIC SERVICE Another American-born idea came with the creation of a Senior Executive Service (SES). The objective of its creation was to develop senior administrators who were committed to professional service as general managers rather than committed to the narrow loyalties of single departments. Appointments could include short-term contracts, transfers from other departments, or from State public services. Private/public sector secondments were encouraged.18 All these reforms were directly and consciously based on their American counterpart. The ‘father’ of the reforms, Peter Wilenski, had gone to Washington and studied the introduction of an SES by the Carter Administration in 1978. As a result of these reforms claims have been made that the Australian public service has become Americanised because it has become politicised.19 Concerns with politicisation were sufficiently strong for the legendary mandarin and head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in the Gorton years, Sir Lenox Hewitt, publicly to attack the Howard government reforms which allowed ministers to sack summarily those who offered unwelcome advice. ‘You will destroy frank, fearless, honest advice if you’re party to this proposal of the Executive,’ Sir Lenox said.20 Despite these changes, there are still huge differences between the Australian and American public services. After all in the United States a new president gets to directly appoint over 4000 public servants. When administrations change this entire phalanx of managers is swept out of office. At best a new Australian government can hope to get rid of a
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dozen CEOs and not renew some of the five year contracts of lower level public service managers when their positions come up. The ‘spoils system’ of political patronage is an American norm. It remains an Australian exception.
THE POLITICAL AGENDA/ POLITICIANS AND POLITICS MINISTERIAL STAFFS
American-style influence can probably be seen more clearly with the growth in Australia of ministerial staffs made up of committed partisan supporters (usually people from the party machines). Until the Whitlam years such large permanent political staffs were unheard of Since then they have become institutionalised. Like the President’s staff, they are gatekeepers of access and information. They can act to reach out to maximise alternative opinions or they can be used to quarantine a leader from advice he does not wish to hear – and indeed determine what the leader will hear. That appears to have been the case with John Howard and the travel rorts affair in 1997. A Sydney Morning Herald article entitled ‘They’re all the Prime Minister’s men’, a direct American reference to the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate book, All the President’s Men, argued that Howard’s chief of staff Grahame Morris, independently of Howard, had made a decision not to tell his minister of critical facts concerning travel rorts, Labor’s Simon Crean called Morris ‘the Bob Haldeman’ of Howard’s office.21 A perception that ministerial staff have ‘Americanised’ the relations between the public service and the Executive led the Institute of Public Administration in New South Wales to hold a one day conference in February 1997 specifically on this topic, ‘From Westminster to Washington – Are Ministerial offices a halfway point?’ The conclusion was that the system remained Australian, and that the notion of ministerial responsibility was still central to the functioning of the Australian political culture. Ministerial staffs were an adjunct to that system not a modification of it. AMERICAN POLITICAL MARKETING
According to Stephen Mills, in The New Machine Men, Polls and Persuasion in Australian Politics,22 the Americanisation of Australian elections has been going on consistently since 1967–68 when in South Australia Don Dunstan’s re-election campaign for Premier became the first Australia campaign to use American formulae. Since then a stream of Australian party professionals has visited the United States watching election techniques and acquiring election skills. In the 1977 and 1980 elections Malcolm Fraser and the Liberal Party drew on American based
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political advertising campaigns in the deliberate creation of ‘pseudoevents’: events which lack traditional news content and are deliberately designed specifically to attract television attention, to generate an image of television, including the ‘street-walk’, ‘the workers’ friend in the pub’ and the ‘farmers’ mate’ at the rural show.23 Also taken from the United States were Richard Nixon style ‘Dirty Tricks’ where ‘if an opponent tries to generate a similar set of impressions, it has occurred to some to try to disrupted the imagemaking process’.24 This occurred in 1980 when Labor leader Bill Hayden began a street-walk for the cameras, which was interrupted by Liberal Party demonstrators who ‘were simply there to disrupt the Hayden visit’.25 In 1982 Stephen Litchfield, the State Director of the NSW Liberal Party invited two US direct-mail specialists to Australia to teach the Liberals the ways of direct mail. ‘By February 1984, the NSW Liberals were conducting a fundraising drive with the new methods that won an award from the Australian Direct Marketing Association. The $2 million debt was wiped out.’26 By the next election, both parties were committed to US-style campaign techniques. David Combe, who went on to become ALP Federal Secretary in 1983, had observed techniques in US presidential campaigns. ‘The 1983 elections saw the ALP and coalition Parties spend $12 million on campaigning.’27 Robert Squire, one of the United States’ top political consultants, commented in 1986 that he sees more ‘Party officials from Australia seeking advice about his work than from any other country.’28 These contacts have continued, drawing on American techniques of fundraising and political marketing, including the recent American inventions of ‘negative’ advertising and push-polling. Of the key party machine men in 1996/97, David Epstein, Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition; Mark Texter, Chief Pollster to the LPA and the CLP, Mark Arbib, NSW State ALP secretary responsible for campaigning in NSW; and the ALP’s Queensland organisers, Wayne Swan and Mike Kaiser, have all spent time in the United States observing campaigns in detail. In 1996 Arbib attended a Political Consultants’ Conference.29 In 1997 the Australian Democrats employed the American political consultant, Rick Ritter, who had worked on Clinton’s campaign and later worked in the United Kingdom on Tony Blair’s successful election. At least one candidate for ALP pre-selection for the 1998/99 election (Carmel Niland in the seat of Lowe) is using American-style polling and political marketing techniques in an attempt to win that battle.30
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In order to get direct financial help to Labor women candidates, the women’s organisation in the ALP has directly borrowed both the idea and the name, Emily’s List, from its sister organisation in the United States’ Democratic Party. (The name is an acronym from ‘Early Money is Like Yeast: it raises the dough’). Commercial marketing practices developed in the United States have been applied in Australia where market research and polling are used to target swinging voters, narrowing the channels of communication and removing the information-gathering function of the party member. ‘Parties now conduct campaigning for the benefit of a few selective group of voters ... The shift to political marketing ... has also encouraged the shift in political communication from being a labour intensive to a capital intensive activity.’31 That shift exacerbates the need to use American derived methods of fund-raising. Here then is the best case for the Americanisation of Australian political culture. Unless the system adapts it into a means for integrating new voters into the system, it may well contribute to the growing alienation of voters from the traditional political parties and from politics generally, a trend evidenced most strongly in the United States, and increasingly strong in Australia, where by 1997 approximately 25 per cent of voters indicated a preference away from the major parties.
TELEVISION American styles of television reporting were also adopted by Australian political journalists changing the focus of the press conference from the parliamentary press gallery to the television reporters. The result was that Australian political campaigning adopted American-style techniques of trivialisation. The questions that television journalists ask are different from those of print media. They want a politician to say something dramatic in a time span of between 10 and 60 seconds ... Politicians who perform best under these circumstances are those who speak most in terms of dramatic symbols.32
Equally transforming has been the copying into Australian politics of the telecast presidential debate where we have seen Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Hewson and John Howard all participate in such debates. But the style remains intensely Australian – an American idea modified and Australianised. Television image has also led to the physical transformation of our leaders, beginning seriously in 1972 with Gough Whitlam whose hairstyle was transformed into a younger, more ‘up-todate’ image. Even John Howard had his glasses changed and his eyebrows tamed for television.
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This most American of all influences has meant that being telegenic is now seen as a political asset. Together these influences have hastened further the processes which lead to the trivialisation of politics, a comment born of US experience.
POLICY IDEAS In the 1996 election campaign, ‘Mr Keating and his advisers secretly considered a dramatic shift to the Right in an attempt to emulate Mr Bill Clinton’s winning second-term strategy, including a crackdown on the dole’.33 In 1997, Prime Minister John Howard returned from a trip to the United States and almost immediately called for a shift to a lower minimum wage and reduced dole payments by pointing to US experience. ‘There is a trade-off. We have as a nation over the years adopted as part of our ethos a higher minimum wage than many other countries, ... Now, one of the consequences of that is that you do have a higher level of unemployment.’34 The Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, accused Mr Howard of trying to ‘Americanise’ the Australian system. While Mr Howard’s ideas were quickly put to one side, many other American-born ideas have been adopted or seriously considered. For example, Bob Carr’s ‘get tough with criminals’ policies have been taken directly from the ‘three strikes and you’re in’ policies developed in the United States; as was the introduction of privatised prisons in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria; the possibility of a voucher system for students in the education system; the possible introduction of American-style (indeed American run) health managed organisations (HMOs) to run hospitals; and the foreshadowed introduction by Carr of law regarding paedophiles based directly on its American counterpart (Megan’s Law) where the names of paedophiles are made public. The US Information Agency has been selecting ‘established or potential Australian leaders in government, politics, media, education, science, labor relations, and other key fields’ for at least 35 years, and sending them on study tours to the United States. It is hardly surprising that American ideas have been highly influential and an obvious part of the ideas expressed by many of our leaders. The USIS sent both Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser to the United States in 1964.35 Paul Keating was an international visitor, sent in 1971. The USIS sent ALP Member of Parliament Jenny Macklin in 1997 and ALP Member of Parliament Mark Latham in 1998. Both are considered by some as potential leaders of the ALP. Despite these American influences, it would be drawing a very long bow to argue that Whitlam, Fraser, Keating or Howard had been Americanised
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in their politics. Each worked within his own Australian political milieu. While ideas were taken up, Australian politics and the limits of the Australian Constitution forced modifications and transformations of ideas. Moreover all these political leaders could manoeuvre in ways impossible for their American counterparts because of the strength of Australian party discipline.
CONCLUSION Australian politics has been described as Americanised in part because it used the American model in drawing up the federal elements in the Australian Constitution. The federal arrangements also meant that like the United States, Australia has a powerful Constitutional Court which through its judgments shapes politics. Over recent years the similarities between the two Courts have become more obvious as the Australian Court ventured out of its cloak of legalism into more active policy making. Politics has also been seen as Americanised through the growth of an ‘American-style’ powerful Senate which since the late 1960s has been acting to hold the Executive more accountable and, at times, thwart its will. Despite similarities in the two countries’ constitutions, the decisions of the Australian High Court with respect to federal/State powers have made Australian federalism very different from American. The hallmarks of Australian politics remain strong party organisations and Executive dominance of parliament though powerful party discipline. A strong Senate owes more to the Australian adoption of proportional representation and the pre-federation Australian tradition of strong upper houses than it owes to its American cousin. Moreover the politics of the Australian Senate are played out strictly along party lines. It is not, and has never been, a States’ House despite its having been modelled on that idea, borrowed from the American system. Television, advertising, polling and image making have all been transmitted from America to Australia and have helped change the nature of election campaigns, money raising in politics and leadership style. These changes have helped trivialise issues and turned campaigning and fund-raising into capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive activities. The result is to place further distance between the political parties and the voters, making the parties seem less relevant as vehicles for mass political representation. In addition a number of policy ideas, both large and small have crossed the Pacific (occasionally they seem to come the other way from
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the United States across the Atlantic to Britain and thence to Australia). These have included the ‘new politics’ of the 1960s and 1970s, ideas of representative and participatory democracy in the 1970s, and in the 1980s the market oriented, anti-Statist ideology of the ‘New Right’. However, when these ideas and techniques are incorporated into Australian politics that environment mediates them in dramatic ways. Compulsory voting means campaigning in Australia can focus on marginal seats and use the new American techniques of money raising and polling to strengthen the grip of Australian political parties and political leaders. In the United States they are used to make individual politicians even more vulnerable to the influence of donors and to the politics of narrow single-issue politics. On these grounds alone it would be inappropriate to called Australian politics ‘Americanised.’ Rather American ideas are Australianised by imprinting onto them the Australian way of doing politics and Australian content. Despite all the American-born influences, Australian politics and its political system remain distinctively and uniquely Australian. 1 M. Kirby, ‘Court and Policy: The Exciting Australian Scene’ Commonwealth Law Bulletin 19(4) October 1993:1794–1811 p. 1795. 2 G. A. Rumble, ‘Federalism, External Affairs and Treaties: Recent Developments in Australia’ Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 17(1) Winter 1985:1–42, p. 3. 3 For details see, for example, L. Zines, ‘Federal Constitutional Power Over the Economy’ Publius: The Journal of Federalism Fall 1990 vol. 20:19–34. 4 Ha and Anor v State of NSW etc, 5 August 1997. 5 Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen (1982) 152 CLR 168; Commonwealth v Tasmania (1983) 158 CLR 1. 6 B. Galligan, ‘The People’s Constitution and the Higher Court’ Voices, Summer 1994–96 IV (4):23–35, p. 32. 7 The expansive interpretation of representative government seems to have been ended by the High Court’s decision at the end of 1995 in McGinty. (James Andrew McGinty and Others v The State of Western Australia FC 96/001). In that decision the Court addressed the meaning of representative government and declared there was no support in the Constitution for an implication that the institution of representative government or representative democracy is part of the Constitution independently of the terms of ss 1, 7, 24, 30 and 41 of the Constitution ... all that can fairly be said is that those sections of the Constitution give effect to the political institution of representative government. 8 A. Fraser, ‘False Hopes: Implied Rights and Popular Sovereignty in the Australian Constitution’ Sydney Law Review, vol. 16, 1994:213–27, pp. 215–16. 9 D. Tucker, ‘Representation-Reinforcing Review: Arguments about Political Advertising in Australia and the United States’, Sydney Law Review, vol. 16 1994: 274–87, pp. 273–75. 10 A. Fraser, p. 223.
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11 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 1992, M. Millett ‘Political demands on High Court’. 12 Reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July 1996, B. Lagan, ‘Stand up for High court, says judge’; and reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 16 August 1997, B. Lagan, ‘Senior judge lashes politicians’. 13 Quoted in M. Kirby, p. 1807. 14 For discussion see B. Galligan, Politics of the High Court, A Study of the Judicial Branch of Government in Australia UQP, St Lucia, 1987, p. 39. This book is generally recommended for its discussion of the American nature of the Australian Constitution and Court system. 15 reported in the Australian, 24 October 1997. 16 R. Blandy, Times on Sunday, 1 March 1987 paraphrasing and expanding on D. Lal, The Political Economy of Economic Liberalisation. 17 T. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, Ideology, Policy and the Crisis of Public Authority Norton, NY, 1969. 18 Task Force, 1992, pp. 6–20. 19 See for example, J. Halligan, ‘Labor, the Keating Term and the Senior Public Service’ in G. Singleton, (ed.) The Second Keating Government, Australian Commonwealth Administration 1993–1996, IPAA and UC, 1997, pp. 56–59. 20 Sydney Morning Herald 8 August 1997, J. Brough ‘Mandarin lashed for Public Service attack’. 21 Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Who knew what when?’ 26 September 1997. 22 S. Mills, The New Machine Men: Polls and Persuasion in Australian Politics, Penguin Books, 1986, p. 2. 23 K. Windschuttle, The Media, A New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 315. 24 ibid. 25 Laurie Oakes, Daily Mirror, 14 October 1980, p. 6, quoted in K. Windschuttle p. 316. 26 S. Mills, p. 1. 27 ibid., p. 3 28 ibid., p. 6. 29 P. Zagami, op. cit. p. 19; interview with Mark Arbib, Sydney 23 October 1997. 30 C. Niland, Interview, 7 October 1997. 31 P. Zagami, Paul, ‘Marketing, Media, Money and America, Political Campaigning and Communication in Australia’ unpublished Honours thesis, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, 7 July 1997, pp. 17, 46. 32 K. Windschuttle, pp. 312–13. 33 P. Williams, The Victory reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1997, ‘How the good ship Labor, under Cap’n Whacky’. 34 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July 1997, T. Wright, ‘PM paves way to cut wages, dole’. 35 Whitlam refers to this visit in G. Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, 1972–75, Viking, Ringwood, 1985, p. 35.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH: JURISPRUDENCE Kathe Boehringer
INTRODUCTION: NATIONALISM AND FEDERALISM This chapter examines the recent judicial recognition in Australia of a limited constitutional protection of political communication.1 The welcome accorded this development has two bases: the first is that, for many commentators, the development marks the Australian High Court’s emergence from a jurisprudential Dark Ages of crabbed and narrow interpretation; the second is that the centrality of ‘communication’ to ‘democracy’, a position at least rhetorically maintained in the American Supreme Court’s First Amendment decisions, has at last been recognised. The argument developed in this chapter is that there is little cause for celebration. Judicial review in the United States has generated a mass of incoherent and competing speech protection principles, a situation that casts doubt on the wisdom of the High Court’s departure. Further, the Court’s establishment of a single, national communication regulation regime bespeaks a commitment to a retrogressive nationalism and residual managerialism rather than to democracy. Although attention has been focused on the scope and ambit of the implied freedom, it is important to consider who is providing the protection. The Court’s implicit support for national rather than federal regulation of political communication raises an important constitutional issue. The strength of the federal principle lies not merely its formal constitutional basis – the states are, after all, constitutive elements in both the American and Australian constitutions – but that federalism recognises and responds to the heterogeneous reality of modern civil
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societies, thus resisting the essentially monarchal vision of a single, unitary national community. The federal principle maintains that the association of autonomous bodies politic – such as the states in a federal compact generates the only kind of unity capable of expressing the diversity and differences characteristic of modernity. In the twentieth century, however, national ruling elites in both Australia and the United States, aided and abetted by the hollowing out of the federal principle by the highest courts, have aggressively asserted that the nation-state is alone capable of creating political unity out of contemporary heterogeneity. Nationalists contend that the federal principle is hostile to the possibility of a sovereign people. Yet close examination of the national governmental institutions in both the United States and Australia reveals no institutional location in which those putatively ‘sovereign’ citizens do in fact exercise such authority. Indeed, the only role discharged by the allegedly ‘sovereign’ citizens in the modern nation-state is the decidedly limited one of voting. The function of elections is not to provide citizens with a forum in which to exercise their sovereignty, but rather to supply national governments with a mandate, a reservoir of power, supplied by ‘the people’ to the state for use by its public agents.2 The federal principle challenges the monopoly of authority and power wielded by the central government in the people’s name. The principle envisages a wide range of institutions – some ‘political’, like state governments, others ‘civic’ like universities, trade unions and churches – within which a cross-section of citizens can appear together in public to consider common problems and relevant action. The inherently democratic potential of state governments to provide actually existing alternatives to national policies and actions cannot be denied: the nationalists’ article of faith, that is, that there is really only one best way to do things and they know what that is, can hardly be said adequately to reflect the range of views that do and must circulate in a healthy democracy. Federalists respond with the charge that nationalists are not truly committed to the constitution of a healthy democracy, but are only concerned with the appearance of one to satisfy the requirements of a more or less enlightened despotism. Examined from a federalist perspective, the High Court’s implication of a constitutional freedom of political communication reflects a cosmetic commitment to freedom of communication: on the ‘appearance’ side, the Court can be seen to be asserting the central importance of political communication in the representative democracy the Court finds created by the Australian Constitution; on the ‘reality’ side, not only is the asserted representative democracy formal rather than substantive in nature – note that the High
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Court’s reasoning is that Australian ‘representative democracy’ is created by the formal constitutional clauses concerned with elections, not by a democratic citizenry – but also that the lineaments of the vital ‘freedom’ of political communication will be crafted by a single, national, judicial regulator. Prima facie, while such an arrangement may appeal to social engineers seeking mechanisms through which social unity may be manufactured, or to modern despots concerned to redeem what is essentially authoritarian rule through the appearance of enlightenment – once again, it must not be forgotten that the High Court’s elevation of political communication to a constitutional freedom enables the Court, not the people, to establish the rules under which the people’s political communication can effectively service the electoral process – it will have little appeal for citizens seeking themselves to participate in the constitution of the norms and values of political communication.
MANAGERIALISM In the United States, the ‘theoretical discussion of constitutional interpretation has an elevated status’.3 The contrast with Australia is startling. Until the mid-1980s, little public attention, except for ‘landmark’ cases, was paid to the High Court’s constitutional jurisprudence. Scholarly attention was confined by the settled nature of the High Court’s theoretical framework. The approach of ‘legalism’4 was regarded as characterising the High Court’s approach to judicial review. ‘Legalism’ ... belongs in a larger family of approaches including literalism, positivism, formalism, textualism and, in the US, ‘strict construction’. All of these concepts share the ambition of constraining judicial discretion to ‘legally defensible’ choices which are theoretically protected from influences of individual political philosophy.5
Criticism mounted by those relatively few Australian scholars influenced by ‘legal realism’6 was of merely ‘academic’ interest in the face of this interpretative orthodoxy. In the mid-1980s, however, a sea change took place. It is now widely accepted that legalism is no longer the cornerstone of constitutional interpretation.7 Today, Australian legal academics, judges and practitioners are engaged, as are their American counterparts, in debating the alternative theoretical approaches relied upon in the course of High Court judicial review. Much of the Australian scholarship concerning the implied freedom of political communication (see discussion below)
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addresses the question of the theoretical basis upon which the Court overcame its previous perceived reluctance to imply constitutional rights. A necessary accompaniment to this theoretical debate has been the realisation that the move away from legalism calls for a new conception of the functions of judicial review. Both High Court judges and the public alike recognise that perceived adherence to legalism protected the Court from the charge, often heard in the United States, that the Court is a ‘political’ rather than a ‘judicial’ institution. No less a figure than the former Chief Justice, Sir Anthony Mason, has stated that judges engage in law-making, rather than confining themselves to legal interpretation. In these novel circumstances for the Australian legal order, it is unremarkable that the institutional role of the High Court is a major theme of contemporary Australian, as well as American, legal writing. But it is surprising that only a few Australian scholars have concerned themselves with the question of the specific nature of the political intervention now conceded as inherent in the process of High Court judicial review.8 This chapter argues that despite rhetorical flourishes, the High Court’s implication of a constitutional freedom of political communication, enabling it to strike down state legislation, bespeaks a very contemporary commitment to managerialism rather than to democracy. Managerialism arguably involves an administrative rather than a political approach to the resolution of conflict, about speech or any other topic. As indicated above, the High Court’s creation of a single register for the assessment of political communication indicates an essentially managerial approach. The establishment of a single source of wisdom9 in this area flies in the face of both common sense and the federal principle. If a recognised characteristic of successful modern democracies is the undoubtedly heterogeneous nature of their citizenry, only a fear of the unpredictability of that citizenry could motivate the establishment of a single register. Given the highly contested nature of what constitutes political speech, to say nothing of what might be its appropriate limits, the High Court’s insistence on a single determinative agency reflects a commitment to ‘managing’ political conflict rather than encouraging political engagement by citizens. The federal principle, a structural and arguably moral feature of both the Australian and American constitutions, with an honourable history of providing an institutional home for both political alternatives and/or opposition to the policies and action of the central government, has been hollowed out by judicial review in the twentieth century in the name of ‘democracy’. Yet at the century’s end, the undoubted result has not been
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either an increase or an enhancement of democratic participation in governance but rather of increasingly unaccountable and irresponsible administration by bureaucratic bodies and private power in an unholy alliance of corporatist10 interests.
JUDICIAL REVIEW AND MANAGERIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES In the United States, constitutional protection of speech is contained in the first amendment to the US Constitution. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Legal scholars, although perhaps not the general public, are aware that until 1925 the Supreme Court regarded the First Amendment as inapplicable to state statutes, insisting that the First Amendment’s restriction upon legislative power applied only to ‘Congress’ not to state legislatures. The explosion of Supreme Court jurisprudence since 192511 doubtless accounts for the wide public awareness of ‘freedom of speech’ in both the United States and elsewhere. Less well understood are the doctrinal antinomies generated by Supreme Court decisions since 1925. American free speech jurisprudence has become so confused and contradictory that the number of scholars calling for a jurisprudential overhaul is large and growing. Some call for jurisprudential reform on grounds of doctrinal incoherence. Streeter, for instance, examines the Supreme Court’s ‘fairness doctrine’ in terms of its inherent indeterminacy. The basic task of the Fairness Doctrine – protecting individual freedoms from group constraints – makes sense only if freedom, constraint, individuals, and groups are manifestly distinct categories. And manifestly, they are not. The apparently noble task of protecting the freedoms of individuals against group constraints, as a result, begins to look like an empty verbal exercise. If anyone involved with broadcasting can be construed as either group or individual, moreover, if any action can be equally well construed as either an act of constraint or the exercise of freedom, then it will always be possible to argue that someone’s individual freedom is being constrained by somebody else.12
An emerging group of American scholars has voiced concerns and reservations about Supreme Court decisions in which protection has been extended to ‘unexpected beneficiaries’.13 For example, in Virginia
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State Board of Pharmacy v Virginia Citizens Consumer Council,14 purely commercial expressions, previously considered as beyond First Amendment protection, were viewed as essential ‘to the formation of intelligent opinions as to how that [free enterprise] system ought to be regulated or altered’; in Austin v Michigan Chamber of Commerce15 and First National Bank v Bellotti,16 political campaigns and expenditures that created the possibility of unequal access to the electoral process were trumped, in the Supreme Court’s view, by individuals’ claim to access to candidates; in R. A. V v City of St. Paul,17 the Supreme Court invalidated a city ordinance on the basis that the criminalised conduct – burning a cross on the lawn of black householder – amounted to political communication. Writers concerned about these developments are now calling for retrenchment from the long twentieth-century progression of increasingly speech-protective interpretations of the First Amendment. At the heart of the retrenchment literature lies the belief that some forms of expression are incompatible with the aspirations of contemporary Americans for a civic-minded, decent, compassionate, and responsible society.18
Robert Nagel’s approach is qualitatively different. He asks the fundamental question which generations of free speech judges and scholars have never considered: has Judicial review now or ever been an appropriate means of articulating free speech norms and practices? Nagel contends that if the intention of academics and judges in constructing an elaborate edifice of judicial protection of freedom of speech is ‘to create a society in which information is plentiful and vigorous dissent is tolerated ... [then] the assumptions upon which this ambitious enterprise rests are largely unproven and often doubtful.’19 Nagel maintains that, given the nature of the judicial process, it is implausible to expect judicial review to promote systemic objectives such as ‘creating a tolerant, open society’ and castigates academics and judges for overlooking the absence of substantial evidence that Judicial review either impacted or can significantly impact on major causes of intolerance or censorship. His discussion of Zachariah Chafee’s seminal 1919 article,20 which strongly advocated an extensive role for the courts in promoting freedom of speech, is particularly revealing. Chafee’s article began with advocacy of a new role for the Bill of Rights. For Chafee, the Bill of Rights should be understood as ‘declaration of national policy in favour of the public discussion of all public questions’.21 Consequently, the significance of the First Amendment lay in its insistence upon a ‘constant regard’ for free speech
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in all public officials.22 Chafee’s next step was to cheerfully admit that the courts’ record was somewhat dismal, that is, that legal reasoning had failed to define clear, useful limits to freedom of speech to date, but nonetheless to contend that were the courts provided with a sufficient number and variety of cases, they could develop a rational principle or a test that would ‘solve’ the problem of freedom of speech. [T]he problem of locating the boundary line of free speech is solved. It is fixed close to the point where words will give rise to unlawful acts. We cannot define the right of free speech with the precision of the Rule against Perpetuities or the Rule in Shelley’s Case, because it involves national policies which are much more flexible than private property, but we can establish a workable principle of classification in this method of balancing and this broad test of certain danger.23
Chafee’s argument is clearly grounded in a strong vision of the needs and responsibilities of a national administrative state. Accordingly, he cheerfully strips the Bill of Rights of its historical, political and constitutional significance – particularly its federal significance: after all, the protections contained in the Bill of Rights against the central government were the result of political agitation by the states – transforming it instead into a consumer-oriented Guide to Good Administration. Chafee’s optimism about the capabilities of judicial review in this area reflects the sunny confidence of the salesman. Chafee, arguably, is ‘selling’ judicial review on the basis of virtually nothing except the conviction that national ‘progress’ requires a strong national administration and that the vital area of speech needs harmonisation from the top. To achieve this desired colonisation, Chafee was prepared to wrench the Bill of Rights out of its historical context, away from its concerns with the federal balance between state and national governments, and essentially to revise its prescriptions in light of the requirements of a new, national, administrative order. Nagel’s analysis disputes Chafee’s assumptions about the capacity of the courts to develop a speech regime that will deliver a tolerant and open society. Studies of periods of severe suppression demonstrate that the etiology of intolerance is exceedingly complex and variable. Informed speculation suggests that a wide range of factors coalesce to determine the amount of tolerance or intolerance, including: educational levels, methods of child-rearing, economic conditions, international politics, institutional rivalries combined with prolonged political frustration involving a major
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party, national character, insecurities caused by flux in social status, and even the weather. Adjudication is an unlikely mechanism for controlling such large and complex factors.24
In Nagel’s view, only sheer faith underpins such an ambitious role for the judiciary. My own view is that Chafee’s optimism reflects his commitment to a managerial approach which emphasises formal ‘process’ whether or not, substantively, the process can truly deliver. Many free speech scholars (e.g. Emerson,25 Meiklejohn26) Simply take the utility of judicial review for granted, emphasising the educational role that will be performed by the Supreme Court’s declaration of the ‘national policy’ (Chafee’s term) found in the First Amendment ‘in favour of the public discussion of all public questions’. Nagel finds reliance on the pedagogic role of judicial review unconvincing given the very strong critiques mounted by most commentators of many aspects of the jurisprudential edifice. The assumption by many writers that judicially elaborated protections really do or really will deliver either vigorous or useful public debate is entirely unsubstantiated in Nagel’s view. Indeed, in the cases that figure prominently as milestones of judicial protection of speech – the Sullivan case27 in the United States, for instance, or the Theophanous case in Australia, both of which apply constitutional speech-protective regimes to state defamation law – the reviewing court asserted, but failed to provide, empirical evidence of its ‘chilling effect’ upon speech or of the claimed ‘risk to the formation and publication of ideas and ultimately to the political system itself.’28 For Nagel, the absence of any assessment of the general program of judicial speech protection undertaken by way of judicial review is particularly problematic given the following considerations: 1
2
Legitimacy problems associated with the national judiciary’s ‘interference’ with traditional regimes of private rights which arguably provide ‘justice as between the parties’ (e.g. via the common law of defamation); Legitimacy problems associated with the national judiciary’s imposition of a national speech protection regime upon state legislation: Nagel argues that to the extent that the national courts justify imposition on the basis of a judicially declared and delimited constitutional ‘right’, questions necessarily arise concerning the original meaning of the Constitutional text. Because neither constitutional ‘intent’ nor ‘structure’ can be conclusively demonstrated but rather rely on the judicial application of interpretative techniques, it is extremely unlikely that public support and appreciation for such judicially constructed protection will be forthcoming.
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The irony here is that a program of judicial speech protection will be regarded as ‘interference’ by the very public who are the alleged beneficiaries. Any regime that produces a public alienated from the legal system seems more than a little problematic. 3
4
Problems of indeterminacy: Nagel argues, as does Streeter, that those who raise and pursue the undoubted complexity of freedom of speech fail to acknowledge that free speech principles when applied to the arguments of plaintiff and defendant can justify a victory by either. Indeterminacy again raises the spectre that a general program of vigorous speech protection by a national judiciary seems to confuse rather than generate a climate of public discussion or a capable citizenry The problem of trivial and ‘hard’ cases: Nagel maintains that the public 29 is bound to regard a case like Cohen, which considered whether a conviction for breach of the peace of the wearer of a jacket featuring the words ‘Fuck the Draft’ violated the wearer’s freedom of speech, as ‘trivial’. Such cases necessarily expose the Supreme Court to display what will inevitably appear as pompous highmindedness. When the big guns of highly elaborated First Amendment principles are used to demolish the tiny targets of local statutes which prohibit, say, nude dancing, it becomes ‘outlandish’ to assert that such a large constitutional armoury is necessary to protect the very foundation of democracy. Nagel states: Whether or not first amendment theory is correct in positing that any minor deviation from the wall of protection for free speech is potentially dangerous, judicial protection inherently creates problems for public appreciation of the importance of free speech. If judicial protection, as the chief mechanism for giving effective meaning to the first amendment, continuously creates that meaning by attempting to fit specific facts to grand theory, public sympathy for free speech will decline.
If, on the other hand, the national judiciary reserves its jurisprudential big guns for important, rather than trivial cases, it is likely that those cases will be precisely those ‘hard’ cases which, given the variety of doctrinal weapons available, are amenable to a number of possible determinations. Hard cases, too, present barriers to full and comprehensive public appreciation of the judiciary’s speech protection program. Once again, the judicial review mode seems to create more problems than it resolves. 5
The problem of categorisation: Nagel demonstrates that the jurisprudence developed by the United States Supreme Court over the past 70 years has been devoted to an increasingly fruitless attempt to
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construct watertight analytical categories – ‘speech’ versus ‘conduct’; ‘public’ versus ‘private’ figures; I speech’ versus ‘commercial speech’; ‘obscene’ vs ‘nonobscene pornography’. The utility of this categorisation project is difficult to discern and Nagel suggests that it is designed in part to remove the suspicion that judges are passing off their own subjective views as ‘law’, given the reality that categorical solutions are either too crude or too abstract convincingly to resolve free speech issues.
The judicial project of ‘educating’ the public about appropriate and inappropriate categories of speech seems to have failed. If the object of judicial review is to achieve the systemic objective of the creation of an open, tolerant society, capable of self-government, how can it be said that the judicial suppression of locally or culturally contrived restraints on censorship conduce toward that goal? If cultural brakes on suppression do exist, the fundamental concern should be the cultural consequences of resolving so many first amendment issues through legal analysis. Does the predominance of judicial solutions build a culture that values new information and dissent? It is doubtful that a society that has internalised the level of self-doubt taught by the judiciary could make the kinds of elementary judgments of degree, context and proportion that make vigorous public debate tolerable or desirable. It is questionable whether such a society could even remember the purposes of vigorous debate, which after all include both responsible self-government and the capacity to form judgments, to make moral and aesthetic discriminations. When judges teach that it is dangerous or inappropriate to make decisions about the kinds of books that should be kept in school libraries or the kinds of plays that should be staged in public theatres, they effectively strip the first amendment of much of its moral utility.30
Nagel’s critique strongly suggests that the putatively ‘sovereign’ citizens of the United States have been ousted by the national Judiciary from just the kind of participation in governance that judicial protection of speech claims to foster, a cruel irony indeed. This situation, where judicial activity is contributing to the moral and political decline of citizens, can be addressed only by considering the creation, on a federal model, of institutional spaces within which citizens can engage in self-government, one aspect of which would be to determine the speech rules for that particular institution. The suggestion of a proliferation of institutional spaces, each engaged in developing its own governance practices, may appear anachronistic to contemporary minds influenced by visions of greater and greater political, economic, social and cultural integration. However, if the notion of popular sovereignty, now part of the Australian constitutional
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order,31 is to have any normative reality in an era dominated by global corporations and globally oriented administrative agencies displaying the technocratic values held by rootless, ‘new class’ technocrats, it may be that only those institutions that express a federal approach to governance, rather than a national, ‘managerial’ approach, will be capable of providing the institutional means wherein citizens may learn to accept and discharge responsibility. The damning nature of Nagel’s critique of contemporary American free speech jurisprudence makes the Australian High Court’s recent move into such unrewarding if not counterproductive waters all the more surprising. In considering the Australian constitutional speech regime discussed below, Nagel’s comprehensive criticisms should be borne in mind. In particular, his disturbing comment, made in respect of American speech jurisprudence, that ‘ ... there is a real question whether courts actually promote free speech by engaging in principled decision making or whether they merely provide an emotional safe-harbour for the educated classes’32 needs to be carefully considered.
SPEECH PROTECTION AND THE DECLINE OF THE FEDERAL PRINCIPLE IN THE UNITED STATES As stated above, prior to 1925 the First Amendment’s protection of speech occupied a much more marginal status than it came to hold subsequently. G. Edward White has recently undertaken what he calls the first comprehensive inquiry into ‘why the First Amendment and freedom of speech “came of age”, that is, came to occupy the status of constitutional and cultural lodestars, in twentieth-century America’.33 Importantly for the argument made here, White’s intellectual history clearly indicates that the Progressives’ advocacy of the constitutional significance of speech ran flatly counter to a century of judicial resistance, on federal grounds, to the application of either the First Amendment or, after 1868, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, to state law. White’s account seeks at least to supplement and occasionally take issue with the small number of historical scholars who have taken the trouble to explain the late elevation of speech in the United States.34 White’s own approach explores the emergence of speech into constitutional prominence on the basis of ‘modernism’ which he claims altered the intellectual meaning of the concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘speech’. It is these very concepts, he argues, that have begun to ‘fragment’ in the late twentieth century, thus generating the ‘unexpected beneficiaries’ problem mentioned above.
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It might be argued that the mid-1920s constitutional dispensation requiring that essentially contested concepts like ‘freedom’ and ‘speech’ have both a single meaning and that that single meaning, so vital to the democratic project, be elaborated by remote judicial officers, seems almost perfectly designed to produce controversy, resentment and incoherence. Warren, a Washington lawyer writing immediately after the Gitlow decision notes that nineteenth and early twentieth century judges consistently resisted the following arguments: 1 2
3
4
that the protections provided in the national Bill of Rights should be applied to state legislation; that the rights arising under state constitutions and state laws should be regarded as ‘privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States’ (as stated in the Fourteenth Amendment) and therefore cannot be abridged by state law; 35 that the Bill of Rights should be regarded as Fourteenth Amendment ‘privileges and immunities’ so that state legislation affecting such rights could be protected by that clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; that the ‘liberty’ and ‘property’ that appeared in the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment should be construed to included within their scope all civil rights pertaining to the individual.
Warren cites the care taken by judges to construe the term ‘liberty’ narrowly so as to respect the federal principle, that is, the particular civil liberties regimes devised by the citizens of the several states. He describes the 1925 decision in Gitlow, if carried to its logical conclusion, as one in which ‘the simple word liberty will have become a tremendous engine for attack on State legislation – an engine which could not have been conceived possible by the framers of the first Ten Amendments or by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment itself’.36 Warren asks whether the Supreme Court’s new construction is a desirable feature of a federal government. In the change of conditions from the year 1868, is the ‘liberty’ of the citizen to be freed from State restraint, by National interposition, of greater or less importance than the ‘liberty’ of the State to control its own affairs and to regulate its own welfare and good order, under its own State Constitution as construed by its own State Courts? Is it, or is it not, a good thing that the legislation enacted by each State to meet local conditions and to regulate local relations should be standardised, by being forced to comply to a new definition of ‘liberty’, applied to every State by the judicial branch of the National Government?37
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White’s narrative is not at all concerned with the federalism viewpoint. He does not even consider whether the enhanced constitutional and cultural significance of speech protection was a watershed marking the decline of the federal principle. For him, the enhanced status of speech protection was, rather, an achievement of the Progressive Movement’s ‘democratic project’. The increasing influence of the democratic model of politics relative to the capitalist model of economics was reflected in a fundamental development in American constitutional jurisprudence. The emergence of free speech as constitutionally and culturally special was intimately tied to that development. I am calling that development the bifurcated review project – an effort to fashion a double standard of constitutional review in which judges would defer to legislative regulation of the economy but scrutinise legislative regulation of noneconomic rights, including the right to free speech. The basis for that heightened scrutiny was the close connection between the freedom personified in noneconomic liberties and democratic theory. The basis for judicial deference to legislative regulation of economic rights was similar. Such deference not only alleviated fears of an undemocratic substitution, under the guise of constitutional interpretation, of judicial for legislative theories of the economy, it left in place legislative regulations designed to alleviate the undemocratic consequences of the unregulated economic marketplace.38
White’s narrative pays virtually no attention to the ‘democratic’ reality of federal politics and institutions, and seems oblivious to the antidemocratic thrust of Chafee’s ‘national administration’ prescriptions discussed above. White’s analysis ignores the critical views of scholars from a wide range of fields concerning the creation of a national administration, and the role of the Supreme Court therein, under the New Deal. The 1930s saw the Supreme Court eventually affirm the New Deal legislation that not only reposed wide discretion and decision-making powers in unelected officials staffing a plethora of administrative agencies – arguably breaching the constitutional principle of separation of powers – but also overrode a settled federal jurisprudence that respected state legislation in particular areas.39 The interests of ‘the nation’ came to prevail over the federal ideal that the States are the appropriate institutions for regulating the civil liberties of their citizens. The Supreme Court eventually affirmed New Deal legislation. In its famous ‘switch in time’,40 the Court, perhaps to protect its institutional position against the court-packing threatened by President Roosevelt, effectively authorised what Burnham calls the ‘managerial revolution’.41
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The constitutional entrenchment of the federal principle, supplemented by the system of checks and balances and judicial review was understood by nineteenth century political and legal writers as bulwarks protecting individuals against tyrannical central government. But the increasing dominance of the ideology of national economic development, fuelled by both growth-oriented capitalism and international financial and territorial competition amongst nation-states, caused American political, economic and eventually led legal elites increasingly to conceive of the United States as a complex, interdependent ‘system of needs’ rather than as a society of rightsbearing individuals. As Toqueville had forecast, the American preoccupation with ‘equality’ and the imperatives of economic growth and development generated the view that the federal principle’s commitment to local control and to politics rather than administration led to time-consuming, unpredictable and inefficient government. Keane summarises: The more this consensus about the need for centralised public regulation develops, and the more state institutions become practically involved in the provisions of ‘public utilities’, the less civil society can cope without state direction, the need for which consequently grows. Trapped within this dynamic, individuals and social groups are drawn, willingly and without coercion, into relations of political dependence. The hands and eyes of the state intrude more and more into the minutiae of daily life. The democratic revolution loses momentum. In the name of democratic equality, government becomes regulator, inspector, adviser, educator, and punisher of social life. It functions as a kind of tutelary power which ‘perpetuates in the social body a type of administrative drowsiness which the heads of the administration arc inclined to call good order and public tranquillity (Toqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 158).42
White’s account doesn’t consider the anti-democratic potential of a ‘tutelary’ national administration. By contrast, he invokes a picture of dramatic post World War I expansion in the ‘meaning and normative significance of democracy’, so dramatic in fact that ‘the model of capitalism as unregulated economic activity separated from democratic theory’. Indeed, the new ‘democratic’ representation regarded economic freedom as producing ‘inequitable distributions of power and wealth’ once again illustrating the American preoccupation with equality. It is difficult to square White’s rosy picture of a ‘national democracy’ with either Warren’s representation of lost local – and democratic – control based on the federal principle, or with critics like Burns and
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Burnham who regard the New Deal’s centralised administrative state as ‘managerial’ and, indeed, anti-democratic. Burnham’s 1942 analysis describes the economics of the major industrial nations as undergoing a transition from capitalist society to ‘managerial’ society. He argues that in the previous epochal transition from feudal to capitalist society, sovereignty had became located increasingly in the ‘representative assemblies’ of the towns of the late Middle Ages which gradually became ‘modern legislatures’, operating first at a regional, and later also at a national level. He characterises these ‘parliaments’ as the sovereign bodies of the ‘limited’ capitalist state. However, the enhanced activities of the ‘unlimited’ capitalist state in the twentieth century – ‘unlimited’ because of the state’s acceptance of heightened welfare and ‘crisis avoidance’43 functions – require the establishment of central administrative bureaus to discharge those roles. Burnham argues that legislatures, burdened by the sheer volume of government activity and decision-making in complex, interdependent polities, delegate more and more functions to administrative agencies, with a resultant drift of legislative powers to those bodies. If parliaments were the locus of nineteenth century capitalist rule then administrative bureaus are the locus of modern twentieth century managerial rule. If Burnham’s analysis is correct, then the notion of managerial sovereignty is at odds not only with ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ – until recently a settled assumption of the Australian legal order – but also with the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ that underpins American and political and legal theory, and has now been stated as part of the Australian constitutional order as well.44 If ‘sovereignty’ is now exercised by the administrative elites of national governments, then the activities of national judiciaries to ‘nationalise’ the articulation and elaboration of speech protection should cause us to consider whether those activities might be directed not toward enhancing citizen sovereignty but, indeed, the reverse. The decisive role of the national judiciary in the United States in, first, effectively shifting the exercise of constitutional powers away from the states to national government and, second, acquiescing in the rise and rise of the national administrative state45 has received a good deal of critical commentary. Lawson goes so far as to describe the post-New Deal administrative state as ‘unconstitutional’ (by which Lawson means ‘at variance with the Constitution’s original public meaning’) and describes its validation by the legal system [as] ‘nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution’.46 Indeed, for Lawson, the judiciallyauthorised rise of the post New Deal administrative state in the United
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States calls into question the utility of constitutional discourse altogether.
THE AUSTRALIAN IMPLIED GUARANTEE OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND FEDERALISM A major concern of Australian legal writing about the implied freedom of political communication established by the High Court in 199247 has been to comment upon its scope and ambit; that is, the implied guarantee is not a personal right but rather a restriction on (federal and state) legislative powers, on the powers of the administration; the guarantee protects ‘political’ not ‘commercial’ speech. A large amount of scholarly writing concentrates on the theoretical bases of the implied freedom’s constitutional recognition. These articles canvass a wide variety of possibilities ranging from the philosophical – that is, the High Court’s implication of the freedom of political communication reflects a foundational premise of constitutionalism in general and of the Australian Constitution in particular; alternatively, the High Court’s implication rests on a commitment to particular freedoms regarded as ‘fundamental’ to ‘representative government’ or to values regarded as ‘democratic’ – to the prosaic, that is, that particular sections of the text of the Constitution (particularly, but not exclusively, the sections invoking elections) necessarily imply protection of political communication; alternatively, that the constitutional text as a whole invokes a system of representative government within which freedom of political communication is vital. One reason for the wealth of academic and practitioner commentary is that the judges themselves advanced a number of definitions, ranging from the narrow – McHugh, J. discussed the implied freedom in terms of ‘freedom of participation, association and communication in relation to federal elections’48 – to the broad – for example, Gaudron, J.’s freedom of ‘discussion of matters of public importance’ – as web as a number of rationales. The 1994 case of Theophanous v Herald & Weekly Times Ltd.,49 which confirmed that state defamation law was subject to the implied freedom of political communication, added further fuel to the speculative fire. The decision seemed to suggest that the implied constitutional freedom would support a specifically ‘constitutional’ defence that could be raised by defendants charged with publishing defamatory political communication. The unanimous High Court decision recently in Lange50 resolved a number of aspects of this ‘jurisprudence of doubt’.51 The Lange judgment made clear that the basis of the implied guarantee of freedom of political communication was the underlying conception of ‘representative
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government’ found in the Constitution and expressed in various sections: Sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution, read in context, require the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives to be chosen at periodic elections by the people of the States and of the Commonwealth respectively. ... That the Constitution intended to provide for the institutions of representative and responsible government is made clear both by the Convention Debates and by the terms of the Constitution itself. ... Sections 1, 7, 8, 13, 24, 25, 28 and 30 of the Constitution give effect to the purpose of self-government by providing for the fundamental features of representative government.52
Thus the theoretical basis of the implied freedom in the notion of ‘representative government’ seems clearly established, although the Court’s assumption that the representative governments that exist by virtue of state elections must be subject to the national regime is hardly obvious. The Court’s implicit denial of the significance of the federal principle repays analysis. Australian academic writing on the implied freedom neither considers Nagel’s question, that is, whether judicial review is appropriate for the articulation of communicative norms and practices, nor analyses the context within which speech protection, limited though the freedom may be, has emerged at this late stage. An important contextual consideration is the undoubted decline of the federal principle in Australia. Before returning to the issue of judicial review, it is important to discuss that hollowing out process. In the Australian constitutional order, the British constitutional convention of ‘responsible government’ – that is, that the executive (effectively this means the Minister in charge of an administrative department) is responsible to/can be disciplined by the parliament – is ‘part of the fabric on which the written words of the Constitution are superimposed’.53 This constitutional convention has been used to authorise the rise of the administrative state in jurisdictions, like Australia, whose constitutional traditions are derived from Britain. Responsible government has had a chequered history. In the late nineteenth century, the English constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey criticised the increasing tendency of the parliament to delegate decision-making to the public administration under the justification that the principle of responsible government ensured that the legislative hand was firmly on the shoulder of the executive. In Dicey’s view, the development ran counter to the fundamental constitutional notion of the rule of law. He argued that the decisions made by appointed officials
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lacked constitutional legitimacy: those exercising administrative power did not enjoy the legitimacy provided by the ‘political sovereign’ (i.e. the electorate) by way of elections to the ‘legal’ sovereign (i.e. the Parliament). Despite this criticism, the convention of responsible government continued to be used by Parliament to justify delegation of its powers to the executive, and an increasingly administrative British state began to emerge. Dicey became so concerned about the strength of this trend, and the patronage opportunities it offered to a political system increasingly dominated by organised parties cynically prepared to exploit crass majoritarian advantage that he campaigned strongly in favour of the referendum, a mechanism which, in his view, had the merit of conforming to the rule of law. In Australia, the convention of responsible government served not only to authorise wide delegation of power to administrative agencies but also served as the fulcrum of the landmark Engineer’s54 decision, the judgment that for many commentators marks a final shift away from the early High Court’s attempts to develop a stable jurisprudence based on the federal principle. The Engineer’s case concerned Commonwealth legislation that extended the national government’s arbitration jurisdiction to industrial relations between the states and their employees. The High Court resisted the states’ claim that their citizens would be exposed to and perhaps injured by the administration of nationally legislated arbitration agendas. Isaacs, J. addressed this consideration by stating that the Australian federation was a political compact created by ‘the whole of the people of Australia’, enacted by the Imperial Parliament and that two fundamental principles – the common sovereignty of all parts of the British empire and the principle of responsible government – underpins the Australian constitutional order. The invocation of these two principles enabled Isaacs to argue that the electoral system provides not only the political basis for the exercise of the Commonwealth’s constitutionally authorised legislative powers55 but also provides the means whereby ‘the people’ – note that this formulation enables him to avoid indicating whether this refers to ‘the people as a whole’ or ‘the people of the several states’ – are in a position ‘to resent and reverse’ any perceived abuse experienced by them in their sectional capacity.56 The decision indicates the adoption of a policy of judicial deference to the national legislature. In circumstances where the following conditions are met, judicial grappling with the federal principle is no longer warranted. Fraser argues57 that as long as it can be said that
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the ‘legal’ sovereign (i.e. the federal Parliament) has legislated within constitutionally prescribed limits; and the actions of the Commonwealth Parliament conform to the constitutional convention – thus ensuring that instances of administrative abuse will be dealt with by Ministers themselves accountable to Parliament, and the electorate is in a position to ‘resent and reverse’ any perceived abuse of them as citizens of the several states, then the High Court will defer to the national parliament’s legislative judgment.
For the Court to do otherwise, argues Isaacs, would mean that the judiciary would ‘separate itself from the progressive life of the community and act as a clog upon the legislative and executive departments rather than as an interpreter’. Isaacs expresses, in plain words, the motivation behind the American Supreme Court’s later ‘switch in time’. Arguably Isaacs’ argument begs the federalism point raised by the several states. To the extent that judicially authorised Commonwealth legislation conceives of the people to whom the national arbitration system will apply as citizens of the nation, it surely will not be long before both the concept and practice of state citizenship disappears. ‘The people’ of the several states, whose resenting and reversing action is looked to by Isaacs, J. for corrective action, may simply wither away. It might be that in the context of 1920s Australia, the homogenising powers of capitalist development processes that arguably erode inconvenient particularities, like local and/or state political allegiances, in the interest of creating a vast, national, undifferentiated class of commodity consumers were not fully appreciated. It may be, as Fraser maintains, that Isaacs’ advocacy of a facilitative, rather than a ‘clogging’ institutional role for the High Court ‘simply took ... for granted that the expansion of Commonwealth arbitration powers to create a national system of industrial relations could be justified by an appeal to the developmental needs of the nation’.58 The argument made here about the necessity and value of the federal principle cuts across the contemporary conventional wisdom that accepts ‘the developmental needs of the nation’. The emphasis I place on the civic role and functions of the states will perhaps surprise those accustomed to the view that Australia is over-governed, and/or that a unitary system is appropriate for such a small population. It is doubtless true that the annual Premiers’ meeting presents little more than a media spectacle, an annual photo opportunity in which powerless state premiers represent themselves as blameless victims of an unresponsive and ungenerous federal government.
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Given the hollowing out of the federal principle by the High Court over many years and the prevalence of what has been called the Court’s ‘centralist’ jurisprudence, the Australian states (unlike the Canadian provinces) have become little more than administrative relay points for national economic and social welfare schemes. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the abolition altogether of the Australian states should be on the agenda of current constitutional reform However, in an era in which the capacity of the nation-state effectively to represent the economic growth and development interests of citizens, let alone their desires for ‘the good society’, in the face of the manifold sources of crisis posed by global economic forces, it is important to consider the proliferation rather than the abandonment of institutions in which citizens can seek to exercise their powers of selfgovernment. However flawed the institutional role of the states may be presently, they represent, in principle, a political institution whose scale and scope responds to the articulation and resolution of local, regional and particularistic purposes. It is vital that the federal principle be regarded as more than constitutional window-dressing, a merely formal mechanism for achieving the political union of independent, ‘sovereign’ politics. Rather, federalism should be understood substantively as a civic principle, representing the reality that complex, modern societies require a variety of political institutions within which a heterogeneous citizenry can formulate approaches toward, and act upon common problems and common goals. The constituent states of the Australian and American federations, are, in principle, forums of appropriate size and scope for citizen deliberation and action. Consider the example of state defamation laws. However inconvenient or expensive it may be for capitalist media organisations to be forced to contend with differing state defamation regimes, is it obvious why the interests of these large corporations should prevail over the wishes of the citizens of the several states? Even if one represents the public spheres of the states as presently constituted in negative terms (i.e. as weak, ineffectual or even corrupt) it is nonetheless the case that the mere existence of these forums as potential alternatives to the complacent managerialism is an important, positive, expression of a concern for local control and local politics. The political value of a national administrative state vis-à-vis the vitality of a civic sphere in a democracy needs to be proved, not asserted. Nagel’s cogent critique of judicial review should also be considered. The recently decided High Court case of Levy v Victoria59 usefully illustrates the limits of judicial review. Levy, an animal rights activist,
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alleged that regulation 5 of the Victorian Wildlife (Game) Hunting Season) Regulations infringed his constitutional freedom to discuss government and politics. He had been arrested and charged pursuant to regulation 5 which effectively prohibited persons not holding a game licence from entering a hunting area on the opening of duck-shooting season. The High Court was thus presented with the question of how to categorise Levy’s intention to protest – after all, he had been prevented from entering the hunting area – and to make his protest manifest via the television coverage of opening day. Did Levy’s intended action fall within the protection afforded to political communication? Was it ‘speech’? ‘Conduct’? ‘Expressive conduct’? ‘Communicative action’? A good deal of the judgment addresses the categorisation problem. Most of the judges decided that the Victorian regulations did indeed prevent Mr Levy from engaging in political communication, by denying him the possibility of protesting on television, that is, denying him access to ‘the media’, and there are a number of judicial statements to the effect that ‘actions’ as well as words are protected by the implied freedom of political communication. Reading the case, it is difficult not to agree that the judges display that ‘pompous highmindedness’ described by Nagel as they parse the text of regulation 5, discriminate between verbal and nonverbal conduct, consider whether the legislative control imposed by the State amounts to a curtailment or significant likelihood of curtailment of the constitutional freedom in the course of determining, in the end, whether any curtailment created by regulation 5 is ‘reasonably necessary’ to the protection of safety acknowledged to be within the legislative powers of Victoria. Additionally, although it is clear that most of the judges believed that Levy’s intended protest did fall within the ‘political communication’ category, it is not at all clear why. What the public might glean from the case in terms of orienting their own future communicative conduct is unclear. More clear is the elevated status of ‘the media’, a repeated theme in the political communication cases, an emphasis seemingly based on the media’s communicative power. McHugh describes television in the following terms: No one could fail to understand the impact of the war in Vietnam on the civilian population after seeing the picture of a terror-stricken, naked child running away from her burning village. Such an image probably had more to do with influencing United States public opinion against the war in Vietnam than any editorial of The New York Times or Washington Post. It can send a more persuasive message to the public
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than any reasoned argument. Without the opportunity to use the medium of television, the citizen cannot make use of its unique communicative powers. Because that is so, the constitutional implication protecting freedom of communication also protects the opportunity to make use of the medium of television.60
The emphasis here on the importance of ensuring the public’s access to media assumes the media comprise a notional public institution. Given this understanding, a more rational jurisprudential development would have seen the High Court insist on the constitutional responsibilities of media corporations.61 In fact, the High Court never adverts to such a possibility. Mahoney, J.’s view of the media is much more sceptical. His concern is that although the ‘democratic development of constitutional law has been increasingly to require public power to be exercised according to rules of law or convention’, that development has not been applied to the media. It is the power of the media which alone remains, in the relevant sense, arbitrary. ... I mean two things. The media exercises power, because and to the extent that, by what it publishes, it can cause or influence public power to be exercised in a particular way. And it is, in the relevant sense, subject to laws and accountable to no-one: it needs no authority to say what it wishes to say or to influence the exercise of public power by those who exercise it. The media may, by the exercise of this power, influence what is done by others for a purpose which is good or bad. It may do so to achieve a public good or its private interest. It is, in this sense, the last significant area of arbitrary public power.62
Perhaps the most worrying aspect is the position that nationally elaborated rules for the protection of political communication can and should be applied to discipline state governments’ attempts to regulate either political communication or other areas that may impact on political communication such as, in the Levy case, public safety regulations. Yes, in Levy, the High Court’s examination of regulation 5 produced a confirmation of that regulation as ‘reasonably necessary’. But the question remains: how does remitting an instance like this to the tender mercies of the judiciary advance the cause of generating a knowledgeable and responsible citizenry? Would not the existence among the several states and/or localities of a range of different protestcontrol regimes do as much, if not more, to educate citizens (shooters and protesters alike) about the limits of speech and action? Would not the actual existence of alternative regimes enable citizens to make real
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life comparisons of speech regulation regimes– as opposed to drowning in the abstract formulations provided by the High Court? And what, after all, is the democratic substance of a decision that literally comes down from ‘on high’, disciplining local content to ensure its conformity to the national norms of political communication articulated by a remote judiciary?
CONCLUSION: THE FEDERAL PRINCIPLE IN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT It seems that in the United States, those who favour ‘retrenchment’ to resolve the antinomies that beset First Amendment jurisprudence have turned to the deliberative democracy model advanced by Sunstein.63 Sunstein’s suggested approach holds that the First Amendment is mainly concerned with securing the conditions for sustained political deliberation. The requirements of this ‘deliberative democracy’ enable him to argue that the Supreme Court should return to an emphasis on the protection of ‘political’ speech, and eschew protection of the ‘unanticipated beneficiaries’ of recent years. The difficulties of making bright line distinctions between ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ or ‘commercial’ speech are, of course, daunting. This categorisation task has begun (see the discussion of Levy above) and the Court has stated that there are distinctions between &political’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘commercial’ communication.64 A more important problem may be that the High Court, like Sunstein, places altogether too much reliance on the continued significance of what Fraser calls ‘the regulatory state’.65 Ulrich Beck’s influential and provocative thesis66 – that political authority has migrated from the realm of ‘official’ politics – urges a reconsideration of the capacities of the administrative state. Beck argues that today, reliance on the techno-economic system to deliver the only thing that contemporary politicians seem to regard as valuable (i.e. economic growth) means that the crucial decisions that permanently and continuously drive social and economic change toward unknown objectives and consequences are no longer made by elected representatives within the confines of the regulatory state. Rather they are made outside the legislature, in the boardrooms of corporations and scientific and technological research establishments engaged in the business of innovation. One result of this shift is that ‘official’ political institutions like national legislatures are now in the invidious position of ‘carrying the can’ for developments they neither create nor control. Another result is that significant political, economic and cultural decisions are made by individuals and bodies which lack political or constitutional authority. In
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such circumstances, the reliance by both a retrenchment-oriented Sunstein and a High Court proud of its newly minted implied freedom upon the existence of a national deliberative democracy and regulatory state within which ‘sovereign’ citizens disinterestedly reason and act seems not only beside the point but wrong in principle. Given the migration noted by Beck, a federal strategy of creating public spheres for the deliberation and resolution of speech issues inside the presently unaccountable but nonetheless powerful concentrations of corporate power that dominate the lives of today’s citizens represents both practicality and principle. 1 See, Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (1992) 177 CLR 1 (in which the High Court determined that a section of the Industrial Relations Act 1988 (Commonwealth) under which a publisher had been prosecuted for ‘bringing a member of the Industrial Relations Commission and/or the Commission into disrepute’ was invalid; and Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth (1992) 177 CLR 106 in which a majority held that some sections of the Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures Act 1991 (Commonwealth) under which political advertising was banned at federal election periods although a scheme of ‘free time’ in respect of political advertising was to be administered by the Australian Broadcasting Authority, were invalid. 2 See, S. Wolin, ‘Collective Identity and Constitutional Power’ in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989. 3 W. Rich, ‘Approaches to Constitutional Interpretation in Australia: An American Perspective’, (1993) 12 University of Tasmania Law, Review 150, at p. 151. 4 The phrase ‘strict and complete legalism’ was used by Sir Own Dixon on 21 April 1952 in his address upon being sworn in as Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. See Jesting Pilate and Other Papers and Addresses (collected by Judge Woinarski, 1965). 5 Rich, p. 152. 6 See, particularly, academic writers influenced by the approach of legal realism: G. Sawer, Australian Federalism in the Courts, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967; and P. Lane, The Australian Federal System,: Law Book Company, Sydney, 1979. 7 See, G. Craven, ‘After Literalism, What?’, (1992) 18 Melbourne University Law Review 874; B. Galligan, ‘Realistic “Realism” and the Court’s Political Role’, (1989) 18 Federal Law Review 40. 8 An honourable exception is A. Fraser, ‘False Hopes: Implied Rights and Popular Sovereignty in the Australian Constitution’, (1994) 16 Sydney Law, Review 213. 9 See, R. Cover, ‘Foreword: 1982 Term, Nomos and Narrative’, (1983) 97 Harvard Law Review. 10 See, generally, P. Schmitter, ‘Still the Century of Corporatism?’ in R Schmitter and G. Lehmburch, Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation, CA: Sage, Beverly Hills, 1979; for Australia, see J. Triado, ‘Corporatism, Democracy and Modernity’, (1984) 9 Thesis Eleven 102; also M. Detmold, The Australian Commonwealth: A Fundamental Analysis of its Constitution, Law Book Company, 1985, pp. 10–31.
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11 The case of Gitlow v New York (1925) 268 US 652, which did not first indicate that the Supreme Court might accept the argument that ‘freedom of speech and of the press – which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress – are among the fundamental personal rights and “liberties” protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States’. (Gitlow, at p. 666). Gitlow was decided on other grounds. The dictum in Gitlow was explicitly accepted two years later (Fiske v Kansas (1927) 274 US 380) when the Supreme Court invalidated a State law on the ground that it abridged freedom of speech contrary to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 12 T. Streeter, ‘Beyond Freedom of Speech and the Public Interest: The Relevance of Critical Legal Studies to Communications Policy’, (1990) 40 J. of Communication 43. 13 See, G. E. White, ‘The First Amendment Comes of Age: The Emergence of Free Speech in Twentieth-Century America’, (1996) 95 Michigan Law Review 299 at p. 368. 14 (1976) 425 US 748. 15 (1990) 494 US 652. 16 (1978) 435 US 765. 17 (1992) 505 US 377. 18 White, ibid. 19 Nagel, ‘How Useful is Judicial Review in Free Speech Cases?’, (1984) 69 Cornell Law Review at p. 303. 20 Z. Chafee, ‘Freedom of speech in war time’, (1919) 32 Harvard Law Review 932. 21 ibid., p. 934. 22 ibid. 23 ibid., p. 943–44. 24 Nagel, p. 304. 25 T. Emerson, The System of Freedom of Expression, Random House, New York, 1970. 26 A. Meiklejohn, Political Freedom: The Constitutional Powers of the People,: Oxford University Press, New York, 1960. 27 New York Times v Sullivan (US, 1964); Theophanous v Herald & Weekly Times (1994) 182 CLR 104. 28 Nagel, p. 317. 29 Cohen v California, 403 US 15 (1971). 30 Nagel, pp. 332–33. 31 See the statement by Chief Justice Mason in Australian Capital Television Pty. Ltd. v Commonwealth that ‘sovereign power ... resides in the people’. 32 Nagel, ibid., p. 321, 33 G. E. White, ibid. 34 M. Klarman, ‘Rethinking the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Revolutions’, (1996) 82 Virginia Law Review 1; D. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years, 1870–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1997. 35 This contention was denied by the Supreme Court in the famous Slaughter House cases, 16 Wall. (US) 36 (1873), Justice Miller holding that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to ‘privileges and immunities’ derived from the States, or to the civil rights ‘which belong to citizens of the States as such’. (Cited in Warren, p. 437.) 36 ibid., p. 462. 37 C. Warren, ‘The New “Liberty” under the Fourteenth Amendment’, (1926) 39 Harvard. Law Review. 431, at pp. 464–65. 38 White, ibid., p. 309. 39 See for example, the shift in the Supreme Court’s reasoning from Schechter Poultry Corporation v US 295, US 495 (1935) and National Labor Relations
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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66
AMERICANIZATION AND AUSTRALIA Board v Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation 301 US 1 (1937). At stake in both cases was the validity of a federal enactment (respectively, wages and conditions; unfair labor practices) which clashed with existing state legislation. James MacGregor Burns, The Crosswinds of Freedom, Knopf, New York, 1989. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, Putnam, London, 1942. J. Keane, ‘Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction between Civil Society and the State 1750–1850’ in J. Keane (ed.), State and Civil Society, Verso, London, 1988, p. 58. Offe, ‘The Theory of the Capitalist State and the Problem of Policy Formation’ in L. Lindberg et al., Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism: Public Policy and the Theory of the State, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA, 1975. Mason, C. J.’s view, expressed in Australian Capital Television, that the elected representatives arc in a ‘trust’ relationship with the ‘people on whose behalf they act’ flies in the face of the traditional view that the parliament is in no sense a trustee for electors. Mason, C. J. cites the enactment of the Australia Act 1986 as marking ‘the end of the legal sovereign of the Imperial Parliament and recognis[ing]that ultimate sovereignty resided in the Australian people’. Deane and Toohey J. J. rely on the constitutional sections providing for popular election of parliamentarians as well as the provisions of s. 128 which involve citizen approval of constitutional amendments as guaranteeing ‘to the people of the nation the ultimate power of governmental control’. G. Lawson, ‘The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State’, (1994) 107 Harvard Law Review 1231. Lawson, ibid, p. 1231. See Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (1992) 177 CLR 1 and Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth (1992) 177 CLR 106. Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth (1992) 177 CLR 106 at p. 227. (1994) 182 CLR 104. Andrew Theophanous, a federal MP, sued the defendant publishers in defamation. Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997) 145 ALR 96. A. Blackshield and G. Williams, Australian Constitutional Law & Theory (2nd edn), Federation Press, Sydney, 1998, p. 113. Lange, p. 104. The Commonwealth v Kreglinger & Fernau Ltd (1926) 37 CLR 393 at 413. Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co Ltd., (1920) 28 CLR 353. The arbitration power appears in s. 51 (xxxv) of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (Imp). Engineers’ case, p. 152. A. Fraser, The Spirit of the Laws: Republicanism and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1990, at pp. 244–50. A. Fraser, ibid. (1997) 146 ALR 248. Levy’s case, per McHugh, at p. 274. See K. Boehringer, ‘The Bad Fairy’s Curse: Corporations, Economic Growth and the “Communications Society”, (unpublished paper delivered to the Communications Research Forum, October 1995). Mahoney, J. in Ballina Shire Council v Ringland (1994) 33 NSWLR 680 at 725. C. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1993); also The Partial Constitution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. See the joint judgment of Mason, C. J., Toohey, J. and Gaudron, J. in Theophanous. A. Fraser, ‘The Partial Republic: A Review of The Partial Constitution’, Review of Constitutional Studies, vol. II, no. 2, 1995. U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London, 1992.
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS Braham Dabscheck The Australian culture with its characteristic state paternalism and economic egalitarianism has little, if any, of the rugged individualism of the American social tradition. Mark Perlman, Judges in Industry (1954).1 The more we reflect upon all that occurs in the United States, the more we shall be persuaded that the lawyers form the most powerful ... counterpoise to the democratic element The courts of justice are the visible organs by which the legal profession is enabled to control the democracy Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved into a judicial question The language of the law becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of the law ... gradually penetrates into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy and America (1835).2
Prominent scholars of American labor law have maintained that America is unique in the extent to which judges and the courts have become involved in the regulation of workplace relationships.3 In making such claims they are unaware of the prominent role courts/judges have played in Australian industrial relations through out the twentieth century. Mark Perlman, an American whose Ph.D. examined the workings of Australian arbitration, highlighted, ‘the part played by the expert behind governmental controls’.4 While courts and judges5 have been crucial to the operation of American and Australian industrial relations they have performed such functions in fundamentally different ways. In America the courts, or state, has operated in a ‘minimalist’ way espousing a rhetoric based on contractualism, or procedure. Such an approach has stressed the
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importance of property rights, hampering attempts by workers to employ collective action in protecting and advancing their employment rights. In Australia the state has been more activist. Industrial tribunals have sought to find solutions to industrial relations problems in attempting to enhance the efficient operation of society. The Australian quest for ‘a new province for law and order’6 constitutes an experiment in Fabian socialism. This chapter is concerned with considering the extent to which Australian industrial relations has been influenced by, or implicated with, the American approach to industrial relations. The major proposition that will be advanced is, despite examples of Australian interest in American developments, the Australian system has operated independently from America. This, however, may need to be qualified in light of recent developments. Since the mid to late 1980s Australia has moved towards a system(s) of enterprise bargaining, variants of which are based on precepts of American contractualism. The chapter is organised as follows. It begins with a brief discussion of industrial relations, focusing on the issue of bargaining power and tensions between individualism and collectivism. This is followed by the development of an analytical construct with which to conceive of industrial relations, in a nation state, thereby affording a means to ascertain American influences on Australia. The next section provides an account of the trajectory of American industrial relations. This is followed by two sections on Australia. The first is concerned with outlining key features of Australia’s traditional system, with the second focusing on recent developments. A conclusion will draw together the major threads of the chapter.
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: INDIVIDUAL VERSUS COLLECTIVE BARGAINING Industrial relations developed as a separate discipline in response to a major change which occurred in labour markets in Western style societies in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This change was the propensity of workers to form collective organisations, known as trades unions, in pursuit of improvements in wages and working conditions.7 The formation of unions raised issues associated with the nature and distribution of bargaining power between the buyers and sellers of labour. To a neo-classical economist individual workers would not take up employment with an employer – or an employer provide employment – if it wasn’t to their mutual advantage. Individuals, so it is claimed, would not enter into an employment agreement/contract if it wasn’t in their best interests to do so. How, they would ask, can individuals be
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forced to agree to something they find disagreeable? The Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their seminal work Industrial Democracy, answered this question by maintaining that individuals had no choice. The need to survive will force workers to agree to low or subsistence wage levels, long hours and substandard working conditions, with limited regard for sanitation and workplace safety. The Webbs, for example, pointed to the inability of individual workers to bargain with employers over such issues as lighting, ventilation, sanitation and safety standards – they would be unilaterally determined by employers. They pointed to the ‘autocratic nature’ of employers and the ‘caprice’ of foremen in determining employment conditions under individual bargaining. The Webbs also argued that individual workers were less skilled at bargaining, or what they referred to as ‘the higgling of the market’, than employers. Bargaining, they said, ‘forms a large part of the daily life of the entrepreneur ... The manual worker, on the contrary, has the very smallest experience of, and practically no training in, what is one of the arts of the capitalist employer.’ They feared that individual bargaining would result in both individual and societal degradation and degeneration. To the Webbs, the solution to problems of individual bargaining lay in the establishment of minimum terms and conditions of employment, or what they referred to as the ‘Common Rule’. Common rules could be established by collective bargaining between unions and employers – they regarded conciliation and arbitration as a variant or form of ‘organised’ collective bargaining – and/or legislative fiat. They hoped, for example, to see the establishment of a national minimum wage. By establishing and gradually lifting common rules the Webbs claimed that ‘the pressure of competition would be shifted from wages to quality’. In this way, they maintained, the output of workers and society could be enhanced. The Webbs saw a positive role for both unions, or rather collective bargaining, and the state in helping to promote the efficient operation of society.8
A BASIS FOR COMPARISON It might be useful to conceive of the industrial relations system of a nation state comprising a spectrum of practices and ideas. The notion of a spectrum implies that there will be in existence different practices and ideas across various sectors or parts of the said nation state. Industrial relations, for example, in underground coal mining will be different from that in department stores; and both, in turn, will be different from that in nursing. Some workers may be members of unions, while others
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are not. Some workplaces will be characterised by cordial, or ‘high trust’ relations, while others will be less pleasant or experiencing ‘low trust’, and so on. In examining a spectrum at a particular point in time it may be possible to identify a dominant paradigm, or equilibrium. The notion of a dominant paradigm, or equilibrium, is not meant to imply stasis or rest. It is simply a device to synthesise the essence of a particular nation’s industrial relations system at a particular moment. The various individuals, groups and organisations involved in industrial relations struggle with each other in trying to realise the achievement of their respective goals. Such struggles are the engine of change. Struggles between those involved in industrial relations will move the dominant paradigm backwards and forwards; to the advantage or disadvantage of the protagonists concerned. A dominant paradigm, having been established, will provide the base from which the next round of struggle between protagonists will occur, ad infinitum.9 Those involved in industrial relations will seek to move the dominant paradigm closer to their desired position; to, in effect, ‘load the dice’, thereby making it easier to compete in the struggles that lie ahead. Spectra and dominant paradigms could be constructed for both America and Australia. Cross-over points from America to Australia could be identified, and a judgement made concerning the influence of the former on the latter. If influences from America have come from the dominant paradigm, and have impacted on Australia’s dominant paradigm, it would follow that America has had a major or significant impact on Australia. On the other hand, if the cross-overs from America to Australia have only been from spectrum to spectrum, the conclusion would be that the American influence has been minor. Both America and Australia operate a federal constitution which lists the powers of the central or Commonwealth government. The American government has been able directly to legislate on industrial relations issues. The major industrial relations power traditionally available to the Australian government has been Section 51, Paragraph xxxv of the Constitution. It states: The parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have the power to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to ... Conciliation and Arbitration for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one state.
The impact of this power is that the Australian government has traditionally lacked a direct power to legislate on industrial relations matters in the private sector. The constitution forced it to delegate such powers to industrial tribunals who could conciliate and/or arbitrate in
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resolving interstate industrial disputes.10 In the early 1980s, in nonindustrial relations cases, the High Court handed down decisions which have enabled the Australian government to base legislation on the ‘corporations’ and ‘external affairs’ powers.11 Up until these decisions, and subsequent legislation in the 1990s, America and Australia differed fundamentally in terms of the ability of their national governments to legislate directly on private sector industrial relations. A number of writers have examined the connection between various aspects of American and Australian industrial relations. Churchward, for example, was interested in Australian unions and radicals being influenced by the Knights of Labor, Henry George and the Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘Wobblies’). In doing so, however, he obliquely states ‘that the Australian Labour movement is above all an Australian product, the response of Australian workers (and to a lesser extent of Australian petty-bourgeoisie) to the growth of Australian capitalism’. He also said ‘the strongest overseas influence has been a British one’.12 Wright has brought together information on Australian employers adopting managerial theories pioneered in America. In many cases such managerial stratagems have been part of the baggage brought to Australia by American multi-national corporations. Wright provides details of Australian employers utilising insights from scientific management, human relations, organisational development and, more recently, human resource management. In doing so, however, he is unable to find a clear and unambiguous impact of such approaches on Australian employers. Wright found ‘it ... difficult to discern a common pattern of Australian employer behaviour . . [there is a] significant variation between firms (and even within them) in their approaches to labour management. For example, ... the adopting of personnel and scientific management practices was far from uniform throughout Australian industry; in many cases representing exceptions to the general industry rule’.13 More interesting, for the purposes of this chapter, is research by Roe which examines links between American progressivism and Australian reforms/reformers in a variety of areas.14 Progressivism was an important feature of American political life at the beginning of the twentieth century, being associated with President Theodore Roosevelt. Progressivism rejects notions of laissez faire and party government. It expresses a belief in the need for ‘government’ by expert commissions. Great store is placed in well educated and talented persons who actively make decisions on behalf of the public interest.
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The erection of industrial tribunals charged with the responsibility of regulating relationships between employers and workers/unions would appear to be consistent with the precepts of American progressivism. It might also be noted that Henry Bournes Higgins, who is usually regarded as being the architect of industrial tribunals in Australia, published articles on the Australian approach to industrial relations in the Harvard Law Review from 1915 to 1920.15 This may serve to indicate, however, that interactions between reformers in Australia and America were more of a two way street, than of one ‘dominating’ the other. Moreover, while regulation by experts in the form of industrial tribunals became the dominant paradigm in Australia, progressivism has had little or limited impact on industrial relations in America. Or, to the extent that judges/courts can be regarded as ‘experts’, such persons on either side of the Pacific have discharged these functions in diametrically opposed ways.
AMERICAN CONTRACTUALISM16 Workers form unions in an attempt to alleviate problems they experience in individual bargaining; to counter the power of employers/business/capital. Courts in America have played an important role in determining the contours of relationships between employers and unions. More or less explicitly, depending on different time periods, courts have acted to protect the inherent rights of property. They have perceived their role as guarantor of private rights against the gutsy passions of ‘turbulent majorities’.17 Klare maintains that American labor law is based on contractualism. Contractualism abstracts itself from questions associated with the exercise and distribution of economic power. According to Klare: The central moral ideal of contractualism was and is that justice consists in enforcing the agreement of the parties so long as they have capacity and have had a proper opportunity for terms satisfactory to each. Contractualist justice is, therefore, formal and abstract: within the broad scope of the legal bargains it is disinterested in the substantive content of the parties’ arrangements.18
The history of American industrial relations is one of struggle fought on two fronts. The first was at the workplace where employers and unions competed for the hearts and minds of workers; where unions sought recognition from employers as agents to represent and negotiate on behalf of workers in collective bargaining. The second front has been in courts and legislatures. Employers have sought to utilise both courts and legislation to restrict the ability of unions to organise workers and act collectively. For unions, the major attraction of legislatures has been ‘minimalist’, that is, to secure legislation which overcomes restrictions placed on them by courts.
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In the 1806 Cardwinders’ case a Philadelphia court decided that an attempt by a union, or combination of workers, to increase wages constituted a criminal conspiracy. A Massachusetts court in 1842, in Commonwealth v Hunt, found that unionism per se was not illegal. The law would not stop unions from pursuing their goals as long as they behaved ‘legally’. Despite this decision courts were still hostile to unions in two basic ways. First, they would issue injunctions against unions who applied pressure (strikes and associated activities) on employers to gain concessions for members. The courts perceived such actions as attacks on the property rights of employers. Second, courts struck down prolabor legislation secured by unions and reform groups. Forbath estimates that in the period 1885–1920 the courts declared invalid roughly 300 labour laws.19 Unions encountered an additional problem following the passage of the Federal 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Act was designed to restrain large corporations, monopolies and trusts from engaging in anticompetitive practices. It contained a penalty of treble damages for those found guilty of acting in restraint of trade. The problem for unions was that employers used the Act against them – injunctions and the threat of treble damages – when they applied pressure in seeking to gain recognition and/or improvements in wages and working conditions. As a result of what was perceived as the unrelenting hostility of the courts, union leaders, at the end of the nineteenth century/early twentieth century, came to regard attempts at securing concessions for workers/unionists via legislation as little more than an exercise in futility, The courts would simply strike down such pieces of legislation. Moreover, this ‘realisation’ provided a major reason why union leaders were unimpressed with calls to form a Labor, or union based political, party. The only real role envisioned for legislatures, by union leaders of this era, was to place restrictions on, or stop courts from becoming involved in industrial relations. They believed they had achieved this aim with the passage of the 1914 Clayton Act. American Federation of Labor President, Samuel Gompers, described the Act as labour’s ‘Magna Carta’. In an attempt to enable unions to avoid coverage of the Sherman AntiTrust Act, the Clayton Act declared that ‘the labor of a human being is not a commodity’. Moreover, in seeking to provide unions with a means to escape the jurisdiction of courts it said: That no restraining order or injunction shall be granted by any court in the United States ... in any case between an employer or employees, or between employers and employees, ... involving or growing out of a dispute concerning terms and conditions of employment.
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The paragraph, however, contained a qualifying clause. Injunctions were not to be issued ‘unless necessary to prevent irreparable injury to property, or to a property right, of the party making the application’. As Forbath has noted the qualifying clause rendered impotent the goal of keeping courts out of labour disputes. Strikes were still regarded as attacking employers’ property rights and courts continued granting injunctions.20 Throughout the 1920s, and into the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor continued its campaign against ‘government by injunction’. These were also years of bitter and protracted disputes as unions and their members strove to gain recognition from employers/business/capital as collective bargaining agents. The depression of the 1930s witnessed a realignment of political forces which was associated with a brace of new legislation. The 1932 Norris–La Guardia Act substantially restricted the ability of federal courts to issue injunctions against unions. In 1933 the National Industrial Recovery Act granted workers the ‘right to organise and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing ... free from interference, restraint or coercion of employers’. It was subsequently declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. In response to this Congress enacted the 1935 Wagner, or National Labor Relations Act. It confirmed the rights of employees ‘to self-organisation, to form, join or assist labor organisations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing’. Wagner declared it to be an unfair labor practice for employers to interfere with employees in pursuing such rights. A National Labor Relations Board would determine collective bargaining units and proscribe unfair labor practices. In 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act introduced the notion of ‘good faith’ bargaining and broadened unfair labor practices to include actions by unions as well as employers.21 The National Labor Relations Act has the appearance of championing collective bargaining as an instrument of industrial relations regulation. It provides mechanisms for union recognition and acknowledges the use of coercive force in the negotiation of collective agreements. Strikes are ‘legitimised’ as a device to be used by unions seeking concessions from employers. Appearances can be deceiving. The courts and the National Labor Relations Board22 have served to undermine the legislation. Under the Act the process of union recognition involves a union obtaining authorisation forms from a sizeable proportion of employees, followed by an application to the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election of ‘eligible’ workers concerned to determine whether or not they want to be unionised. A number of months may elapse
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between the signing of authorisation forms and the subsequent election. Employers use this period to (‘unfairly’) apply pressure on workers to vote against unionisation. Unions have found it increasingly difficult to win such elections, or avoid defeats in union decertification ballots. The commitment to ‘good faith’ bargaining has been interpreted to mean that the parties should meet to discuss proposals and exchange agendas. It has not been interpreted to mean that an agreement is reached. Employers use ‘talking to death’ as a means to forestall union demands. Within a few years of the passage of the Wagner Act the Supreme Court blunted the effectiveness of unions utilising strikes as a means to pressure employers in collective bargaining. The Supreme Court enabled employers to hire new workers to take the place of those old workers who are on strike; with such new workers being able to continue their employment, or having preference, once the strike has ended. Unemployment may be the ultimate cost for those workers who decide to use strikes as a means to challenge employers. In addition, unions are forbidden from using sympathy actions or secondary boycotts in attempting to apply pressure on employers. The effect of this has been to confine union-employer relations to particular (individual) workplaces. The law, particularly the decisions of courts, has, in the words of Rogers, enabled employers to ‘divide and conquer’ unions and workers. As the table on page 160 shows, throughout this century American industrial relations has been one in which the overwhelming majority of workers have had their wages and working conditions determined by individual, rather than collective bargaining. As American employers found it increasingly difficult to compete in international markets they used threats of location to nonunionised locations, domestically and overseas, to force back the tide of unionism. In 1995 less than 15 per cent of the American workforce was unionised.
AUSTRALIAN FABIAN SOCIALISM Australian industrial relations, like that in America, has involved a battle between notions of individualism and collectivism; a battle in which the law, in the form of judges or judge-like persons,23 has played a prominent role. The strikes of the 1890s were the pivotal event in the development of twentieth century Australian industrial relations. In the context of a severe depression employers routed unions in a series of long and bitter disputes over ‘freedom of contract’. The employers’ victory in these strikes, however, proved to be pyrrhic. In reaction to the social dislocation and deprivation of the 1890s, a number of middle class reformers – lawyers, judges, politicians and the like – set about establishing state sponsored systems of industrial
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tribunals to regulate relations between employers and workers/unions.24 While differences existed between the respective Commonwealth and state jurisdictions problems of union recognition were generally resolved by unions registering with the appropriate tribunal, rather than in workplace struggles with employers. Industrial tribunals encouraged parties to reach agreement ‘on lines of fair play’.25 To the extent that the parties could not reach agreement tribunals could exercise powers of conciliation and/or arbitration to resolve such disputes. The tribunals were not simply concerned with procedural issues, as under American contractualism; they would make substantive decisions in performing their functions. The most famous member of Australian industrial tribunals is undoubtedly Henry Bournes Higgins, (the second) President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration from 1907 to 1921. He developed principles that should be applied by industrial tribunals in the resolution of industrial disputes. The best known of these was the establishment of a minimum wage for an adult male unskilled labourer in the Harvester case of 1907. This decision was to be the forerunner of the development of a national minimum wage, and an associated notion that minimum (if not other) wages should have a nexus with changes in prices.26 In the first of his Harvard Law Review articles Higgins claimed industrial tribunals would usher in ‘a new province for law and order ... the process of conciliation, with arbitration in the background is substituted for the rude and barbarous process of strike and lockout. Reason is to displace force; the might of the State is to enforce peace between industrial combatants as well as between other combatants; and all in the interests of the public.’27 The members of federal (and state) tribunals have experimented with different solutions to problems associated with industrial relations regulation. The personnel of such tribunals have not seen themselves as mere ciphers, meekly responding to the desires or needs of the parties, or the government of the day. In 1953 the Federal tribunal pointed out that ‘application[s] ... must be determined in accordance with ... principles. They must thus be determined regardless of the dissatisfaction of an unsuccessful party. It is really impossible to settle a dispute in a way that satisfies all parties; it is frequently impossible to arrive at a just settlement which satisfies even one of the parties to a dispute.’28 Members of various tribunals have sought to steer the parties into what they regard as a just and equitable system of industrial relations. Tribunals are involved in a balancing act – an act that is more complicated than balancing the claims of the parties.
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They balance the expectations of the parties with their interpretation of what the problems of the moment require. They have sought to convince the parties of the wisdom of following their lead down an ideal path of industrial relations regulation.29 The Australian approach to industrial relations, the very notion of ‘a new province for law and order’, reflects the view that the state can play a positive role in regulating industrial relations. The actual role that should be performed by the state (legislation and tribunals) has been the subject of continuous debate and discussion. Unlike America, Australia has had a trade union based parry (the Australian Labor Party) to pursue union/worker interests, at both state and federal levels. Australia is continuously awash with reform proposals. The major pieces of federal legislation, the 1904 Conciliation and Arbitration Act and the 1988 Industrial Relations Act, have been amended more than 110 times. This contrasts markedly with the situation in America. Including the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act major American industrial relations legislation has been amended nine times. While the High Court has handed down decisions which, at times, have restricted the scope of the federal tribunal, they have not impacted on its ‘integrity’, nor forced Australian industrial relations down a particular path in the manner associated with American courts.30 The table on page 160 provides an indication of the collectivist nature of industrial relations in Australia, in comparison to the individualism of America. The Australian workforce has always been more highly unionised than in America. The long run data for Australia is based on a census of unions. Figures in brackets to the left of the column are for financial members, while those to the right are derived from intermittent surveys of members (rather than unions). Recent declines in the rate of unionisation in Australia have been linked to the move to enterprise bargaining (see below), members’ dissatisfaction with the Accord – a series of agreements negotiated between the Australian Labor Party and Australian Council of Trade Unions between 1983 and 1996 – and problems associated with a strategy of massive union amalgamation.31 The Table understates the degree of collectivism in Australia. Awards of industrial tribunals apply to non-unionised as well as unionised workers. In 1990, the last year for which data is available, 80 per cent of the workforce was covered by awards.32
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PERCENTAGE OF WORKFORCE UNIONISED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND AUSTRALIA:
1901 TO 1995 Year
America
Australia
1901
3.8
6.1
1911
6.1
27.9
1920
12.0
53.3
1930
11.6
52.7
1940
26.9
47.9
1945
35.5
54.2
1950
31.5
58.0
1955
33.2
59.0
1960
31.4
58.0
1965
28.4
55.0
1970
27.3
49.0
1975
25.5
56.0
1980
21.9
56.0
1985
18.0
(51.0)a1 57.0 (45.6)b2
1990
16.1
(46.0)a1 52.0 (40.5)c3
1995
14.9
(35,0)a1 40.0 (32.7)d4
Sources: Abraham L Gitlow, Labor and Industrial Society (rev. edn), Richard D. Irwin, Homewood (Illinois), 1963 (1901–20); World Almanac and Book of Facts 1996, Funk and Wangalis Corporation, New Jersey, 1996 (1930–90); US Department of Labor, ‘Union Members in 1995’, 9 February 1996, ftp: // stats. b/s.gov/pub/news. release/union 2.txt; Braham Dabscheck and John Niland, Industrial Relations In Australia, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1981; Braham Dabscheck, The Struggle for Australian Industrial Relations, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Trade Union Statistics, Australia 1995, Product no. 6323.0.40.001; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Working Arrangements in Australia, August 1995, Product no. 6342.0.40.001. a Financial Member, b August 1986, c August 1990, d August 1995.
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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS33 In March 1983 the Australian Labor Party won the federal election. A major part of its electoral campaign was an Accord it negotiated with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, which championed an incomes policy as solving Australia’s various economic and industrial relations problems. Under the Accord the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission would administer a centralised system of industrial relations regulation where wages would be linked to changes in prices (or wage indexation). While Australia experienced economic recovery, following the Labor Party’s election, it encountered a series of international economic problems which served to undermine the centralisation and wage indexation assumptions of the Accord. ‘New Right’ groups, the Coalition and business community unleashed a continual stream of criticism directed at the Accord. They maintained that unions, industrial tribunals and government regulation restricted the ability of Australian companies to compete on international markets. Such groups expressed support for something called enterprise bargaining and for industrial relations to be regulated according to a common law, contractualist regime rather than by industrial tribunals. In a document released in 1989 the Business Council of Australia called for American style representative elections as part of a longer term strategy to bring about the creation of union free workplaces. Despite initial opposition, both the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Council of Trade Unions found themselves attracted to enterprise bargaining. While virtually all of the major parties in Australia have expressed support for enterprise bargaining, there is a myriad of (shifting) interpretations of what the term actually means. Three major dimensions can be identified. First, should unions be involved in the negotiation at such deals and/or is enterprise bargaining a Trojan horse for individual bargaining? Second, what should be the role of industrial tribunals, if any, in the determination of such bargains? Should their functions be confined to procedural matters, or be allowed an active role in ensuring that agreements are fair and satisfy ‘appropriate’ criteria? Third, is there a role for safety nets, or minimum terms and conditions (common rules), to underpin enterprise bargaining and how should such nets be determined? Both Labor Party and Coalition governments at the state and federal level have experimented with different models or variants of enterprise bargaining. Legislation has enshrined ‘collective bargaining’ without unions and encouraged individual bargaining. The role of industrial tribunals has been redefined and/or more or less downgraded. Safety nets of variable heights and tightness have been constructed in
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the various jurisdictions. In response to potential problems associated with individual and non-union collective agreements employee/employment advocates or ombudsmen have been created to provide ‘rights’ and/or protection for employees. Depending on the jurisdiction this new breed of ‘independents’ have more or less proscriptive roles. While such legislation has encouraged individual/enterprise bargaining, with the exception of Victoria, there is still scope for tribunals to hand down awards. It is conceivable that employee/employment advocates and industrial relations ombudsmen may constitute a reworking or redefinition of Australia’s traditional tribunal approach to industrial relations regulation. Conclusion concerning such a proposition will be dependent on the powers and resources made available to these ‘tribunals’ and the extent to which traditional tribunals are able to perform a more or less active role. Having said this, however, the rhetoric of individual/enterprise bargaining, the extolling of the common law, attacks on unions and industrial tribunals constitute the first time in its history that Australian industrial relations has come under the influence of practices and ideas contained in America’s dominant paradigm.
CONCLUSION: STATES APART Courts, in both America and Australia, have played a prominent role in shaping the contours and operation of their respective industrial relations systems. In doing so, however, they developed fundamentally different approaches to industrial relations regulation and/or adopted different notions of the role of the state. In America the state (courts) has been ‘minimalist’, whereas in Australia it (industrial tribunals) has been activist. American courts have acted, in the words of de Tocqueville, as a ‘counterpoise to the democratic element’. In espousing a contractualist rhetoric they have acted to defend property rights, ‘loading the dice’ against unions and the use of collective action. Australia, on the other hand, has been concerned with substantive, as well as procedural issues, and has sought to devise solutions to the problems associated with inequalities of bargaining power and industrial relations regulation. While it is possible to identify some examples of American influences on Australia, until recently at least, industrial relations in Australia has operated independently from that in America. The more recent interest Australia has shown in enterprise bargaining has been accompanied by the rhetoric of and precepts found in American contractualism. The Australian experiment with Fabian socialism may be coming to an end. Alternatively, depending on how tensions between awards and enterprise bargaining are resolved, and the functions afforded to employee advocates/ombudsmen Australia may be in the throes of ‘modernising’
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the role of third party neutrals in the regulation of relationships between employers and workers/unions. 1 Mark Perlman, Judges in Industry: A Study of Labour Arbitration in Australia, MUP, Carlton, 1954, p. 3. 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (vol. I), Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1966, pp. 278–80. 3 See Karl E. Klare, ‘Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937–1941’, Minnesota Law Review, vol. 62, 1978, p. 336; and William E. Forbath, ‘The Shaping of the American Labor Movement’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 102, April 1989, p. 1114. 4 Perlman, p. 7. 5 Australian industrial tribunals were, generally speaking, originally courts and were then transformed into commissions. It may be more appropriate to regard Australian tribunals and their personnel as being ‘court-like’ and ‘judge-like’. 6 The term was employed by Henry Bournes Higgins in a series of articles he published in the Harvard Law Review between 1915 and 1920. See note 15. 7 Industrial relations scholars have also concerned themselves with other issues. For reviews of research in America and Australia see Bruce E. Kaufman, The Origins and Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States, ILR Press, Ithaca, New York, 1993; Nicholas Blain and David Plowman, ‘The Australian Industrial Relations Literature, 1978–1986’, The Journal of Industrial Relations, vol 24, September 1987; and Russell D. Lansbury and Mark Westcott, ‘Researching Australian Industrial Relations: Dawn or Twilight of a Golden Age?’, The Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 34, September 1992. 8 Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy, Longmans Green, London, 1911 (1st edn 1987). The quotes come from pp. 540, 659, 658, 223n and 789. 9 For a formal model which develops these ideas more fully see Braham Dabscheck, The Struggle for Australian Industrial Relations, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 1–7. 10 State governments enjoy direct industrial relations powers. Despite this, generally speaking, they have ‘voluntarily’ allowed industrial relations within their respective jurisdictions to be regulated by industrial tribunals. 11 For further details see Dabscheck, pp. 45–49. 12 L. G. Churchward, ‘The American Influence on the Australian Labour Movement’, Historical Studies, vol. 5, November 1952, p. 258. For a recent excellent study on the ‘Wobblies’ see Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995. 13 Christopher Wright, The Management of Labour: A History of Australian Employers, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 215. 14 Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890–1960, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1984. 15 Henry Bournes Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order-I’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 29, November 1915; Henry Bournes Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order-II’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 32, January 1919; and Henry Bournes Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order-II’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 34, December 1920. For a biography of Higgins see John Rickard, H. B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984.
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16 Material contained in this section is a somewhat schematic presentation based on the work of the following American labor law and industrial relations scholars: Klare; Alvin L. Goldman, Labor Law and Industrial Relations in the United States of America, Kluwer, Deventer, 1979; Paul Weiler, ‘Promises to Keep: Securing Workers’ Rights to Self-Organization under the NLRA’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 96, June 1983; Paul Weiler, ‘Striking a New Balance: Freedom of Contract and the Prospects for Union Representation’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 98, December 1984; James B. Alteson, Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1983; Thomas A. Kochan, Harry C. Katz and Robert B. McKessie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, Basic Books, New York, 1986; Thomas A. Kochan and Harry C. Katz, Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations (2nd edn), Irwin, Homewood, Illinois, 1988; Forbath; and Joel Rogers, ‘Divide and Conquer: Further ‘‘Reflections on the Distinctive Character of American Labor Laws’’’, Wisconsin Law Review, vol. 1990, no. 1. 17 Quoted in Forbath, p. 1131. 18 Klare, p. 295. 19 Forbath, p. 1133n. 20 ibid., p. 1226. The presentation here draws heavily on that of Forbath. 21 To complete the legislative picture, in 1959 the Landrum–Griffin Act concerned itself with regulating the internal affairs of unions, to ensure they operated ‘democratically’. 22 For a brief overview of the role of the National Labor Relations Board over the years see James A. Gross, ‘The Demise of the National Labor Policy: A Question of Social Justice’, in Sheldon Friedman, Richard W. Hurd, Rudloph A. Oswald and Ronald L. Seeber (eds), Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, ILR Press, Ithaca, New York, 1994. 23 See Note 5. 24 For details concerning the origins of industrial tribunals in Australia see Stuart Macintyre and Richard Mitchell (eds), Foundations of Arbitration: The Origins and Effects of State Compulsory Arbitration 1890–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989. In particular see the chapter by Stuart Macintyre, ‘Neither Capital nor Labour: The Politics of the Establishment of Arbitration’. 25 A term used by Higgins in ‘A New Province for Law and Order-II’, p. 190. 26 The history of Australian wage determination has been somewhat complex. For details see Braham Dabscheck and John Niland, Industrial Relations in Australia, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1981, pp. 305–40; Braham Dabscheck, ‘The Arbitration System Since 1967’, in Stephen Bell and John Head (eds), State, Economy and Public Policy in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; and Dabscheck, The Struggle. 27 Higgins, ‘A New Province for Law and Order-I’, pp. 13–14. 28 ‘Basic Wage and Standard Hours Inquiry 1952–1953’, 77 Commonwealth Arbitration Reporter 477, at 507. 29 For further development of these ideas see Braham Dabscheck, ‘Regulation Down Under: The Case of Australian Industrial Relations’, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. xxvii, March 1993. 30 For an examination of the role of the High Court see W. B. Creighton, W. J. Ford and R. J. Mitchell, Labour Law: Text and Materials (2nd edn), Law Book Co, Sydney, 1993. 31 For details see Dabscheck, The Struggle, pp. 117–34. 32 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Award Coverage Australia, May 1990, catalogue no. 6315.0. 33 For further examination of issues contained in this section see Braham Dabscheck, Australian Industrial Relations in the 1980s, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,
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1989; Braham Dabscheck, ‘The Coalition’s Plan to Regulate Industrial Relations’, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, vol. 4, June 1993; Dabscheck, The Struggle; Laura Bennett, ‘The American Model of Labour Law in Australia’, Australian Journal of Labour Law, vol. 5, August 1992; Ronald C. McCallum, ‘The Internationalisation of Australian Industrial Law: The Industrial Relations Reform Act 1992’, Sydney Law Review, vol. 16, March 1994; and Richard Naughton, ‘Bargaining in Good Faith’, in Paul Ronfeldt and Ron McCallum (eds), Enterprise Bargaining, Trade Unions and the Law, Federation Press, Sydney, 1995.
FEMINISMS Catharine Lumby In 1994, high-profile Australian feminist Anne Summers aimed a sweeping and scathing polemic at American feminism. After more than two years as editor of the feminist journal MS, Summers concluded that the US feminist movement had lost its way in the most profound sense. The sisterhood, she wrote, had ‘entered the 1990s without a strategy for improving the lives of American women’, it was riven with factionalism and obsessed with celebrities. Herself a political adviser to former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating on how to woo the female vote, Summers was appalled at the seeming impotence of the US women’s movement to influence politicians or even participate in the campaign debate. ‘Ultimately’, she wrote, ‘I became convinced that at least part of the responsibility for the movement’s political frailty lies with the movement itself, especially the national leaders. They have no political strategy whatsoever and seem incapable of putting together a pragmatic plan to force the political system to deliver to American women the social and economic equity long promised by the movement’s rhetoric. It can perhaps be postulated that the Reagan-Bush era is responsible for the movement’s failure: that twelve years of feminist-unfriendly Administrations in Washington left the movement battle-scarred and exhausted. If that is the case, the exhaustion appears to be near-terminal, since the advent of the feminist-friendly Clinton Administration has not produced anything remotely resembling the kind of partnership which Australian feminists have managed to forge with government.’1 Summers’ blowtorch assessment of her American sisters contrasts
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markedly with the bouquets US feminist Hester Eisenstein tossed in the direction of Australian feminist culture after eight years here in the 1980s. Eisenstein was so impressed with the achievements of antipodean feminism that she wrote a book titled Gender Shock, bluntly blurbed as the story of ‘How Australian Feminists Make the System Work – And What American Women Can Learn From Them’.2 On the surface, Summers and Eisenstein appear to agree that Australian feminists have demonstrated a superior ability to inject feminist goals and ideals into both the public and private sectors and the discourse and practice of everyday life. But having read between the lines of both writers, a more complex picture of the relationship between Australian and American feminist culture emerges – a picture which refuses to stay tuned to the same station. Eisenstein and Summers have a lot in common – they’re both white, western second-wave feminists trained in the academy who went on to work in the femocracy. But what’s striking about their respective takes on the Australian-American feminist dialogue, is that even in the very act of agreeing, they reveal fundamental differences in understanding. Most obvious is the gap in rhetoric – Summers’ polemic exhibits a characteristic robustness when it comes to critiquing America. Eisenstein, equally characteristically, is an utter diplomat, even when describing aspects of Australian life she finds surprising and occasionally shocking. Their respective tones betray something more significant than authorial persona or publishing context – each bears the traces of both the margin/centre axis which has conventionally characterised American-Australian dialogue in the twentieth century. In her introduction, Summers freely admits that she went to New York ‘taking for granted ... that the United States represented the pinnacle of achievement of Second Wave feminism’.3 Eisenstein, on the other hand, titles her first chapter on her experiences in Australia ‘Learning to Speak Australian’. From the outset, her attitude to her new home is one of curiosity and surprise. Yet, like Summers, she places US feminism at the silent heart of her comparison. In both accounts, Australian feminist culture emerges as an innovative departure from – and thus a satellite of – an American centre. Eisenstein sums up the subtext most clearly in her claim that: ‘The Australians habitually looked out to sea, and to a large world, partly to check themselves and their progress against other countries and partly to confirm their uniqueness’.4 The problems with a periphery-centre model of cultural flow – the ‘provincialism problem’ as art historian Terry Smith dubbed it in 1973 – have been so well rehearsed over the past 20 years, that it seems
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pointless to reiterate them here. What is worth noting, though, is how even in accounts which implicitly structure themselves on this model – or in Summers’ case, invert it – other possibilities for understanding cross-cultural dialogue invariably shadow the narrative. Eisenstein’s story of an American academic feminist’s encounter with the Australian femocracy is constantly tugging at its moorings. Despite her central thesis that US feminism is based in the academy and Australian feminists are best at ‘doing’ feminism in the real world, her book is plagued by voices off. The ‘poststructuralist’ Australians, for instance, who have immersed themselves in a ‘world view where the achievements of feminism have no meaning because the terrain of political struggle has been abandoned for the terrain of discourse’.5 In Summers’ piece, the alternative narratives revolve around a silence – the absence of any reference to her personal ambitions for a role in American feminist culture. Between the lines of Summers’ account of her disenchantment with American feminist politics, there’s the hint of a different story, a story of learning to see her own relation to feminist culture in a new political light. In her book Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, Chilla Bulbeck asks why stereotypes of ‘other’ women are so integral to white western women’s constructions of themselves. She approaches this question from an unusually productive angle: rather than trying to explain the differences of non-Western women for Western consumption, Bulbeck considers Western feminism through the lens of the ‘other’. Hers is a book which seeks to challenge both the imaginative spaces that non-western people occupy in western minds and the imaginary ‘us’ of western feminism simultaneously. Her ultimate aim, she writes, is to disrupt the sameness/difference binary which has structured Western models of identity and according to which difference can only be understood in relation to a stable, universalising term of reference – an ‘us’ (Bulbeck 1998).6 Of course, as Bulbeck notes, Western feminism is not nearly so homogenous as much of the rhetoric about it suggests. Australia and America are both multicultural societies and, while the feminist debate in both countries has been dominated by white, middle-class women, this hegemony has been consistently challenged (with admittedly limited success) by women of different ethnicity, race, religious background and class. And theoretical Western feminist discourse is itself fractured along myriad philosophical and ideological fault-lines. The upshot is that, even if we wished to make a simple ‘us’ vs ‘them’ comparison of Australian and American feminist culture, it is
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obvious that there is no ‘we’ to proceed from. Or, as Meaghan Morris once put it: ‘Whatever one thinks about woman, feminism, at least, is never One’.7 So how can an analysis of the relationship between Australian and American feminism meaningfully proceed? And what would be its purpose? In an essay on feminism and postmodernism, Judith Butler offers what is, for me, one of the most useful definitions I’ve come across of the feminist projects. She argues that ‘the rifts among women over the content of the term [feminism] ought to be safeguarded and prized, indeed, ... this constant riffing ought to be affirmed as the ungrounded ground of feminist theory’.8 Implicit in Butler’s framework is the notion that difference can be viewed as a productive force in relation to identity, rather than a way of establishing limits or boundaries. Similarly, when we begin to think about the relation between American and Australian feminism we might do better to think about cultural flow in terms of process, rather than influence, and to look beyond a binary model of interaction to consider what’s else is produced when two cultures meet. In the following chapter, I will focus on two areas of Australian feminism, consider points of intersection with their American counterparts and ask what is produced in the traffic between the two which might lend us fresh insights into both. I’ll look firstly at the relationship between feminism and the State before turning to debates and policy on censorship and the media which have flowed from feminist discourse. In the final section of this chapter, I will look at some aspects of recent feminist critical theory and consider their implications for understanding the future of feminism in both Australia and America.
FEMINIST STATES Hester Eisenstein offers a list of the characteristics which seemed to distinguish Australian feminism on her arrival in Australia. Chief among them are ‘a commitment to giving a fair hearing to people of an opposing view’, a mainstream tolerance of leftist views and a willingness to challenge authority. Eisenstein concludes her survey with an observation which appears directly to contradict the anti-authoritarian traits she’s just extolled: ‘By far the most significant difference between Australian and American feminism, though, was the degree to which Australian feminists had found their way into public positions of influence’.9 Eisenstein lets the contradiction pass without comment. But a close reading of the history of second wave feminism in Australia reveals it to
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be, in itself, a crucial caveat for anyone hoping to interpret the particularities of feminist culture here. On a basic level, any account of the relationship between feminism and given State apparatuses necessarily involves a challenge to the State – indeed challenges to when and on behalf of whom the State intervenes go to the heart of social reform movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. As Anna Yeatman notes, ‘All the new social movements fundamentally challenge the institutions and culture of modern citizenship. In their different ways, they all represent a common or public good which they argue the State should resource’.10 The destabilisation, however, doesn’t simply flow one way – if the institutions and discourses which comprise the State have been changed by an encounter with feminism, it’s equally true that feminism continues to change as a result of encounters with the State. The fruits of this friction will obviously differ in different historical periods and different cultural sites. Bearing this in mind, it is nonetheless possible to identify some broad differences in the way the Australian and American States are structured and, perhaps even more importantly, culturally understood. On a structural level, some of the ways in which Australia diverges most obviously from the US system and which affect feminist interventions into the State include the traditional (if declining) role of the unions in Australia and the high proportion of the workforce which remains unionised, the fact that Australia has traditionally relied on a centralised wage-fixing system whereas the US model has always revolved around collective bargaining and a political structure which, by virtue of our tax structure, tips the power balance away from the States and local government towards the Commonwealth. At a less concrete level, though, one of the most important differences lies in the historical attitude Australians have exhibited towards government itself. Put simply, we’ve embraced the spirit as well as some aspects of the form of the Westminster system – we elect governments and, generally, expect them to get on with implementing their agendas. If we don’t like what they do, we throw them out. American politics, on the other hand, has been characterised by a palpable anxiety about centralised power and a system of checks and balances in the relationship between the legislature and the executive which makes the machinery of central government virtually impossible to operate. New South Wales opposition leader, Peter Collins, summed up the history of the Australian ethos recently when he said: ‘The role of government was really determined when the First Fleet arrived with convicts from England in 1788, and they unpacked the first prefabricated government house from one of the ships and assembled it
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on the foreshores of Sydney Cove. Government has delivered most services in Australia since European settlement, and despite Australia’s larrikin image of resenting authority, there’s been a presumption that it’s the government’s job to solve every problem.’11 In a summation of the first decade of the women’s movement in Australia, Eva Cox writes that the Australian feminist entry into the bureaucracy involved a conscious and concerted effort, in the wake of the fall of the Whitlam government. At the time, now more than ten years ago, Cox expressed an ambivalence about this project. On one hand, she wrote, that the move had created ‘a new mandarin class of women whose livelihood depends on the proposals put up by the women’s movement’. But, on the other, she conceded, that it was a project which ‘bears the marks of success, an idea in its time, taken on by the State and incorporated by the structure’.12 Cox’s evaluation of what’s come to be known in Australia as the ‘femocracy’ illustrates a peculiarly Australian unease with the marriage of feminism and State power – not a distrust of the role of government or centralised power, but the suspicion that the union primarily enshrined the goals of white middle class feminists in a way which defused the more radical aims of a feminist agenda. Interestingly, for our purposes here, this concern about the marriage of feminism and State power has often been articulated as concern with the ‘Americanisation’ of Australian feminism – a rejection of the ‘corporatism’ associated with some sections of liberal feminism in the United States. Hester Eisenstein, for example, recalls the hostility directed towards Equal Employment Opportunity consultant, Sharon Lord, when she arrived in Australia in the 1980s ‘preaching the gospel of assertiveness training and dressing for success’.13 Anna Yeatman analysed similar anxieties when she wrote that: ‘Femocracy represents the professionalisation of feminist ideology in respect of a contemporary culture of public policy and management ... A good deal of anxiety turns on whether these professional feminists pursue their own interests or those of the movement’.14 These anxieties alert us to something more than the complexities of translating philosophy into public policy: they point to the contradictory character of the modern State, calling into question the notion that the State can be seen as either an autonomous body of institutions and discourses which can be coopted by one group or another, or as a neutral umpire for competing interests. The idea that female bureaucrats are open to be corrupted and ‘Americanised’ by their contact with power suggests that the relationship between individuals, the community and the State is not nearly so predictable, that ‘the State’ is never a coherent actor and that to regard it as such, whether from a liberal or Marxist
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perspective, is to evade the politics of contemporary State power. American feminism, and its relation to the State, has often been popularly characterised as contaminated by the ideology of ‘Individualism’. As the heart of Western capitalism, America symbolises the worst excesses of liberal democracy – a nation in the thrall of its own public relations campaign about freedom, but which, in practice, elevates the interests of individuals according to their personal power. Anne Summers offers a version of this when she attacks the US feminist movement for its ‘dependence on fame and the famous’. The public fractiousness between individual American feminist celebrities, she argues, ‘would horrify most Australian feminists; they would see it as a betrayal of the principles of sisterhood to denounce one another publicly in this fashion’.15 What this account evades are the shifts in the relationship between the public and private which are taking place across the Western world – shifts which are not entirely unrelated to the conditions which have made it possible for feminists to rearticulate and politicise these boundaries. The postmodern public sphere is characterised by a radical destabilisation of the traditional lines between the public and private sectors and, concomitantly, between other conventional boundaries of identity. I will explore this argument, and its implications for the way we conceive a dialogue between American and Australian feminism further below. But before doing so, I want to make a more detailed examination of a specific site of American influence on the relationship between Australian feminism and the state: the regulation of pornography and other media representations of women.
THE DESIRE TO REGULATE Catharine MacKinnon is a prominent US feminist who is perhaps best known for her campaigns against pornography. In an early article on feminist Jurisprudence, MacKinnon appeared to rule out any role for the law or government in furthering women’s interest because of what she saw as the State’s irredeemably patriarchal character.16 But she soon changed her mind about the value of using the resources of the State to further feminist causes. In 1983, MacKinnon and anti-porn campaigner Andrea Dworkin, who were both teaching at the University of Minnesota, drafted a model anti-pornography law that was passed by the Minneapolis City Council, but ultimately vetoed on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. The law declared that pornography is a ‘practice of sex discrimination’ and authorised civil lawsuits and injunctive relief for four offences: ‘trafficking in pornography’, ‘coercion
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into pornography’, ‘forcing pornography on a person’, and ‘assault or physical attack due to pornography’.17 Laws based on the MacKinnon/Dworkin model have subsequently been considered by seven other US states, but effectively stymied by the free speech guarantee encoded in the US constitution. The foundational role of free speech ideology in US legal and political culture suggests that Dworkin and MacKinnon never had much hope of enshrining their concerns about pornography in the legal form they wished – although in recent years, MacKinnonite feminists have had more success with attempts to link sexual harassment and pornography, a development which is particularly significant for the Australian debate. At the heart of MacKinnon’s understanding of pornography is the notion, as Nadine Strossen writes, that ‘pornography is – not just causes, but is, in and of itself – gender-based discrimination’. And while US courts have not accepted this view, the Supreme Court has accepted the view that sexual harassment does constitute gender-based discrimination, a view Catharine MacKinnon’s first outlined in her 1979 book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women. Therefore, as Strossen notes, when employers, judges and policy-makers accept the argument that pornography constitutes sexual harassment, they are de facto accepting the claim that pornography is gender-based discrimination. This, Strossen writes, has opened ‘a backdoor way into the procensorship feminist camp’.18 Unlike the United States, Australia has no guarantee of free speech encoded in its constitution (although the High Court has recently moved to read a limited guarantee of free speech into the preamble). And, historically, Australians have lived with one of the strictest censorship regimes in the Western world, promulgated at both Federal and state levels – a regime which was dismantled for a brief period in the 1970s and early 1980s, but has been in the process of reconstruction over the past decade. In order to understand points of intersection and divergence from US feminist debate on the issues, it is worth briefly examining the recent history of the debate as it unfolded here. In the late 1960s, a loose coalition of activists, publishers, artists and writers (among them a number of significant future feminists) began to challenge the liberal conception of censorship. Whereas liberal opponents of censorship, such as Peter Coleman, had tended to support sexually explicit material only in circumstances where they felt it had ‘literary or artistic merit’, this new group of anti-censorship campaigners argued for a more radically libertarian approach. Sydney feminist and
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journalist Wendy Bacon, for instance, defended herself against a 1972 charge of selling obscene material by arguing that community standards were an illusion and that there was no stable aesthetic framework by which to judge an appropriate response to sexually explicit material. By the mid– 1970s, however, the libertarian/anarchist view of censorship was being overtaken by feminist concerns. The origins of the Australian feminist movement lie in two broad factions. One, a liberal, equity focused movement, has much in common with the United States National Organisation for Women, founded in 1966. This strand of feminism emerged in Australia under the auspices of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL). The other key loose coalition of interests emerged under the umbrella of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). While WLM. initially attracted a diverse crosssection of women, including union activists and married women agitating to re-enter the workforce, its deepest roots lay in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and the radical student left. Influenced by diverse strands of socialism and Marxism, WLM was self-consciously political in both theory and strategy from the outset and highly suspicious of the efficacy of ‘working within the system’. Of particular interest in the way MacKinnonite feminist views have been played out in Australia is how her arguments draw on the ideological foundations of both these groups. Initially, debates about the significance of pornography and ‘sexist’ media representations of women percolated primarily through theoretical debates and activist strands of the WLM. Rosemary Pringle recalls that ‘the powder keg that pushed women to confront the issue of pornography was the 1975 US screening of the notorious film Snuff (Pringle 1981, p. 3). The film, a B-grade slasher movie with obviously amateur special effects, was billed as showing the actual rape, torture and murder of an actress, and caused an outcry among feminists internationally and led to the formation of the US lobby group Women Against Pornography. At the outset, liberal feminists in Australia tended to distance themselves from the anti-porn movement, concentrating their energy on the issue of visibility of women in mainstream media representations. Founding member of WEL, Beatrice Faust, became well-known for her opposition to anti-porn feminism and to what she regarded as its fundamental misreading of the male investment in pornography. By the mid-1980s, however, the influence of MacKinnonite views facilitated a merging of these formerly distinct poles in the debate, by shifting the emphasis away from the question of what pornography might potentially do to viewers based on a liberal conception of harm (the cause and effect
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debate), to what it is (a form of discrimination against women in and of itself). The pornography-as-discrimination argument first came to light publicly in a series of controversial judgments finding that exhibiting pornography in the workplace constituted a form of sexual harassment (which is regulated under the Federal Sex Discrimination Act and its state counterparts). It was an argument which began to find increasing favour among female politicians and bureaucrats. In 1984, the New South Wales Women’s Advisory Council which advised the Premier on policies affecting women, condemned the planned introduction of an X rating for videos (a category for classifying sexually explicit, non-violent material). The 12-member board argued that sexually explicit material, in an of itself, constituted the subordination of women. Following a concerted campaign by both feminists and religious conservatives, Xrated videos were banned from sale or rental in every Australian state. Similar arguments have been mounted with success by feminists in regard to computer game classification and pay television material. The same logic has also come to influence feminist-driven public debate and policy on media representations of women more generally. In 1992, for example, Victorian Premier Joan Kirner used a conference on the status of women to call on attorneys-general and censorship ministers to develop guidelines on print and video material which showed women in ‘demeaning sexual poses’ And it is this latter influence which is perhaps of even greater importance than actual instances of censorship. In America, equal opportunity legislation has always remained the subject of fierce debate, not least because it brings the politics of race as well as gender to the political forefront. In Australia, equal opportunity laws and related determinations are, from time to time, the subject of public debate. The sustained furore over Helen Garner’s quasi-fictional account of sexual harassment policies in universities in her book, The First Stone, is a recent example. Nonetheless, a broad comparison of Australian and American popular debate on the merits of antidiscrimination laws suggests that Australians have adapted remarkably quickly to equal opportunity culture. For reasons I have already alluded to – including a higher tolerance for government intervention – Australians have shown themselves to be historically far more comfortable with the regulation of areas of life many Americans consider to be private matters. And it is this tolerance for regulation, I want to argue, which has led to a broad acceptance of the notion that media representations of women can, and often do, constitute a kind of discrimination against women in and of themselves, and therefore require regulation.
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In her book, States of Injury, US feminist scholar Wendy Brown asks why it is that the complicated and radical analysis of a feminist like Catharine MacKinnon has managed to have such extraordinary political purchase in the United States. But despite the valid examples she offers of MacKinnon’s influence there, there’s no suggestion that MacKinnonite attitudes to representations of women have had any concrete influence on the regulation of media flows. This is clearly not the case in Australia – and many of the contemporary views expressed by high profile feminists on advertising, pay television and the internet suggest further regulation may eventuate. There are numerous problems with relying on a regulatory framework to deal with unwanted media representations. For the purposes of this essay, however, the key issue which arises is the fundamental question of what feminists stand to lose when they invoke the protection of the State. It’s an issue which turns on the question of when and how the power to protect becomes the power to control. And it is in the latter area that US feminist experience offers some crucial caveats for Australian feminist culture.
FEMINISM IN THE POSTMODERN PUBLIC SPHERE The State doesn’t simply process citizens or employ staff, it actively produces the subjects of democracy. And it produces us in particular ways – as gendered, dependent, and regulated subjects, among others. The move towards ‘smaller government’ and the concomitant privatisation of the public sector across the Western world represents a dismantling of State power. At the same time, however, matters formerly consigned to the private sphere are increasingly coming under public discussion, surveillance and recognition. The latter partly occurs through technologies and agencies of the State, but also through an increasing array of quasi-public/quasi-private technologies, including the mass media. Feminists have, of course, long argued for the politicisation of the private sphere and for the recognition that the separation of public life and citizenship has always rested on the repression of a feminised ‘other’ domain. But with the increasing visibility of women and other minority groups as legal and political subjects, has come an array of discourses and institutions which concomitantly define and regulate them. In Wendy Brown’s account of contemporary US democracy, the penetration of feminist goals into bureaucracy and policy emerges as a highly ambiguous victory. In contrast to Foucault’s claim that the State’s importance is on the wane, Brown argues that male social power and the production of female subjects appears to be increasingly concentrated in
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the State. ‘Yet,’ she writes, ‘like the so-called new man, the late modern state also represents itself as pervasively hamstrung, quasi-impotent, unable to come through on many of its commitments because it is decentralising itself ... The central paradox of the late modern state thus resembles a central paradox of late modern masculinity: its power and privilege operate increasingly through disavowal of potency, repudiation of responsibility, and diffusion of sites and operations of control.’19 Brown sounds a note of crucial caution about the political merits of any previously marginalised group seeking protection from the State, arguing that what has been ‘liberated’ from the private sphere can also, in the same movement, be colonised and administered by other dimensions of State power. Despite the hostility to centralised power which now dominates US politics and the concomitant dismantling of government programs, Brown detects an insidious intensification of the regulation of women’s lives when it comes to issues such as poverty, welfare, in vitro fertilisation, abortion, day care, surrogacy, teenage reproductive rights, sexual freedom, education and employment. She ends, however, on an optimistic note, writing that: ‘... like male dominance itself, masculinist state power, consequent to its multiple and unsystematic composition, is something feminists can both exploit and subvert, but only by deeply comprehending in order to strategically outmanoeuvre its contemporary masculinist ruses’.20 In an era where Australian feminists find themselves confronting the privatisation – small government rhetoric which US feminists have lived with for the past two decades, it is worth considering Brown’s analysis of the US experience. Rather than simply congratulating ourselves for having laid a solid foundation for feminist concerns in the public sphere, or battling to retain lost ground, the present political environment suggests the need to take stock. To question exactly where the modern State and masculine power are going in relation to women. And to ask what strategies are required in the face of that, before determining the uses we might make of it. This article began with a reference to Anne Summers’ claim that the US feminist movement had been effectively dismantled by years of conservative government. Yet, the fragmentation of feminist movements, both in the US and Australia, may not be the disaster feminists such as Summers claim it is. The modern State is a hybrid and unstable animal. It has proved itself far more susceptible to outside forces than previously imagined, whether those forces represent commercial or alternative political interests. At the outset of this article, I argued that it is pointless to try to capture the relationship between American and Australian feminisms in binary terms, that the currents
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which flow between different cultural and political paradigms are not so easily distinguished. A similar conclusion can be drawn from the recent US feminist experience. In an era when traditional liberalism is in jeopardy, attempts to resurrect its classic ideals of equal rights and social uniformity may well be doomed. But, at the same time, the identity crisis of the modern State opens up new fault lines in the social realm and with them new possibilities for rethinking politics. 1 A. Summers, ‘Feminism on Two Continents: The Women’s Movement in Australia and the United States’, in N. Grieve and A. Burns, eds, Australian Women: Contemporary Feminist Thought, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 53–58. 2 H. Eisenstein, Gender Shock, Beacon Press, Boston, 1991. 3 Summers, p. 53. 4 Eisenstein, p. 10. 5 ibid., p. 33. 6 C. Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. 7 M. Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancee, Verso, London, 1988. 8 J. Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations’, in J. Butler and J. Scott, (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, Routledge, New York and London, 1992, p. 16. 9 Eisenstein, p. 11. 10 A. Yeatman, ‘Women and the State’, in Contemporary Australian Feminisms, Longman Chesire, Melbourne, 1994, p. 178. 11 C. Lumby, ‘Attack of the Killer Rabbits’, George, August 1997, p. 94. 12 E. Cox, ‘A Decade For Women, or the Decayed Women’s Issues’, WEL Informed: Monthly Newsletter of the NSW Women’s Electoral Lobby, 149, September 1985. 13 Eisenstein, p. 23. 14 Yeatman, 190. 15 Summers, pp. 56–57. 16 C. MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Towards a Feminist Jurisprudence’, Signs, 8, 4, Summer, 1982. 17 N. Strossen, Defending Pornography, Scribner, New York, 1995, p. 75. 18 ibid., p. 121. 19 W. Brown, State of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, p. 194. 20 ibid., p. 196.
SPORT Richard Cashman and Anthony Hughes In the popular mind the Americanisation of Australian sport has been self-evident for several decades. American sports now have a higher profile than ever before and basketball was the fastest growing sport in the 1980s. American sporting icons have deeply penetrated the Australian market – in the 1990s US basketball Michael Jordan was better known and more popular than any Australian sports star. American sporting clothing, customs, language and other cultural practices have become immensely popular, with young people in particular regarding them as cool and fashionable. Australian sporting administrators have looked to American techniques of promotion and management to add to the popularity of their sports. A number of commentators, such as journalist Phillip Adams, view the Americanisation of Australian culture as unfortunate and even insidious. Adams believes that Australians have been enchanted by a succession of ‘quick-talking, finger-snapping’ Pied Pipers who appear along with ‘Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Levis, McDonald’s, KFC and Reebok’, and dictate ‘the diet, the dress and provide the mass-produced dreams for all our kids’.1 The alluring Pied Piper, in Adams’s view, disguises the hard sell of an American cultural imperialism, which has met with little real resistance. There are a number of questions which can be posed about the alleged Americanisation of Australian sport. What is meant by ‘Americanisation’? How does it operate? Can it be precisely measured? What is the explanation for an apparent increased American presence in sport? Does this constitute cultural imperialism? Does ‘Americanisation’ pose a threat to the continued popularity of sports like Australian Rules
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football and sporting traditions which derive overwhelmingly from British-Irish heritage? The concept of Americanisation is simple because it assumes an American cause and an Australian effect, as Philip and Roger Bell have pointed out.2 American influence, in addition, is also part of and cannot be separated from the broader movement towards unfettered consumerism and global communications, often categorised as globalisation. The term Americanisation will be used for convenience in this chapter because it is a word which has wide popular currency. Americanism is, in a sense, the most familiar and recognisable Australian label for globalisation. It will be argued that the process Americanisation, such as it exists, has been clouded by a number of popular myths. The word myth here is not used in an anthropological sense, as a dominant idea or guiding principle. Myth is used in the more popular sense as a commonlyaccepted belief which oversimplifies and distorts complex processes. Such myths are, at best, only partially valid.
MYTHS OF AMERICANISATION OF AUSTRALIAN SPORT 1
The Americanisation of Australian sport is a relatively recent phenomenon. This process has become more evident since the 1970s when television helped to promote greater visibility of American sports, such as basketball, baseball and gridiron, and American sporting culture generally.
While American sporting culture has to some extent become more visible in Australia since the 1970s – in the form of cheerleaders, the wearing of backward-facing baseball caps, billboards featuring Michael Jordan, baseball hoopla and razzamatazz, ready access to American Channel ESPN Pay TV, marketing practices including sports agents, language, along with team names, such as Bulls, Broncos and Cowboys – a focus on high profile sports, such as basketball, underestimates the long tradition in sport of borrowing from North America. This is most evident if one looks beyond the high profile British-Irish and Australian sports, such as various football codes, cricket and tennis. US sport and culture have had a significant influence on Australian sport from the mid-nineteenth century. While many Australian horseracing traditions can be traced back to Britain and Ireland, the sport of harness racing has American antecedents – trotting has never achieved any status in Britain or Ireland. When the first harness races took place at Flemington in January 1860 they were known as ‘American Trotting Races’ and American trotters were imported to Australia from
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the 1860s. This American-derived sport became popular in the 1880s and 1890s when Australian trotting clubs were formed and tracks established, dedicated to pacing.3 While Australian greyhound racing was modelled on the British sport of coursing, Americans were responsible for a key innovation, the mechanical hare. The ‘electric hare’ was introduced to the Epping (now Harold Park) course on 28 May 1927 by American Frederik Swindell.4 American pedestrians, such as the American champion Dan O’Leary who visited Australia in 1883, were frequent visitors to the country. American boxer, James Lawson, referred to as ‘the coloured man from California’, was involved in a controversial bare knuckle contest in 1884 when his opponent Alex Agar was killed. Almost 5000 people assembled Bondi Beach on 30 November 1889 to observe two champion swordsmen fight for the title of mounted swords champion of the world. One was the Scottish-American, Captain E. N. Jennings. On 15 February 1890 there was an international pigeon shooting contest between Captain J. L. Brewer of America and Lewis Clarke, a member of the North Brighton Club. The first Australian rodeo, which drew on American frontier traditions, was held in Gayndah Queensland in 1897. Some North American sports, such as lacrosse, achieved a measure of popularity in the late nineteenth century. A Canadian athlete, L. Mount, introduced lacrosse to Australian when he visited Melbourne in 1874. The game quickly became popular in Australia and clubs were founded in a number of colonies. An intercolonial competition was begun in 1888 when Victoria met South Australia and sizeable crowds watched lacrosse matches in the next decade. When South Australia defeated Victoria at Adelaide on 22 August 1896, the game was watched by 4000 spectators. American influence on Australian sport has a long and continuing tradition. It can be documented in many sports including boxing, rodeo, softball, tennis, yachting, greyhound racing, surf-board riding and professional wrestling. There is some truth in the myth of a burgeoning American sporting presence since the 1970s, because from that time Australians have had the opportunity to watch a greater amount of American sport (as well as global sport generally) through television. It would be surprising if the greater visibility of American and global sport had not sparked some interest in Australia. 2
While Australians freely looked to the United States in the nineteenth century for new forms of popular culture such as entertainment parks, circuses, popular music and vaudeville, Australian sport appears more resistant to North
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American models, following British-Irish traditions. The study of American influence on Australian sport in the period from 1870 to 1970 has been largely neglected by Australian sports historians. Because they have focused on prominent sports such as cricket, the various football codes, horseracing and tennis, British and Irish-derived traditions attracted most research interest. Bill Mandle’s 1973 article on cricket and Australian nationalism, which outlined the importance of a powerful sporting love-hate relationship with the motherland, was considered one of the seminal articles of the field.5 In the first two anthologies on Australian sports history – Sport in History and Sport: Money, Morality and the Media – there was limited exploration of the impact of American sporting culture in Australia (the only chapter which directly explored this theme was Richard Broome’s account of the celebrated fight between African-American Jack Johnson and the ‘great white hope’, Canadian Tommy Burns, in Sydney in 1908).6 By contrast, historians of popular culture, such as Richard Waterhouse and Richard White, have been far more diligent in documenting the long-term influence of American popular culture on Australia. Waterhouse suggested that the development of a distinctive North American culture in the late nineteenth century provided Australia with an alternative model (to the British) enriching Australian culture in various ways in the form of vaudeville, circus, amusement parks and black and white minstrel shows. He documented the lively Australian interest in American popular culture, between 1875 and 1900 (for instance, six large American circuses visited Australia, some more than once).7 Sports historians, by contrast, have dwelt rather more on Australian resistance to American sporting culture and an Australian preference for British-Irish sporting culture with its notions of amateurism and athleticism. The best example of Australian resistance to American sporting culture in the nineteenth century was the mixed response to Albert Goodwill Spalding’s missionary tour to promote baseball in Australia in 1888/89. Sporting goods entrepreneur Spalding brought two American teams to Australia to play exhibition games. The tour was organised and paid for by A. G. Spalding, ‘an able and energetic booster of baseball, his business and America’, and the tour ‘was designed mainly to advance these three interests’. Spalding ran a thriving sporting goods business, ‘especially in baseball bats, balls, caps and uniforms’.8 While the tour attracted good crowds and generated much public debate about the relative merits of baseball and cricket, it was unsuccessful in terms of establishing the game as one of Australia’s major sports.
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The resistance to baseball at this time and a continuing preference for British-Irish sport have been explained by historians in the following ways. First, a team sport like cricket dramatised the mother countrycolonial discourse which was a central issue in Australian culture. Second, a team sport (unlike popular culture) was invested with wider meaning: it was supposed to build character and encourage worthwhile traits such as stoicism, discipline and team-work. Sports such as cricket were linked with dominant ideologies such as amateurism and athleticism. Third, there was little in the US-Australian relationship which might give rise to powerful sporting traditions, such as the Ashes contest in cricket. Or, the American-Australian relationship was not significant enough to produce any similar compelling mythology or a desire by colonials to ‘thrash the motherland’, as Bill Mandle put it.9 This thesis is more relevant if one looks again at the high-profile team sports, such as cricket and football. It is less evident if one looks at more individual and professional sports. Many of the great boxing matches at the turn of the century involved American boxers – often whole troupes of American boxers were imported – and promoters obtained great mileage from the ‘us versus the Yanks’ advertising strategy. While many middle-class Australians copied British and imperial models, Americans were sufficiently prominent on the world stage by this time to provide attractive alternative models – even if this represented an ‘alternative other’, defining what Australians were not. Boxers, like Les Darcy, looked more to the United States than to Britain during World War I, because North America had the best and most lucrative boxing operations. The biggest boxing tournament in Australia at the turn of the century, which excited huge public interest, was the celebrated clash between Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns. While this fight did not involve Australians and did not dramatise the colonial relationship (in the way that cricket did), it connected with a lively issue of public debate common to North America and Australia in 1908 – the so-called ‘race debate’ (given that the issue of the White Australia Policy was a prominent issue in this decade). In 1908 ‘race’ issues could be more dramatised through American sporting culture than through British-Irish sport. In certain areas then, particularly racial and frontier discourses, America was able to make a greater contribution to Australian sport than did Britain. John Rickard, in a study of the rise of professional wrestling as a television sport from the 1950s, suggested that American sport also represented the model of an ‘exotic other’. It brought to Australia such colourful stars as Chief Little Wolf.10 This interest in the ‘other’ may have been one of the factors behind the spectacular growth of basketball in
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the 1970s and 1980s because Australian teams featured a sizeable number of African-Americans. Richard Waterhouse has claimed that black entertainers, whether sportspeople or musicians, had long held a special place in Australia and a greater measure of acceptance than in North America.11 The visit of Duke Kahanomoku was a popular event in 1915. As the 100 yards Olympic freestyle champion, he was invited to Australia by the New South Wales Swimming Association. While he was in Australian he demonstrated his expertise as a board-rider and helped introduce that sport to the country. Swimming and surfing were sports where Australians looked elsewhere from mother England for culture and tradition. So began an influential surfing movement involving Australia, the United States and Oceania, in which surfing innovations were interchanged. The introduction of American lightweight Malibu boards in the late 1950s, for instance, changed the character of Australian boardriding. 3
The aim of the Americanisation of Australian sport was to achieve cultural domination, to use sport for cultural, economic and political gain.
While it is true that some forms of Americanisation had a missionary aspect – the purpose of the Spalding tour was to promote an American game and thereby to promote American sporting goods and culture – this oversimplifies the many reasons why some aspects of American sporting culture gained ground in Australia. Because there was a large United States presence during World War II, Americans contributed to Australian sporting culture in diverse ways and for a variety of motives. For instance, sport was used by army personnel to diffuse the tensions between American and Australian military personnel. It was reported on 29 April 1942 that the US Army had challenged Australia to the biggest inter-services sports series in a variety of sports. The US Army organised a rodeo at the Exhibition Oval, Brisbane, which featured 100 American cowboys, based in the US Army, and 100 of Australia’s stockmen and buck-jump riders. With free admission the event attracted a crowd of 70 000. Baseball games, such as when the US 27th General Hospital team played New South Wales at Marrickville Oval on 4 May 1944, were also common during the war years.12 The rise of softball in Australia demonstrates that a variety of Australians played an important role in the ‘domestication’ of this American sport. Lynn Embrey,13 an historian of softball, has outlined how North Americans introduced it to Australia. Canadian Gordon Young arrived in 1938 to take up the post of Director of Physical
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Education in New South Wales and introduced the game to primary school teachers. The second founder was Sergeant William Duvernet of the US Army who organised softball games for American service personnel, including nurses at the Fourth General Hospital (Royal Melbourne Hospital) in Australia in 1942. Another North American promoter was former semi-professional baseballer, Mark Gilley, who helped promote the game in Queensland immediately after the war. A handful of US servicemen, who remained in Australia, provided much needed support for softball in the years after the end of hostilities. Although North Americans were prominent in establishing the game in Australia, the sport enjoyed spectacular growth in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s – when it became one of the fastest-growing sports14 – because it was taken over and run by Australian women, notably Esther Deason, Marj Dwyer and Merle Short. Softball was defined as a suitable and appropriate sport for girls and women to play. The criticisms which were levelled at women who played the ‘manly’ sport of cricket were not levelled at women who took up softball.15 Australian softball developed along such different lines from the US game that Americans were surprised by the shape of Australian softball when the first World Series of Softball was organised at Melbourne in 1965. One of the American pitchers, Bertha Tickey, who had 19 years of experience including 147 no-hit games, was astonished to be called for illegal pitching because of the differing rules of the Australian game. Australia’s victory in the Championship was in part because softball was played on larger cricket and football ovals. At a crucial stage in the final an Australian was able to get home from second base because a wild pitch travelled a long way behind home plate.16 It is interesting to note that even in the 1950s, when the BritishAustralian connection was still powerful, softball and American sporting culture were supported by some prominent Australians involved in the Australian-American Association. They believed that the growth of American sport and Australian-American sporting ties would enhance closer political ties between the two countries. The Association President, R. G. Casey, praised the ‘excellent good-relations campaign’ of the Softball Federation and went on to hope that ‘if more organisations in Australia would realise the necessity for a strong British-American link, and act accordingly, it would considerably assist the aims of the Australian-American Association’. Sir John Latham, Federal President of the Australian-American Association, praised softball in 1954 ‘as a living memorial to the US serviceman comparable with the American memorial erected in Canberra’.17
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Softball, along with Davis Cup tennis in the 1950s, provided the principal opportunities to use sport to promote what were seen as the positive aspects of the burgeoning Australian-American relationship at this time. Netball replaced softball in the 1970s as the fastest-growing sport in the country. The sport is a modified form of basketball and the game, before 1970, was known as ‘women’s basket ball’. It is derived from the game invented by American James Naismith in 1891. However, women’s basketball came to Australia via England where it was converted to netball. This occurred when basketball was introduced to the students of the Bergmann-Osterberg College of Physical Education, Hampstead Heath, by a visiting American, Dr Toll. In 1906 a book entitled The Game of Netball and How to Play It was published by the Ling Association (later known as the Physical Education Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). The rules of this hybrid American-British game became so altered that netball is unrecognisable to Americans. Netball has developed into the leading women’s game in Australia and many Commonwealth countries. 4
Australia, following US models, has opted for a more commercial and professional culture of sport since the 1970s and has rejected Anglo-Australian traditions of amateurism.
There is some truth to this perspective. America has long provided an alternative model of sport to British traditions. American money has played a role in undermining some Australian sporting traditions (the US professional tennis circuit for instance proved attractive to the cream of Australia’s tennis crop in the 1950s). However, ‘Americanisation’ is not the prime reason for Australia moving away from the dominant Britishderived amateur model of sport. The critical cause – the failure of Australia to achieve a gold medal at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 – resulted more from changes in global sport than from American influences. The huge expansion in televised coverage also transformed sport from a part-time amateur activity to highly-paid work for those at the top of the sporting tree. It may appear on the surface that the World Series Cricket (WSC) crisis from 1977 to 1979 was a good example of a sport moving away from British traditions to a more avowedly American free market approach. The cricket establishment was shocked by the WSC revolution which brought in coloured clothing, helmets, night cricket, promotional and media gimmicks, pop music and helped popularise the abbreviated, limited overs game. Kerry Packer, the moving spirit behind WSC,
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undoubtedly drew some inspiration from American marketing and television models. Among other things Packer hired an American sports promoter and agent, Mark McCormack. He advised Packer to involve the American firm (International Financial Management Inc.) whose vice-president Linton Taylor became prominent in World Series Cricket.18 However, this cricket ‘revolution’ had many wider ingredients which were not necessarily American. One-day cricket was invented in England in 1963 and was one of the first attempts to restructure cricket along more commercial lines. Bob Stewart in his thesis on Australian cricket has argued that the move towards hyper-commercialisation of Australian cricket had already begun in the 1960s, with innovations such as Sunday play, when cricket officials attempted to make the game more attractive.19 The first cricket helmets did not emanate from baseball – they were motorcycle helmets – nor was coloured clothing borrowed from baseball. Richie Benaud has also pointed out that some Channel 9 innovations in sports televising, notably the use of multiple cameras, were copied by US and European television.20 Sports-, such as cricket demonstrate the subtlety of cultural borrowing. Far from being a one-one process, or an exercise in cultural dominance, the domestication of American sporting culture involves an active role on the part of the host society. Although the American game of baseball is a rival to the English-derived game of cricket, baseball administrators have defined it as complementary and auxiliary to cricket. Baseball has a long history in Australia – it was played occasionally in Sydney and Melbourne from the 1870s. The 1878 touring Australian cricketers had an opportunity to view the game first hand as they spent some weeks in the United States before reaching the United Kingdom. Because of the obvious primacy of cricket, baseball officials at the time of the Spalding tour in 1888/89 were willing to define the American game as an auxiliary rather than a competitor to cricket – ‘to help cricketers keep their eye in during the winter and to improve their fielding’.21 As a result, a succession of prominent cricketers joined and strengthened baseball competitions played during the winter. Some cricketers, like Norman ‘Norrie’ Claxton (1877–1951), who played 39 cricket games for South Australia from 1898/99 and 1909/10, became a prominent baseball administrator. He donated the Claxton Shield for interstate baseball competition. Cricketers also turned to baseball to learn new bowling techniques. Monty Noble learned to bowl an ‘outcurve’ from baseball and later Craig McDermott developed new techniques for the bowling of a slower ball – so important in Limited Overs; matches – after working with Australian baseballer, Dave Nilsson. Rod Marsh, head coach of the Australian
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Cricket Academy, attended the training camp of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1996 to investigate baseball training techniques. From time to time baseballers have attempted to change the relationship, which defined baseball as subsidiary to cricket. During the 1960s, summer baseball was introduced in a number of states, in competition to cricket, and in 1973 the Australian Baseball Council declared that baseball would become a summer sport. For more than a century baseball was not in direct competition with cricket because baseball officials recognised that it was inadvisable to challenge the dominant bat-and-ball game. While there has been some decline in the British connection since the 1970s – the rise of the republican movement, the growth of a more multicultural society along with the weakness of English cricket in the 1990s – baseball still does not represent a major threat to cricket (even though baseball leagues have become more prominent in the 1990s). It is likely that the greater threat of baseball (and American sport) may come from other factors, the much larger salaries which can be offered to young Australians to play ‘US’ sports. In a similar way American sport may also undermine the strength of one of Australia’s most popular cricket opponents, the West Indies. However, the decline of British cricket and the possible decline of West Indian cricket has been counter-balanced by the growth of cricket as a global sport, particularly on the subcontinent and to a lesser extent in Africa. The appeal of US sport and traditions varies greatly from sport to sport. Rodeo is a sport where American models appear to inspire considerable emulation. The history of rodeo in Australia has yet to be documented in any form. However, it is evident that in parts of the outback, particularly in Queensland and northern New South Wales, rodeo has become genuinely popular and an Australian Roughriders’ Association was founded in 1945. While of very limited appeal in urban areas, many in rural areas are drawn to rodeo with its ‘cowboys’ and ‘cowgirls’, and to the romantic and rougher notions of the American west. No doubt this process was closely linked to the popularity of Hollywood films in the 1920s and the 1930s, and to the ‘cowboy’ genre. During the 1930s, for example, Australia had its own ‘singing cowboy’, Tex Morton, who was a New Zealand/Australian clone of the American singing cowboy, Gene Autrey. Morton’s career was launched soon after the release of the film, The Singing Cowboy, in 1937.22 Rodeo represents an interesting form of Australian cultural borrowing because in many respects it appears a direct cultural ‘lift’ from American
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traditions – in terms of the outfits, the language, the culture and even the links with country and western music. The language of Australian rodeo, including a preference for terms such as roughriding and buckjumping, hardly disguises this direct ‘steal’ from American culture.
‘AMERICANISATION’ IN MULTICULTURAL AUSTRALIA Has the US-Australian sporting relationship increased in importance since 1945 given the closer political, social and cultural contacts between the two countries? Does Americanisation threaten the long-established British-Australian contests like those over the Ashes? One would expect the sporting balance to have shifted from Britain to the United States since-World War II, given the rise in importance in the AustralianAmerican relationship since 1941; the growth of a more multicultural society; and the decline in the British connection during the past few decades. Greater sporting contacts between Australia and the United States in the twentieth century have led to the development of a more distinctive and sophisticated US-Australian sporting connection. Some of Australia’s celebrated sporting moments occurred in the United States: the deaths of Les Darcy (1917) and Phar Lap (1932) and the celebrated victory of Australia II in the 1983 America’s Cup. The US-Australian sporting relationship has been dramatised in sports such as the clash between Australia and the United States in Davis Cup tennis in the 1950s; the contest in the final of the first softball World Series in 1965; and clashes between the softball and basketball teams in the 1980s and 1990s. Of these contests it was almost annual Davis Cup clashes in the 1950s which captured the greatest public interest, probably because it was one sport in which Australia could most successfully compete with the United States. Despite the growth of these contests, no ongoing sporting contest or tradition which reflects the Australian-US cultural relationship, comparable with the Ashes series in cricket, has developed. There is a great irony in that while the alleged Americanisation of Australian sport appears a powerful force – particularly in terms of clothing, equipment, team names, cultural practices and sporting culture in general – it has not been translated into any continuing and ongoing sporting contests, like the Ashes. While there is great penetration of American sporting practice in a general sense, so that Michael Jordan is a popular and recognisable figure, there appear definite limits to the penetration by American sports. Apart from rodeo and basketball – the latter being both an American sport but also one with an Olympic and global dimension – no US sport with the possible exception of softball has made a real impact on the Australian sporting scene. And while
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basketball enjoyed a spectacular growth in popularity in the 1980s, there was a reported decline in basketball crowds by the mid-1990s. Or, looked at in another way, the dominant sports in the 1990s and the foreseeable future still seem to be cricket and the various BritishAustralian varieties of football. One of the fastest growing sports, netball, has some past connection with the United States but is now largely a Commonwealth sport. Some of the above may suggest that Americanisation represents a real threat to the continuation of British-Australian sports. The opposite is more likely to be the case. The American sports which are likely to prosper in Australia are those which also have a global or an Olympic dimension, such as basketball and softball. The Scottish-derived sport of golf has prospered in the United States and North American tournaments have eminent status; golf, however, is very much a global sport. A number of possible reasons can be advanced for this limited penetration by American sport. First, many US sporting teams, such as the ‘Dream Team’, appear unbeatable. US sport, unlike British sport, gives Australians few real chances to achieve success. Second, US sport is ethnocentric, the focus in baseball and gridiron is on the so-called World Series and the Superbowl respectively, which are only open to North American teams. As a result, the United States, unlike Britain, cannot satisfactorily provide an international or global dimension to major Australian sports. Because Australia is a small power, global sport, as in the Olympics and international contests such as Test cricket, has been one way in which Australia can strut on the world stage. Sport has been one way to attain international notice, which is arguably more difficult to achieve in art, culture, politics and intellectual concerns. Third, the United States is not successful in a number of sports in which Australians excel: such as cricket, netball, and various football codes.
CONCLUSIONS It could be argued that Americanisation in sport provides less of a threat to the continuance of Australian variants of global culture than it does in other aspects of culture, politics and society. Nevertheless, Australian sports historians have underestimated and have failed to document the global dimensions of Australian sport, which includes a long tradition of borrowing from American sport and culture. While historians of Australian popular culture have documented the lengthy and complex dialogue between the two societies, sporting links have yet to be fully explored. Sports historians have been dazzled by the powerful
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imperial traditions and by the influential British-Irish sporting traditions. This chapter demonstrates that far from being an unwelcome and occasional interloper into the Australian sporting culture, the AustralianAmerican sporting relationship is long-standing, powerful and often welcomed. Australian sports people have long looked to the United States for ideas, culture, technology, money and careers. America has long represented the big league when it come to sport and popular entertainment and a succession of Australians pursued American sporting dreams to Hollywood (Annette Kellerman and Snowy Baker), or as kickers in American football (Mark Harris and Darren Bennett), or as baseball and basketball players (Luc Longley), or as coaches (Harry Hopman) or as swimmers or athletes in the US college system. American sport has provided alternative meanings and mythologies to the dominant British-Irish models. While British sport has tended to dramatise the imperial relationship, American sport has addressed issues such as race and frontier myths. American sport has long provided Australia with an ‘exotic other’ dimension, whether it be Duke Kahanamoku, the Harlem Globe Trotters, or Chief Little Wolf. Far from being a threat to the future of long-established ‘Aussie’ sports, American sport in Australia has to compete with many other global sports. While American culture and clothes may continue to be popular in Australia, US sports have no guaranteed future as such. The so-called ‘Americanisation’ of Australian sport is a complex phenomenon which varies from sport to sport and is at times reciprocal. There has been a century-long ‘dialogue’ between baseball and cricket which illustrates both resistance and adaptation at the same time. Netball was an American inspired sport, but it has changed to such an extent that it is now barely recognisable to Americans. This chapter has suggested the variety of ways in which ‘Americanisation’ operates – both directly and indirectly. There have also been many Australians who have looked to America for various purposes: sports people have wanted to advance their careers; coaches have looked to the United States for techniques; entrepreneurs have pursued the large US sporting market, and politicians have been aware of the advantages of closer ties with the United States. Many individual and groups of Americans, such as basketballers and basketball coaches, have been attracted to Australian sport for a variety of reasons, to further their careers, their businesses and even their religion – as was the case with the Mormon basketball teams – or simply to experience an ‘exotic other’ that is Australian sporting culture.
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1 Phillip Adams, ‘Dolls on the American Knee’, Weekend Australian, 11–12 September 1993. 2 Philip and Roger Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 1–16. 3 ‘Harness Racing’, W. Vamplew et al, (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian Sport [OCAC], Oxford University Press, Melbourne, (2nd edn), 1994, pp. 201–202. 4 ‘Greyhound-racing’, in OCAC, p. 193. 5 W. F. Mandle, ‘Cricket and Australian Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 59, no. 4, December, 1973, pp. 225–45. 6 Richard Broome, ‘The Australian Reaction to Jack Johnson, Black Pugilist, 1907– 1909’, in R. Cashman and M. McKernan, (eds), Sport in History: The Making of Modern Sporting History, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1979, pp. 343–63.; see also Cashman and McKernan, (eds), Sport: Money, Morality and the Media, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1981. 7 Richard Waterhouse, ‘Popular Culture and Pastimes’, in Neville Meaney (ed.), Under New Heavens: Cultural Transmission and the Making of Australia, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 238–85; Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures Public Leisure; A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788, Longman, Melbourne, 1996; Richard White. ‘Americanization and Popular Culture in Australia’, Teaching History, vol. 12, August 1978, pp. 3–21. 8 Bruce Mitchell, ‘Baseball in Australia: Two Tours and the Beginnings of Baseball in Australia’, Sporting Traditions, vol. 7, no. 1, November 1990, pp. 2–23. 9 Mandle, ‘Cricket and Australian Nationalism’. 10 An unpublished. paper delivered at the Everyday Wonders Conference, Brisbane, June 1997. 11 Richard Waterhouse, Black and White Minstrel: The Australian Popular Stage 1788– 1914, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1990, pp. 145–51. 12 R. Cashman, Australian Sport through Time, Random House, Sydney, 1997, p. 250. 13 Lynn Embrey, Batter Up! The History of Softball in Australia, Australian Softball Federation, Bayswater, Vic., 1995; and L. Embrey, ‘‘‘Great Hit, Jo-Jo’’: Levelling the Women’s International Softball Scoreboard’, Sporting Traditions, vol. 14, no. 1, November, 1997, pp. 55–77. 14 R. Cashman and A. Weaver, Wicket Women: Cricket and Women in Australia, UNSW Press Sydney, 1991, pp. 112–13. 15 Cashman and Weaver, Wicket Women, pp. 112–13. 16 Embrey, ‘Great Hit, Jo-Jo’, p. 62. 17 ibid., p. 59. 18 Christopher Forsyth, The Great Cricket Hijack, Widescope Publications, Camberwell, Vic. 1978, p. 46. 19 Robert K. Stewart, ‘‘‘I heard it on the Radio, I Saw it on Television’’: The Commercial and Cultural Development of Australian First Class Cricket: 1946– 1985’, Ph.D. thesis, La Trobe University, 1995. 20 ‘World Series Cricket – Twenty Years On’, Channel 9, 28 January 1998. 21 R. Cashman et al, (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 52. 22 Simone Meares, ‘Tex Morton and the Transformation of Australian Culture’, BA (Honours) thesis, UNSW, 1991.
TELEVISION Philip Bell Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had been hushed up. Oscar Wilde The American has no language. He has dialect, slang, provincialism, accent and so forth. Rudyard Kipling
GLOBAL/AMERICAN; LOCAL/AUSTRALIAN Kipling’s disdain for American English identifies the very qualities that make it distinctive. His insult assumes that there existed a fixed, standard English language, an uninflected, unaccented, non-vernacular. Of course, this is impossible. All Englishes, and all other national languages are in constant flux, growing as social circumstances change. Kipling’s child-like belief that his language is natural, and the American merely a (per)version of it, amounts to belief in pure, high or standard languages which are bastardised by popularisation or by transportation to new climes where the indigenous languages hybridise the import to produce new creolisations, new vernaculars. In discussing recent developments in the language and imagery of Australian-produced television programs, I will develop the positive implications of such concepts. I suggest that television actively vernacularises, or ‘creolises’ the cultural forms which are transferred through it from one culture to another. I assume that it is possible to understand ‘Australian television
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culture’ as a more-or-less coherent process, by which the nation is intersubjectively imagined, through which sub-cultural conversations are enacted which continuously define and redefine who is watching and listening – in age, ethnic, gender and national terms (among others). Its provincial dialects and accents become its distinctive modes of mediation, not its assumed American (or British) antecedents. Television is a vernacular medium, addressing its audience (not spectators, c.f. cinema) in domestic, some might say domesticated, contexts. Not only is its address to the vernacular subject, but its content (field of representation) is increasingly the domestic, the ‘private’, the consumerist, the mundane and the ephemeral. To ‘watch TV’ is to participate in the domestic rituals of the wider culture, to share in the wider culture through the metonymic medium. Insofar as ‘the nation’ (or the more colloquial ‘Australia’) is named and assumed in television’s informal discourses, it can be seen to undergo continuous re-definition. Australian television, then, is not imitative of some larger category of American television, but is a creolised1 and unique realisation of the televisually mediated meanings which only make sense within their projected local spaces and within their particular contexts of reception. Australian television is a dual system, with the state-funded ABC and SBS charged with representing the national and the multicultural dimensions of Australian society, while the commercial networks are required to meet responsibilities in relation to locally-produced programs. As Curthoys has noted, Australian television is Janus-faced, looking both to American and British cultural forms, innovations and influences ... negotiating between, rejecting, modifying, adding to, changing and transforming these imports’.2 Australia enjoys a ‘mixed economy of broadcasting’ through the overall requirements of about 50 per cent local content which, Cunningham and Jacka have recently claimed, ‘means that the system remains identifiably indigenous’.3 Furthermore, ‘[T]he Australian system seems to have bred a talent for successful low-budget television’ and many local productions are exported, especially to Europe.4 Looking back to the first two decades of Australian television, however, one finds little evidence for a distinctive, local voice. American programs and formats dominated commercial channels’ schedules, with the most popular genres centred on the family (Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy); adventure, including Westerns; the law and the underworld; Institutions (especially hospitals) and Disney-ing fantasy. Bell and Bell have commented on the first two decades of Australian television thus:
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That more Australians watched Roots than any other television broadcast prior to 1980 suggest that the idioms and cultural content of American history and American television were familiar and pleasurable in Australia. More generally, however, it is clear from the empirical evidence of the ‘ratings’ at least, that Australians watched American genre series in huge numbers from the first years of television. Until the Mavis Brampton Show (1965) and Homicide (1967), locally produced entertainment programs other than news, sport, or games shows, were too rare to be genuinely competitive with American imports (if one allows that ratings data demonstrate cultural ‘preferences’). Three years after the introduction of television, in 1959, all of the ‘top-ten’ programs in Australia originated in the United States: 77 Sunset Strip, Wagon Train, Sea Hunt, Rescue 8, Maverick, Perry Mason, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Rifleman, and Sunday night movies.5
However, summaries of audience ratings during Australian television’s first 25 years cannot be extrapolated to describe the 1980s and 1990s. Since the relatively late introduction of colour into the Australian medium, increasingly local programming has flourished. As Jacka and Dermody have shown, the introduction of colour television corresponded with a resurgent nationalism and nationalistic cinema6 generating locally-inflected genres in current affairs, sports and magazine programming. In this chapter, I will discuss recent developments in Australian commercial television which extend the above-quoted generalisations and, in important respects, contradict them. In particular, the rise of magazine-style, ‘infotainment’, comedy and consumeradvocacy genres has led local audience preferences since the m id-to-late 1980s especially. It is possible to speculate that during this period, roughly since the Hawke-Keating government ‘deregulated’ financial institutions, and due to the strong growth in tourism and other service industry employment, the introduction of competition in telecommunications and the multiplication of ‘information industries’ jobs,7 Australian consumerism has shifted towards services and information. This is reflected in new demographics which drive television programming via advertising, the ‘key fink’ in the relationships amongst television industries, audiences and program genres and schedules. Increasingly, many of the most watched programs conflate advertising and their infotainment content. The popularity of these programs, I argue, reinforces retrospective complacency and closes the gate on possible intrusions by the political or the public. In short, they ask audiences to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’, echoing the disaffection which Howard’s ‘battlers’ and Hanson’s ‘mainstream’ expressed. High levels of rural unemployment, the relative impoverishment of the wouldbe middle-class, increasing hours of work for static incomes and the dismantling of social security – these might be soil in which such programs thrive.
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To contextualise recent developments in mainstream commercial programming, I will refer to a seminal analysis of Australia television’s nationalistic populism by King and Rowse.8 I will argue that Australian television has become increasingly ‘local’ in its audience address (tenor) and in its cultural/historical references (what I’ll call its ‘discursive field’), although its most popular genres (modes) are largely modifications and hybrids of American precursors. As Ang points out, After all, it is in the US that many of (television’s principles and conventions), now often taken for granted and fully routinised, were first explored and perfected.9
Indeed, international patterns of commercial television programming can be seen, generally, as American-global: ... [T]he commodification of media culture is an increasingly global phenomenon which brings with it the adoption of peculiarly modernist cultural arrangements such as the fashion system with its principle of planned obsolescence, framed within risk-reducing strategies of innovation through repetition. In television ... this takes the form of continuous reshaping of relatively constant formats and genres (eg the cop show, the sitcom, the soap opera) and a standardising of scheduling routines.10
The advertising-riddled and self-promoting schedules of commercial television, are, however, filled with constantly changing cultural ‘content’ – socially/historically significant fields of representation. These and the voices (literally) of television as it addresses its various viewing audiences, are more labile than the genres and schedules might suggest. ‘...[G]lobal media do affect, but cannot control, local media’.11 The ‘negotiations’ which shape Australian television (as Bell and Bell argued in Implicated: The United States in Australia) can be seen as one of ‘localising’ these genres; mixing them, multiplying some, ignoring other possibilities and thereby developing distinctive programmes and even distinct programming schedules. This process has recently been labelled ‘glocalisation’, to draw attention to cultural practices which address viewers ‘... at different times as part of a global community, a regional one, a national one and even a local one – on a city or locality-wide basis’.12 However, glocalisation might better be thought of as a set of processes which produce varied forms of television than as a dimension of any single genre or style of program. It emphasises the increasingly diverse contemporary mediascapes and directs attention away from models postulating imperialism and the passive imitation of American models.
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By the mid-1990s, expenditure on overseas, which means principally American, programs was only 38 per cent of total program costs for the Australian industry: TABLE 1 COMMERCIAL NETWORKS: LOCAL AND IMPORTED PROGRAM 13 EXPENDITURE
Channel 7 Channel 9 Channel 10
Local (A$ million)
Imported (A$ million)
204.7 158.2 78.1
49.8 80.6 27.5
The popularity of local information (‘infotainment’) and magazinestyle genres has continued to rise since the early 1980s (following the success of 60 Minutes and other consumerist current affairs programs). Recently, lifestyle/health, home-improvements, gardening and travel magazine shows have achieved very high ratings. For example, as recently October 1997, such local programs dominated the ratings. TABLE 2 AUDIENCES FOR NETWORK TELEVISION 5–11 OCTOBER 1997: 14 TWENTY MOST POPULAR PROGRAMS
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Blue Heelers (7) Friends (9) This Is Your Life (9) Better Homes ... (7) Getaway (9) Funniest Home Videos (9) Footy Show: New Faces (9) Suddenly Susan (9) The Great Outdoors (7) Our House (9) RPA (9) Weddings (9) Good Medicine (9) Burke’s Backyard (9) 60 Minutes (9) Beverly Hills Cop 3 (7) A Current Affair (9) Hey Hey Its Saturday (9) Striking Distance (9) Mad World of Sport (9)
(Aust) (USA) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust) (USA) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust) (Aust/imported) (USA) (Aust) (Aust) (USA) (Aust/ imported)
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The ‘live’ television broadcast (even when it is of death, indeed especially so), and the celebrity-hood of TV itself have become, in 1997, the strongest competitors for audiences with live sports and movies. TABLE 3 MOST WATCHED TELEVISION BROADCASTS ON THE TWO MOST 15 POPULAR NETWORKS IN 1997 (SYDNEY ONLY)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Television broadcast
Audience (%)
Logie Awards (9) Diana’s death (9) Rugby League: NSW vs QLD 1 (9) Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix (9) Rugby League: NSW vs QLD 11 (9) Witness: Thredbo Survivor (7) AFL: Sydney vs Western Bulldogs (7) Movie: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (7)
35 35 32 33 33 32 31 31
Younger viewers prefer American-produced comedy and drama. However, they are less valuable as consumers, and are a ‘narrow group of light to medium viewers’ (according to a Channel 7 executive). TABLE 4 THE TELEVISION PROGRAMS MOST FREQUENTLY WATCHED BY 13– 16 17-YEAR-OLDS, FEBRUARY-OCTOBER 1997
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
The Simpsons Friends Drew Carey Caroline in the City Suddenly Susan 3rd Rock from the Sun The Nanny Mr Bean (UK) Home and Away (Aust) The X-Files
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This list excludes movies, which are also extremely popular with youth. In a recent ratings survey, films such as Cool Runnings, True Lies, Mighty Ducks, Speed, Jurassic Park and Richie Rich all rated extremely well with the 13–17 group. Sport, particularly rugby league, is also a ‘hit’ with this group. Television’s most watched broadcasts, therefore, are live and/or local. This might not surprise those who see the medium as primarily oral, community-oriented and domestically accented (in the literal sense of being as parochial as the viewers’ interests in house and garden, in the daily rituals of everyday life). Yet, television in the age of satellite transmissions is also a medium of globally-arresting events, if not of global cultural rituals. It provides instantaneous, world-wide surveillance and, at certain climactic moments, implicates most of the world into ‘virtual’ universality.17 O’Regan18 distinguishes several ‘levels’ at which Australian television addresses various, overlapping audiences: local, regional; national, international; and, within each, as ‘majoritarian’ or ‘minoritarian’. To the former list might be added the domestic/familial and the global. Majoritarian address to the domestic and to the national concerns of audiences is clearly predominant in the most watched Sydney programs in late 1997 (above) while the ‘most watched’ broadcasts during the year were: TABLE 5 MOST WATCHED BROADCASTS IN 1997 Channel 9
Audience (%)
Logie Awards (9) Diana’s death (9) Rugby League State of Origin Australian Grand Prix (F1) Channel 7 Witness – Stuart Diver
35 35 (1,2) 34,33 32.5
19
32.5
Commenting on SBS television, O’Regan has pointed out: Broadcasting works on units that are below and above the level of the nation. Television’s local and regional levels produce their own programming orientations and imagined communities of viewers (as Sydneysiders, Victorians, Westralians). These may be, at times, at odds with the national level ... Similarly, international programs and orientations within the service may be at some distance from national cultural and national political aspirations. Australian production is only partly made up of Australian originated program concepts. Ethnic and
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minoritarian programming is international in SBS’s multilingual programming (SBS is sometimes thought to undermine national culture through its screening of such programming). And in a society in which so much of the population is first- or second-generation Australian, some audiences may identity with overseas-produced programming as much as with local programming.20
Analysing Indian television, Appadurai and Breckenridge coined the phrase ‘nationalist realism’ to emphasise the way that the nation as figure or as ground is constantly projected through the medium: ‘Above all, it is the Indian heritage that is turned into spectacle’.21 They argue that television increasingly articulates the relationship between domestic life and ‘the projects of the nation state’ – its modernising and commercialising goals. In cricket for example, ‘... leisure, spectacle, stardom, and nationalism come together in a volatile way’.22 Similarly, various Australian football codes ritualistically project televised community as the region or as the nation, linked through identification with the television spectacle itself and with personalities who become nationally significant through their broadcast talent. Examples close to home are not difficult to find. The nation became a village as Stuart Diver was rescued from his Thredbo tomb, and the (Western) world became a town lining up to farewell Diana, its princess/daughter: thus the nation and the world (or versions thereof) are reinscribed as naturally unified and harmonious. But television’s more routine programs address and thereby assume a very local, parochial subject. In linguistics, the local, informal or everyday is labelled ‘the vernacular’, although the term originally referred to any language which originated in its place of use.23 The non-learned or non-literary connotations of the term serve well to remind us that television is increasingly an oral, everyday, informal medium, a point I wish to emphasise in my following argument. King and Rowse24 have analysed a cycle of Australian television advertisements in the early 1980s which they argue sold a particular concept of ‘Australianness’. They propose that these are ‘populist’, representing an imagined, unified community in relation to products and services (such as banking). Australian ‘humanity’ ads as they label them: portray a large number of non-actors (le ordinary people), often in groups, frequently responding to the camera, smiling or gesturing. They present ‘mosaics’ of such social groups in recognisably social (e.g. outdoor) situations with a jingle or what might be called an ‘anthem’ over these images. A mosaic of ‘typical’ participants, in outdoor settings, ‘people themselves’. In short, they celebrate ‘typical Aussies’ in collective
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up-beat identification-inducing mosaics. Government advertising such as Project Australia’s exhortations to ‘have a go’, World Series Cricket ads, Newcastle Building Society promotions – all employed these rhetorics: It’s a typical Aussie morning on a typical Aussie day And I love this place I was born in In a typical Aussie way ... Have a go ...
King and Rowse present an historical context for this populist nationalism, with its imagined Australian community: By 1972 the ideological struggle over the content of Australianism had displaced a workerist populism. It became a matter of celebration by Australian social critics in the sixties that Australia was a nation of suburbs in which peoples’ aspirations went no further than enjoying their friends and family on the weekends. The proponents of Left Australianism regarded these suburban anti-heroes as the lost constituency of socialism – the outcome of embourgeoisement.25
Television, then, played off an increasing (media-reinforced) distaste for ‘politics’. An imagery flourished which ‘offered something unequivocal and certain – people themselves’.26 The populist nationalism which emerged partly through television’s determinedly anti-political rhetoric, its cynicism about the public sphere and the politicians who were shown as its self-interested citizens, led to an apparent consensus ... ‘rooted in an affluent disaffectation from the political, a resolute preference for the world lived and consumed in private.’27 Australian television (especially on commercial networks but not exclusively so) has continued to represent itself and its audiences-constituents as privatistic, domestic and consumerist. Ray Martin is about as ‘political’ as Channel 9 ever becomes. It invariably represents its viewers as vicarious consumers of politics. Australian television networks can, in a sense, legitimately address the whole nation, and do so in telethons, sports broadcasts and election debates, for example. Channel 9 might be watched by one third of the nation’s viewing audience for such media ‘events’. That television networks act as brokers of a formal political kind is evident in the balanced devil’s advocacy of current affairs interviewing28 where ‘them’ (politicians, trades union leaders, business spokespeople, even bureaucrats) are confronted with tests of their credibility, to be judged by the armchair electorate. Television’s populism is the necessary correlative of its place as outside (at least in its own representation) ‘real’
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political/corporatist arrangements by which the state is guided and the nation defined. When television intervenes, it does so as an agent of populist reform – for example, it advertises or brokers jobs as a solution to unemployment which is seen as a symptom of the corporatist system rather than as the result of political policies. Television can act for its viewers, for its consumer-constituents, to solve social problems, making public demands on ‘big’ (and small) business on behalf of people all over the country. Ray Martin’s invitation to ‘Australia’ to ‘do something together’ to ‘kick-start’ jobs in Jobs for Australia, 17 September 1997, was populist nationalism in action (literally). The presence of Dick Smith (‘mate’), the language of the audience (‘fantastic’, ‘Aussie’, ‘there you go’) brought the audience to the jobs. ‘Think of Australia and jobs, not just profits’ said Smith, and the General Manager of Coles offered 1450 vacancies for the television audience.
RECOGNISING AND IDENTIFYING ‘AUSTRALIA’ The popularity of various locally-distinct football codes and their incorporation into the oral rituals of television, especially since the advent of colour twenty years ago, the association of political personalities (sic) with various sports, and domestic rather than social or public spectatorship are all embedded in the practices of everyday Australian life-as-televised. Nightingale et al have interviewed and observed members of an Australian family watching Rugby League on television. They identify distinctly gendered differences in the significance given to watching. Some men, for instance, identified strongly with the televised game, ‘losing’ awareness ‘of the distinction between self and image’ (to the embarrassment of their mates or family).29 One woman, a widow living with her two daughters, linked watching football with family identity; it was part of the memory of her late husband’s presence in the family and ‘part of her genealogy’.30 Observers reported strong, active identification with players, teams and with the game as televised: ‘At the crucial play, Mavis wanders in with coffee. She is ignored as the watchers rise ... and shout at the television and each other. Mavis is shouted down when she says “coffee”, then shakes her head and leaves’. (Dare I label this ‘a scene from Australian life’?) The ‘bardic’ (oral mediation) function of television was first elaborated by Fiske and Hartley.31 Although it can be used rather reductively, this concept points to important aspects of television’s role in signifying versions of the everyday experience of its audiences. The authors argued that TV develops rhetorics by which it reworks social practices and meaning into forms which appear ‘authentic’, natural and
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are therefore, pleasurable: ‘we (the audience) are at once celebrated and implicated in the TV message, and that message is no innocent rendition of our own experience, but as artificial a construct as was the verse of the original (Celtic) bards’.32 The bardic address, they argue, assumes and celebrates consensus, ritualising the oral forms through which social membership and identification are maintained. On Australian television, the rise of ‘soaps’ (Neighbours began in March 1985), mini-series (often dealing with emblematically ‘Australian’ issues) and the indigenisation of games shows and talk/variety shows (Hey, Hey it’s (still) Saturday), have been a story of increasing localism, vernacularisation, suburban/domestic focus and of continuous (if changing) nostalgia for ‘Australia’. The ‘bush legend’33 was retold through the mini-series, but the authenticity of rural life in the 1990s is asserted with only half concealed irony in The Bush Telegraph (Channel 7). This faux naif genre packages retrospective cliches of ‘ourselves’: John Williamson’s voice, shearers’ exploits, yarns, rodeos, wood-chopping, Albert Namatjira (who has to be explained!) and a one-armed campdrafter all figure in this condescending glimpse of real (because it is rural) Australia. In one program, archival newsreel footage of women woodchoppers allowed for some very anti-’politically correct’ jokes about gender, as the country show was brought to town by television. Even America’s Most Wanted has been indigenised and Roger Climpson introduces Australia’s Most Wanted with promises of audience involvement: ‘Two alleged paedophiles from last week’s show face court, thanks to you. That and much, much more’. The second-person address, of course, assumes an identifiable audience (in both senses). Our House (Channel 9) presents smiling Australian speech, sunny houses, renovators’ hints and, occasionally, a nostalgic segment on ‘historical’ personalities or commodities (such as the ‘birthplace of the very first Victa (lawnmower)’. Phrases and accent are determinedly local and not middle-class: Now what do you reckon this place used to be? ... I bet you’ll pick it in one ... helluva lot ... smack bang in the middle ... in a tic ... tricks of the trade ... dropped by for a chat ... shed ... verandah ... lounge-room.
Settings are frequently the backyards, or the houses referred to in the show. The son of the Victa’s inventor is invited to ‘have a burn around
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the yard for old times’ sake’. These examples of Australian argot are, of course, elements of the genres’ particular mode of address – I’m not arguing that they ‘reflect’ some essential ‘Australian-ness’, but that the ordinary/typical audience member is ‘constructed’ or assumed through such address. In the program Money, ‘hosties’, ‘oldies’ and ‘mates’ can be heard as part of the consumerist address (again, to ‘you’). Currently (October 1997) the Lotto draw follows Money – with its ‘truckload of entries’! A different kind of audience involvement is invited in Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show, ‘brought to you’ by The Womens’ Weekly. Clips of viewers’ videos of pets, weddings, accidents, embarrassments – nearly all set in the domestic realm – are made into ‘television’ via canned laughter, anthropomorphic and ethnocentric voice-overs and by the professional packaging that the genre offers. ‘Austraya’ is repeated in the program song. In Weddings, ‘you’re gonna meet some great couples’, including (on 16 September 1997), Sharon and Craig and Michelle and Stephen. The program promises ‘a few laughs’ and a ‘ceremony’ (with the emphasis on the moan); families as generations; houses as palaces; television as confirmation that these private rituals are entertainingly social. Such typical Aussies families on typical Aussie days celebrate the places they were born in, in typical televised ways. The ‘concept’ of the ‘magazine’ genre, like others unique to television, including This is your life, may have originated in the United States, but the cultural context which it assumes is particular to contemporary Australia – its self proclaimed ordinariness being its principal point of identification or at least recognition. The Footy Show turns the living room into the pub, enacting the mateship, that watching television inhibits. Blokes, yarns, jokes, gender parody, irony, even expert opinion about football (passed off as inexpert conversation amongst equals) – sports programs must be careful not to speak down to their audiences.
POPULISM RE-VIEWED Populist television is antagonist to ‘big government/big business’ but is the handmaiden of the same. Australian television remains in a sense, a ‘party of non-partisanship’34 continuing to define itself as credible, ordinary, apolitical and, above all, ‘ours’ – Australian. The multiplication of magazines of domestic consumerism (weddings, travel, sex, health, house repairs, motoring), and other genres of ‘infotainment’ – electronic window shopping – are stridently local in their verbal and visual cliches. They are nostalgic and privatistic, equating the consumer with the audience-in-general. Today’s ‘typical Aussies’ seldom even venture into the public places that their 1980s equivalents
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collectively celebrated. They remain behind closed doors and paling fences. The vernacular architecture of home is echoed by the vernacular speech of the genres. In The Bush Telegraph, to cite further examples, stereotyped rural Aussies speak in distinctly local ways: ‘poke a stick at’; ‘true champ’; ‘beautiful’ (bewdiful); ‘do ya?; ‘round ere’. This is not to argue that during the past 20 years the details of television’s populist discourses have not changed. In the 1990s, the global and the American are linked symbolically and Australia itself is represented as relatively disempowered. The corporatist ‘other’ of populism from which ‘Aussies’ are estranged is now more opaque and indescribable. But the authentication of ‘our’ ordinary selves in the privately public rituals of home and leisure remains patent and potent in commercial television. Against the strident banality of the local program, the glamour and professionalism of imported shows is artificial and escapist (‘unreal’). American television shows are those in the third person; the local programs often speak in the second and the first person. Australians are addressed as ‘you’ in the hyper-vernacularised discourses of the genres discussed. Through television, we consume our most ordinary, our most Australian selves. Commercial television’s populism is directed against not America, not the State, but public life, corporatist government and all things which proclaim themselves as ‘political’, although these entities are not named in the televised rituals which celebrate their irrelevance: In King and Rowse’s words,’... the non-popular entity remains unnamed and the “popular” remains plural and inclusive’.35 ‘Real’ Australian sports and domestic consumerism are the ground of television’s address; the figure consists of the artifice, imported dramas and political display which are segregated from the populist programs by advertisements and station promotions. The latter proclaim television’s own power to represent Australia by displacing the public/political, and providing ‘all you need to know’ about ‘the way it is’. In the newly popular genres I have discussed, no discernible social context (no particular class, suburb or demographic) is implied. Predominantly anglo-centric (Anglo/Australo-centric?), chattily optimistic, sentimental or mildly humorous, these genres present their ordinary audiences themselves as their ‘stars’. Their ‘nationalistic realism’ is the realism of the putative reflection – never before has the just-likeus-ness of television been so blatant, so common (in every sense). Australian commercial television has indigenised imported American formats. It has vernacularised almost to the point of parody (cf. Roy and H. G.; Elle McFeast, et al.) and has domesticated even the limited images of people in public that earlier genres celebrated.
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Families, couples, brides, grooms, parents are blessed by the smiling presenters who bring the viewers their ordinary accomplishments (as good consumers), their ritual joys (as good couples), their aspirations (as healthy bodies). (Meanwhile, the complaints of the consumer culture are played out in more overtly populist advocacy of ‘current affairs’ and global climatic or financial disasters continue to symbolise the dangers of being other than one’s self). What I have called the hyper-vernacularisation of television’s verbal and visual discourses can be seen as ‘de-classing’ and naturalising the otherwise more formal, public speech and imagery of Australian television. In commercial programs this is unselfconscious; in the ABC it is frequently parodied and ironised (the slang, the media cliches, the pseudo-complicity with the ‘stars’ and audiences alike). Appadurai argues that televised Indian cricket re-articulates and decolonises the English model, making it local, authentic and ‘ours’ (‘owned’ by the Indian fans through the changed televisual and spectatorial customs). In identifying this paradoxically indigenising process, he echoes Lotman’s final stages of cultural transfer (described briefly in the introduction to this volume). It might not be stretching the interpretation of recent Australian television magazines too far to see them as involved in vernacularising and indigenising three of the focal rituals or symbols of bourgeois English and of celebrity American life: the wedding ceremony, the house/home and the garden. Lotman’s fourth stage, which hardly seems to refer to cultural transfer in the literal sense at all, offers a surprisingly apposite reading of the popular (and populist) genres I have discussed: ... [The receiving] culture itself .. begins rapidly to produce new texts; these new texts are based on cultural codes which in the distant past were stimulated by invasions from outside, but which now have been wholly transformed ...36
Weddings, Sex/Life, Burke’s Backyard, The Bush Telegraph, Who Dares Wins – all appear as indigenously (Anglo-)Australian in their speech and iconography as the 1919 version of The Sentimental Bloke might have looked when it was first screened alongside Hollywood imports. (C. J. Dennis manufactured an exaggerated Australian argot, as did Barry Humphries for Barry McKenzie and Paul Hogan for Crocodile Dundee. Language connoting ordinary Australianness is also central to the success of the 1997 film, The Castle.) I have labelled these media exaggerations and neologisms, ‘hyper-vernacularisation’. Television offers audiences points of recognition (rather than intense identification); it re-presents the battlers’ home as better than a castle, just as the suburban wedding is better than any royal ritual.
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‘Better’ because more authentically, more recognisably of its ordinary audience. Televised weddings make celebrities of us all; we make a Hollywood in our own backyard. Populism in its televised modes intervenes against the powerful, corporate, globally distant world, and continually re-affirms, the authentic, the familial, the local, the domestic world as its counterpoint. Anti-corporate, non-multicultural Australianness is continually being re-imagined both negatively and positively through the vernaculars of television. Although American words may infiltrate this defensively local discourse, and despite the American origins of many of the programs with which they share the airwaves, popular Australian television of the 1990s is, to turn Kipling’s insult on its head, provincial in its accent, slang and dialect. What is strange about Crocodile Dundee and De Castle and recent television schedules generally, is the seamless, invisible (or seldom noticed) transitions between the vernacular populism of local programs and the very different accents, narratives, acting styles and mise-en-scène of the American-produced ‘shows’ which are regularly broadcast following local productions. Melrose Place, L. A. Law or The X-Files do not merely offer glamourised and hyper-dramatised ‘worlds apart’, they seem not to address audiences as national or local subjects at all. Theirs is by contrast, the televisual itself, making no specific demands on the viewer to identify as ‘Australian’, but not as ‘American’ either. Rather, gendered and social (usually family, age, work or general moral and sexual) issues are problematised and provisionally resolved on a level beyond the nationalist realism of parochial ‘Australian’ television. Many of the programs that have achieved great popularity in the last decade are incorrigibly domestic, sub-urban, nostalgic and ostensibly class-less. I would argue that they are, however, very precisely targeted in demographic terms. They suggest that television’s inadvertent, distracted audience uses the medium as well as being used by it to rehearse various facets of subjectivity. To focus on the American origins of the television programs is to ignore their destinations in the current Australian context. It is in the address of ‘live’ broadcasts and of locally-produced infotainment shows that local populism is principally advanced via various modes of a ‘nationalist realism’ in which ‘Australia’ is ritualistically re-presented and re-inscribed. I have discussed some of the most popular recent commercial television genres to highlight their nostalgic nationalism and domestic, consumerist orientation. The assertion that television is a conduit for cultural ‘Americanisation’ seems difficult to sustain in the face of the popularity of the genres considered. Not only are examples of such genres increasing, they are increasingly popular. I believe they are also distinctively populist in emphasising the authenticity of ordinary people in the non-political realm. The origins of such genres of commercial
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television and the prevalence of American entertainment notwithstanding, ‘Australian’ television has vernacularised and indigenised imported formats throughout its history. In the context of global Anglophone culture (with an American accent), local television increasingly practises being different. 1 P. Bell, and R. Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 202–205; see also introduction to this volume. 2 A. Curthoys, ‘Television before television’, Continuum, 4:2 1991, p. 163–64. 3 S. Cunningham, and E. Jacka, Australian Television and International Mediascapes, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 58. 4 ibid, Chapters 6, 7. 5 P. Bell and R. Bell, p. 173. 6 S. Dermody and E. Jacka, The Screening of Australia, vols I, II, Currency Press, Sydney, 1987, 1988. 7 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 1997 p. 20, ‘How the axe fell on 3.3m’. 8 N. King, and T. Rowse, ‘Typical Aussies: television and Australian populism’, in M. Alvarado and J. O. Thompson (eds) The Media Reader, B.F.I., London, 1990, pp. 36– 50. 9 I. Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 154. 10 ibid. 11 Ang, p.151. 12 Cunningham and Jacka, p. 13. 13 Cunningham and Jacka., p. 56. 14 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 September 1997, source A. C. Neilsen. 15 Sydney Morning Herald, The Guide, 29 September–5 October 1997, source A. C. Neilsen. 16 Sydney Morning Herald, The Guide, 10–16 November 1997, source A. C. Neilsen. 17 M. Wark, Virtual Geography, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1997 18 T. O’Regan, Australian Television Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993. 19 Sydney Morning Herald, The Guide, 29 September–5 October 1997, source A. C. Neilsen. 20 O’Regan, p. 82. 21 A. Appadurai and C. A. Breckenridge, ‘One: public modernity in India’, in C. Breckenridge (ed.) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, U. Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1995, p. 9. 22 ibid., p. 12. 23 Definition in Macquarie Dictionary (3rd edn) 1997. 24 N. King and T. Rowse, pp. 38–46. 25 ibid., p. 42. 26 ibid., p. 49, see also: P. Bell et al. Programmed Politics: A Study of Australian Television, Sable Press, Sydney, 1982, chapters 4, 7. 27 P. Bell, et al., Programmed Politics: A Study of Australian Television, Sable Press, Sydney, 1982. 28 P. Bell, and T. van Leeuwen, The Media Interview, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1994, Chapter 4.
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29 V. Nightingale, et al. ‘Contesting domestic territory: watching Rugby League on television’, in A. Moran (ed.) Stay Tuned: An Australian Broadcasting Reader, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992, p. 160. 30 ibid. p. 162. 31 J. Fiske, and J. Hartley, Reading Television, Methuen, London, 1978. 32 T. O’Sullivan, et al., Key Concepts in Communication, Methuen, London, 1983, P. 19. 33 T. O’Regan, ‘The enchantment with cinema: film in the 1980s’, in A. Moran and T. O’Regan (eds) The Australian Screen, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1989, Chapter 6. 34 N. King and T. Rowse, p. 43. 35 ibid. 36 Y. M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, p. 146.
FILM Neil Rattigan From the first murmurings associated with the rebirth of Australian cinema in the early 1970s, the question of Australian films’ relationship to America has been raised, debated, embraced, denigrated but never resolved. How do Australian feature films represent Americans? Why are Americans in Australian film narratives? Are Americans in Australian films always American, and does it matter whether they are or not? The very need to ask these questions arises from the extra-diegetic (commercial and cultural) significance of American actors as well as their diegetic presence (in the filmed, ‘story world’ or fictional reality) of Australian films. The two are not always synonymous. In various ways, in multifarious forums, Australian have been told for thirty years how important America is to the Australian film industry, but on the external evidence of numbers of films alone, they hardly rate at all. My filmography lists some 49 films, but there have been approximately 600 feature films made in Australia since 1970. If anything, since the mid 1980s and Crocodile Dundee, Americans in Australian filmic narratives have become less significant rather than more. Even so, the presence of Americans in those 49 films ought not to be ignored. Prior to the resurgence of Australian films in the mid- 1990s, the importance, felt differentially, of America as the fountain of eternal success led to the oft-derided situation of American actors being imported to play characters which the logic of the narratives and the diegesis argued need not be American. The most ‘notorious’ was the importation of Hollywood star Kirk Douglas for The Man From Snowy River, in which he played not one but two characters. Other examples,
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among many, are child actor Henry Thomas (fresh from success in E.T The Extra-Terrestrial (USA, 1982)) for Frog Dreaming, Richard Chamberlain for The Last Wave, Rosanna Arquette in Wendy Cracked a Walnut, and Tina Turner for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The use of imported actors is complicated according to whether or not they are American within the diegesis.
MID-PACIFIC BLUES The category of films which can be dealt with most easily is those films which, while by most criteria Australian,1 contain American actors who seem to make no conscious attempt to disguise their ‘Americanness’, but which are also films that make no particular attempt within their diegeses to assert that their location is Australia (despite the occasional obviousness of landscape, Australian accents and/ or familiar Australian actors). The most common explanation for American actors (and/or characters) in these Australian films is that an American actor in a main (i.e. promotable) role enhances the prospect for the film to find American distribution and concomitant box-office appeal. While this calculated (if in most instances futile) reason may be true for some films, it is difficult to see how, say, Broderick Crawford in Harlequin, Joseph Cotton in The Survivor or Tom Skerritt in A Dangerous Summer might conceivably have been thought to serve such a function. This seems equally true even in films which do register Australian narrative locations and concerns For example, the same question may be asked of Piper Laurie in Tim, John Savage in Hunting or Peter Coyote in That Eye, The Sky. These Mid-Pacific films, making no particular mileage from their Australian location, seem almost totally dependent upon this marketing explanation for the presence of American actors. Their non-specific locales, indeterminate time periods, and non-existent social references make it irrelevant whether their characters are recognisably of one nationality or another. That these films are yearning for an American audience is often confirmed by the over-dubbing of Australian actors with American accents, even for Australian release.
AMERICAN ACTOR, NON-AMERICAN CHARACTER There are a handful of Australian films in which American actors have played roles which quite specifically are not American characters. It is possible that in some cases, these actors were used because of artistic reasons, because of their ability as actors or a particular quality in performance or (diegetic) presence they could bring. For example, the presence of Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain in Evil Angels or Dennis
Hopper as the eponymous hero of Mad Dog Morgan. Even so, these
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characters do not bring an American presence into the diegesis. although the extra-diegetic effect may be of some interest in a study devoted to audience response and interpretation.
IS YOU IS? OR IS YOU AIN’T? Hollywood films, and to a greater extent American television with its historical evolution towards greater realism in style and content, have ensured that screen Americans (and all that they might stereotypically represent) are not alien to Australians. Thus, the presence of Americans in Australian narratives works on the levels of both familiarity and otherness. Familiarity, perhaps self-evidently, allows Americans to be placed in my formulation of cousins. It may well be argued that this familiarity is what enables films such as Wendy Cracked a Walnut, ‘Norman Loves Rose’ and Now and Forever to use American actors who make no attempt to disguise their Americanness (mainly their accents) but whose self-same Americanness is never commented upon or raised as an issue within the diegesis. Otherness, on the other hand, is quite deliberate in a number of films, particularly those that fall into my category of ‘Colonisers’. Americanism is thus a flexible commodity which can be emphasised or ignored depending upon the specific needs of particular narratives. Since the obvious American origins or status of certain characters is not an internal issue with films such as those mentioned above and others, then Americanness (as distinct from or as complementary to Australianness) is equally not an issue nor at issue. These films, while they might say something about certain practices, certain commercial inclinations within the film-production industry at particular times, do not aid in explaining the American presence in Australian films at the level of effect upon narratives, issues or themes. But these films cannot be simply abandoned as belonging to a sub-category of the Mid-Pacific films. There remains the possibility that by being diegetically non-specific but extra-diegetically American allows these characters certain traits, behaviours, reactions, or attitudes that would not be considered to be ‘appropriate’ for an individual of Australian identity. Thus the measure of American Bible belt evangelism in the enigmatic personality of Henry Warburton (played by American actor, Peter Coyote) in That Eye, the Sky would risk seeming even more inexplicable with an Australian actor/character. Of these films, it can only be assumed that these characters are what I call not-Americans2 because nobody comments upon the fact that they may be American. In a number of them there are others who also designate themselves as not of Australian origin, usually by accent, occasionally by behaviour, and they too are not subject to comment by
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others, nor routinely comment themselves upon their status as Australians of other origin. ‘Norman Loves Rose’ provides confirmation of this. The American actress Carol Kane plays Rose, a recently married, possibly Australian-Jewish wife. The film’s milieu is, for the most part, a Jewish subculture in Sydney and nearly everyone speaks with some sort of Jewish-accented English. Kane/Rose’s Americanness is lost within a plethora of ethnicity that surrounds her. Only one, Rose’s father-in-law, specifically locates his non-Australian origins – in Poland. One of the more bizarre examples of the not-American is found in The Earthling. Here a well-known Hollywood actor, William Holden, plays the not-American. The American child actor, Ricky Schroder (reasonably well known at the time) plays an American, and his parents are played by well known Australian actors, Jack Thompson and Olivia Hamnett, with (in the video release version) over-dubbed American voices. Not-Australians? Whereas my next category deals with films in which American characters admit they are American (but not much else), Patrick Foley (the character played by William Holden) in The Earthling clearly claims to be Australian but one who has spent many years, most of his adult life, abroad and has returned home to die. Sean Daley3 (the character played by Ricky Schroder) is plainly American, a fact that is ‘explained’ by his parents having American accents and probably being tourists. The slight extra-diegetic dissonance created by an American child having parents played by very familiar Australian actors is quickly dissipated when the latter plunge terminally over a cliff early in the film. After which, no matter to what extent Foley makes it clear his returning to his birthplace and reminisces about growing up in the bush, these two characters are Americans in the Australian bush. While a number of films in this category make so little of their Australian context that their narratives might as well be taking place anywhere, others notably use the Australian landscape in ways which impose an often cliched locational identity. The Earthling goes further than this. It Americanises the Australian bush. This Americanisation of the Australian landscape occurs in a number of ways including providing all Australian fauna with homicidal tendencies (with the exception of ‘cute’ kangaroos), and the selective use of ‘atypical’ scenery that emphasises lushness, water, shade and tress and shrubs that are not obviously eucalypts. Unlike the fatal effects of the landscape itself in Burke and Wills, unlike the supernatural power of the bush in Picnic at Hanging Rock, both of which represent quintessential Australian views of the Australian environment, this film makes of the Australian bush a surrogate Hollywood jungle or American backwoods. It is here that The
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Earthling slips into the category of American presence as colonisers in Australian film. An Australian landscape colonised both within and outside the diegesis.
YES, I’M AN AMERICAN – SO WHAT? The not-Americans function to suggest an Americanisation of the Australian cultural consciousness has taken place, rendering Americans ‘invisible’. Even in the most obvious of Australian locations or situations, their Americanness causes no comment. Nobody meeting or recognising Foley after 30 years says anything about his having developed a flawless American accent. Nor are not-Americans granted any special status beyond that which the contingencies of the narrative may require. To what extent the various films’ makers expect the diegetic invisibility to transpose itself to audiences is impossible to judge. In the films within this next category, however, the Americanness of the characters is explicitly acknowledged. But often it is no more than a passing acknowledgment. In Tim, Mary Horton mentions that she was born in America but nothing further is made from this. Her Americanness is not a source of curiosity to the simple-minded Tim, nor commented upon by Tim’s jealous/envious sister, nor by Tim’s workingclass parents. The only reason for its passing reference seems to be because the film’s makers felt it had to be acknowledged, in order then to be dismissed as irrelevant. Unlike those films with not-Americans, here it was felt the film’s audience would notice. In other words, the makers of this film do not feel that the Americanisation of Australia was not a fait accompli. The same is true for most films in this category. In The Delinquents, Brownie (played by an inescapably American Charlie Schatter) explains his Americanness by claiming to have been born in Australia but taken to the United States as a baby. There is nothing in Brownie’s behaviour, attitudes or in reactions of others to him which serves to suggest that he is shaped by being American (other than the way he pronounces English). Roadgames has not one but two clearly American characters, played by relatively well-known American actors, Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee. Neither denies their American origins, although Quid (played by Keach) has little to say about his, and Hitch (played by Curtis) is specifically identified only by reference to her American diplomat father in Canberra. Their Americanness goes largely unnoticed by any of the Australians they have contact with, and there is quite a number of these, many of whom might have good reason for drawing attention to Quid being an American. These two characters (and the film) find nothing
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remarkable in being Americans in Australia, not even the extraordinary coincidence of one American, hitch-hiking across the Nullarbor, being given a lift by another American, driving a truck. It is all so taken for granted that it is again curious that the film makers felt it necessary even to mention it at all. Frog Dreaming4 continues this pattern of explaining the presence of an American in an Australian context by one or two lines of exposition. In this case, Cody (a suitably American name, reminiscent of Buffalo Bill Cody) is the ward of an Australian, having become so after the death of his parents. (Australia seems surprisingly fatal for parents of pre-pubescent American boys.) As in The Earthling, the location is the Australian bush and, like The Earthling, the bush plays a significant part in the drama. Here, however, it is not simply the Australian landscape as it is imagined in white Australian culture that is colonised, but also an Aboriginal perception of it. Cody, a white American boy, becomes an ‘initiate’ into Aboriginal mysteries. After the identity of the ‘bunyip’ in a flooded quarry is finally, through Cody’s persistent curiosity and intellectual precocity, revealed to be an old engine, abandoned and subsequently subjected to explicable if unexpected natural forces, it is to Cody alone that an Aboriginal kadaicha reveals that the place is, in fact, a sacred site, a place of ‘frog dreaming’ (which presumably whites had defiled with their mining). This is taking Wim Wenders’ oft quoted line ‘the Americans have colonised our subconsciousness’ to another level – an American colonising ‘our’ Aboriginal, dreaming as well. This is also the case in a confused way in The Last Wave, where the appropriation of (alleged) Aboriginal mythology by a (not?) American is even more absolute. Gross Misconduct is an exceptional case of ‘So what?’. The protagonist, Justin Thorne, is played by American Jimmy Smits (presumably well known from the television series L. A. Law, and more recently NYPD Blue). The fact that Thorne is an American is not relegated to a throwaway line as in Tim, or the marginally longer biographical expositions in The Delinquents, Roadgames and Frog Dreaming. The very opening scene of the film makes overt reference to the Americanness of Thorne and his family – a totally incongruous Fourth of July picnic on the banks of the Yarra. A later discussion emphasises the fact that Thorne is a recently arrived American academic. Thorne is later falsely accused of raping a student, but nothing of this seems to be specifically related to his national and cultural origins. The sexual attraction from Jenny, the student, does not seem to have any basis in his Americanness; it is explained as her neurotic obsessions and the effect of her traumatic relations with her father. Nonetheless, masculine sexual attractiveness is a regular aspect of the construction of Americanness in Australian films,
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and Gross Misconduct uses this as a part of Thorne’s character to maintain suspense. He is sexually attractive (in the diegesis); the film maintains the probability that Jenny’s obsession with him may be because of this, until the revelatory denouement. There is an important ‘twist’ to the tail in Gross Misconduct when it is revealed that Thorne had previously contracted a ‘Green Card’ marriage in the United States, and that he will not or cannot reveal in his defence the status of his previous marriage because of its illegality in the United States, and the possible consequences for his previous wife. This is obviously an intrusion of matters that are intrinsically American (and make it less likely that this character could have been Australian without damaging the narrative). This serves, however, only a narrative convenience, providing a dramatic irony that enhances both the innocence of Thorne and his moral stature, while his silence helps ensure his (wrongful) conviction.
JUST A COUSIN OF MINE: YOU’RE LIABLE FOR TO SEE HIM HERE ANY OLD TIME5 Americans as ‘cousins’ in Australian films depend upon a simultaneous familiarity – a ‘family resemblance’ – and a difference which makes them sufficiently interesting to warrant inclusion as protagonists or main characters. Most importantly, as cousins, these Americans do not represent a threat to Australia, Australians (except those who for narrative purposes ‘deserve’ it) or to the ‘Australian way of life’. Some become ‘adopted’ Australians or, in one way or another, are established on a journey towards being ‘Australianised’, a distinct reversal of the usual perceptions of Australian-American relations. The best known of these films are the two Crocodile Dundee films, yet in relation to the American presence in Australian film, these are atypical. Crocodile Dundee, looking simultaneously to a local audience and an American one, takes for granted a pre-existing Americanisation of Australian culture. This is not an Americanisation that insists Australian culture has been ‘colonised’, has been modified (from whatever it was) in ways which have worked to make it more ‘American’. That perception would have been fatal for the film as it relies on a clear sense of cultural difference between Australian and American identity. The film ‘loads’ this difference by making the main signifier of difference a ‘throwback’ Australian, a bushman of an earlier cultural tradition. This image remains a powerful signifier of Australian myths of identity and national character, while still allowing Dundee some attributes of the later twentieth century version of the larrikin. At the same time, Crocodile Dundee is dependent upon the unstated assumption that Americanisation of Australia has produced in Australians a familiarity with America and
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Americans. The adventures which Dundee undergoes in New York are explicable only because unfamiliarity with American culture and social existence is restricted to Dundee-, and not, by implication, to a putative Australian audience. Indeed, the amount of time the film spends ‘explaining’ Dundee – the first third of the film, which is in narrative terms almost pointless – may be as much for the benefit of an Australian audience as it is for an American one. Americans in America are as familiar as family members, occupying a range of stereotypes ‘known’ from Hollywood films and American television programs. Americans are also cousins in Crocodile Dundee because they so readily recognise the essential attractiveness of the all-Australian Dundee. Jealous boyfriends and the odd pimp notwithstanding, Americans in this narrative are all won over by Dundee’s charms, and allow him to take liberties that it is difficult to imagine they would allow their fellow citizens. Crocodile Dundee is a reverse colonial. Super-Ocker Mick Dundee travels to the United States to win the hearts and minds of the local inhabitants, and succeeds. Americans fall willing, mesmerised victims to this atavistic, anachronistic cousin, this reminder of what they once were. The ‘cousin’ from Down Under is able to achieve that which the cousins from Over There can seldom do – win over the ‘other’. Leaving Crocodile Dundee aside and noting the exception of the Vietnam war film, The Odd Angry Shot, the American cousins in all these Australian films achieve sexual relationships with such relative ease that this characteristic becomes a fundamental way of defining Americanness in Australian film. In High Rolling, the sexual confidence of the American Tex is pointedly contrasted with the more ‘normal’ Australian male diffidence of Albie. Essentially a road move, High Rolling proceeds with Tex as a successful sexual predator and Albie the more reluctant, easily embarrassed sidekick. Throughout, Tex’s character, his Americanness, is consistently underlined by his sexual aggression, accompanied by the other consistent American trait, abrasive extroversion. Tex’s caricatured Americanness does differentiate this film from others where the presence of an American in the plot also serves no clear narrative purpose. But this difference is simply one of the quantity of Americanness given the character rather than that Americanness contributing to or influencing the narrative. The same might be said of One Night Stand. This disjointed narrative of four young people ‘trapped’ in the Sydney Opera House on the night that global nuclear war commences does not seem to require that one of these is an American. That Sam is an American is never in doubt, nor do the others ignore it. Arguably, for dramatic purposes it is ‘easier’ to create four distinct characters by making one of them ‘foreign’.6 All the
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same, there is no narrative reason for Sam to be an American beyond the irony that he is a deserter from the armed forces of one of the nations responsible for the nuclear war raging outside. In a reversal of the roles of the two men in High Rolling, here it is Sam who is the more introverted, more sexually repressed while the Australian (Brendan) is the more active. Sam’s status as a cousin is not so much that his Americanness has narrative function but that he quite clearly and equally shares the experiences of the three Australians. His thoughtfulness, sensitivity and intelligence are a deliberate contrast to Brendan (who despite the approach of Armageddon, seems concerned with little more than sex) but none of these qualities is asserted because he is an American. There is in One Night Stand a curious inversion of Bob Ellis’s aphorism to the effect that ‘Americans act as if they believe that they are Superman on furlough, while Australians act like crims on parole’.7 In Rebel, the eponymous American protagonist does both. Rebel, like Sam, is a deserter from the American armed forces on some rather inchoate conscientious grounds. Rebel, in keeping with the general perception of Americans in Australian films, is sexually attractive, active and successful; he courts and beds Kathy, the older, married Australian woman. His American charms, sexual and otherwise, are such that he has the effect of arousing sympathy even from the dogged Australian cop helping the American military police capture him, and the amoral black marketeer, Tiger Kelly. Nonetheless, Rebel is less a rebel (if his desertion can be categorised as such) than he is a victim. Being an ‘ordinary’ American does not itself make the American in question a cousin. At some level, nearly all American cousins are victims. Even as cousins, their Americanness sets them apart, defines them and sets the parameters for the variety of relations they have with Australians. Almost, inevitably, one of these relations is a sexual one. Others involve differing levels of victimisation or exploitation by Australians – as blatant as Tiger Kelly’s attempts to exploit Rebel, homicidal in intent (as the Baker brothers in Razorback), or class-based snobbery towards Davis in Phar Lap. All four characters in One Night Stand are victims, of course, but whereas the three Australians are victims of forces over which they have no control, Sam, ironically, brings on his own victimisation. Nearly all the Americans in the Crocodile Dundee films are victims of Dundee in his role as a trickster, or if victims is a little harsh, then perhaps they are simply comical dupes. Some victim-cousins manage to change their status, to reverse their situation. Alma Harris, in Over The Hill, is seemingly a lifelong victim of familial demands and patriarchal oppression. But her victim- isation is,
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moreover, in America and related to American cultural circumstances. She requires the liberating experience of the Australian bush to release her. In other films, Australia is the source and site of victimisation. In Razorback, Carl Winters is doubly a victim of Australia inasmuch as the Outback in the combined form of the psychotic Baker brothers and a giant boar cause the death of his wife and unborn child. He too becomes a victim, albeit not terminally, of the brothers, through them of the environment itself, and finally of course of the razorback. Carl, however, goes from victim to avenging warrior in the space of the narrative. Rebel is a victim of war and in a more direct sense than Sam in One Night Stand. To an extent, he triumphs over military and local police, and the exploitative Tiger Kelly, although his victory is as hard won as is Carl’s over a rampaging giant pig. Victimising Americans in these ways reduces their capacity to act as if they are ‘Superman on furlough’. An actual Superman on furlough (or retirement really) occurs in The Return of Captain Invincible in which a super-hero, victimised by the McCarthy era in America, has found his way to Australia and drunken obscurity. A ‘deserter’ from the fight for ‘truth, justice and the American way’, he is brought back to the fray by the love of an Australian policewoman. As victims, however, few of these Americans are alone. There are Australians who take their side, share their battles, even in the case of One Night Stand, share their fate. Thus common ground is often found, and not always and only on the basis of sexual attraction. Jake Cullen, whose grandson is the first victim of the boar in Razorback8 has a family loss in common with Carl. Tex and Albie, in the formulaic requirements of the road movie, are buddies or mates who share adventures. Rebel is supported by other Australians and his own fellow servicemen. In all these films, outsider status is thus mitigated. In The Odd Angry Shot, this similarity is carried to the level of making Americans largely indistinguishable from Australians in their interest in boozing, gambling, whoring and brawling.
CAPTIVATING CAPITALISTIC COLONIALISTS Historically, World War II is a key moment in at least the cinematic version of the Americanisation of Australia. Several films explicitly recognise this: Blood Oath, Death of a Soldier and Rebel. The first two also implicitly demonstrate that this Americanisation was accompanied by a measure of political colonisation, that America in various ways interfered, directly and indirectly, in Australian affairs. These two films argue that in asking ‘Big Cousin’ for succour, Australian had surrendered some of its sovereignty. Blood Oath is concerned with what are exclusively Australian matters,
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the trial of Japanese soldiers on the Indonesian island of Ambon for war crimes against Australian prisoners-of-war. The Americans are literally present only through an apparent ‘observer’ whose purpose is to ensure an acquittal for a high ranking Japanese officer. America itself is a constantly referred to absent-presence. Americanisation here is political and interferes with and (mis)directs Australian legal proceedings. This Americanisation – an implied imposition of a ‘New World Order’ – extends to Australia, and ‘explains’ why the Australian Judge-Advocate is determined subtly to obstruct or direct the proceedings to favour the Japanese and to avoid satisfying any Australian ‘desire’ for revenge. (The film ensures an Australian viewpoint by casting the quintessential Australian Brian Brown in the main role of indefatigable but frustrated investigator/prosecutor.) By use of graphic flashbacks of ill-treatment and execution of POWs, this excessively legalistic evenhandedness is subverted by the film and the need for explanations for the obstructive actions of the Judge-Advocate heightened. The explanation offered is that of the ongoing Americanisation of the Post-war Western World, including Australia, Blood Oath takes an anti-American stance, touching a deeply embedded historical thread in Australian attitudes to America and, like Death of a Soldier, does so by selecting an historically sensitive moment when particular aspects of this anti-Americanism coalesced. The representation of Americans here is that they arc duplicitous, self-serving and ‘corrupt’ to the extent of interfering with the Australian legal system to achieve their own ends. The Australian legal system is also subverted to American ends in Death of a Soldier. The film begins with the arrival in Australia of General Douglas MacArthur along with tens of thousands of American soldiers. Actual newsreel footage and reconstructions recreate the public acclaim accorded MacArthur but this is instantly contrasted to footage which emphasises the Australians fighting alone in New Guinea. This deliberate dichotomy remains a thread within the film, which is actually concerned with the murder of three Australian women by a Private Eddie Leonksi and his subsequent court-martial and execution by the American Army. In a telling scene, MacArthur is shown to be seated in a place of honour in the Australian parliament, listening to Prime Minister Curtin respond to hostile questioning about the right of the American army to prosecute an American soldier/citizen for ‘crimes committed in Australia, against Australian citizens’. The clear implication is that MacArthur is controlling events, including the Australian government. Leonski is, however, another American victim, although this time he is a victim of his own nation, not of Australia or Australians. He is
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a murderer but he is also clearly insane. The American army, for reasons of ‘public relations’ is determined to hang him. His status as a victim attracts the sympathy of Australians, represented here by a duo of Australian detectives whose investigations of the crimes arc often hampered by the Americans. This sympathy is similar to that accorded Rebel by the Australian policeman and is based solidly in the Australian tradition of the ‘fair go’. They, and, by extension, Australia itself are powerless to prevent the Americans doing what they want. The same powerlessness is evident in Blood Oath, where a less important Japanese junior officer is also sentenced to death in the name of American expediency, although this time it is by an Australian court. Both these films demonstrate American colonialism within the very fabric of Australian social institutions – the legal system and the government. Individual Americans, in Death of A Soldier at least, are given some redeeming features although certain basic characteristics are present, especially the sexual attractiveness of Americans. This is, however, a sustained representation of Americans as invaders, so much so that the film, retells and even exaggerates what are known to be fallacious incidents of conflict between Australian and American servicemen. More accurate in Rebel is the resentment which Australian men, servicemen or otherwise, felt towards the willingness of American MPs to wield batons, and Rebel himself is rescued by waterside workers who object to his being beaten by ‘dog wallopers’ – a recognition of common cause at a key moment and a reason for Rebel’s last minute refusal to take the ship to safety. In Death of A Soldier and particularly in Rebel, due to the latter’s idiosyncratic style, there are parts of Sydney and Melbourne that become indistinguishable from (less desirable) parts of American cities (or Hollywood images of these), especially in the way in which the streets are patrolled and policed only by American MPs. Like the colonisation of the landscape in The Earthling, there is a colonisation of the Australian cityscape in Death of A Soldier and Rebel. In films without wartime narrative locations, American colonisation is usually less institutional and less political, more individualistic and, most importantly, economic. Colonisation by Americans in Australian films is more often an extension of capitalism, or at least its practice by individuals. This is in keeping with the common perception, true of most of the films that have been discussed above in different categories, that Americans and Americanism are defined by wealth and materialism. In short, Americans are rich, or even if cousins, much better off than Australians. Out-and-out capitalist Americans are found in The Man From Snowy River and The Man From Snowy River 2, The Picture Show Man, Hunting and
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in Exchange Lifeguards, with a lesser version of both in the character of Dave Davis in Phar Lap. Agents and spokesmen (they are always male) for American capitalism, American ‘colonists’ are found in The Coca-Cola Kid and Undercover. Ownership of bits of Australia is clearly fundamental to the capitalist/colonist and in the case of Harrison in The Man From Snowy River films, his ownership has presumably been accomplished in the same way as any white colonist of the nineteenth century – ‘I carved this place out of the bush’. But Harrison is more than a normal squatter. Clancy, even he of the Overflow and spokesman for a more traditional, pre-capitalist Australia, accuses Harrison of being far more greedy and ruthless than the old time squatters. Yet the reasons for Harrison being an American in this most Australian of all legends are far from clear. One reason is the inevitable extra-diegetic commercial one, and for once the producers did attract an American actor of sufficient reputation to justify this strategy. But Harrison is also an American precisely because of his ruthless attitude towards owning property and making money. It is easier to locate these traits in an American than in an Australian, who as a credible dramatic character would have to ‘work’ to overcome the residual cultural traits of ‘fair go’, egalitarianism, and mateship – even as an employer and landowner – and who would face greater condemnation on these grounds alone.9 Even so, the film is careful to soften the image of Americans it creates via Harrison by the expediency of introducing his more acceptable brother, who despite being as American (the same actor after all) has all the qualities of a genuine Australian bushman: mateship, egalitarianism, humour in adversity, a touch of larrikinism. He is, however, also an exploiter of Australian resources through his goldmining activities. What makes him more Australian than American is his singular lack of success at it. By the time of The Man From Snowy River 2, Harrison’s out-and-out capitalist status has been modified. The ‘colonist’ American is himself ‘colonised’ or ‘out-colonised’ by the English and particularly the Bunyip aristocracy. Harrison’s functioning as a capitalist is reduced by the plot device that he needs the financial support of the banks (or the Bunyip aristocracy who run them), which in turn makes him into something of an ‘Aussie battler’ who rejects the banks’ form of capitalism and thus his own expansionist plans, and aligns himself with the ‘ideology’ of Jim Craig, the ‘Man’ himself. Here, Americans have shifted slightly towards the cousin end of the spectrum and away from the traditional class enemy of the ordinary Australian, the upper-class English and, especially, those who would emulate them in Australia, the Bunyip aristocracy. This colonising shift (from American to English) is continued in
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Quigley. The film is basically a Hollywood western in an Australian location,10 in which the eponymous hero, an American gunfighter brought to Outback Australian as a ‘vermin controller’ soon finds himself at war with the ‘English’ station owner, Marston (when he discovers Aborigines are the ‘vermin’ to be controlled). Of the dozen or so white men Quigley kills along the way, not one speaks with an Australian accent. They are purportedly Scots or Irish convicts who resent Quigley because he is American – rather than turning against their ‘master’ for whom they are actually prepared to die. In Quigley, as in quite a number of these films (for example, Over the Hill and The Last Wave) an American has an instant affinity with Aborigines. To what extent this is a by-product of their Americanness is far from clear. In Phar Lap, the American part-owner of the horse, Davis, is a capitalist both in the sense that he has the money to buy the horse and is a wealthy businessman. He is contrasted to Harry Telford, the trainer, who is consistently on the verge of bankruptcy – a real little Aussie battler. Davis is, however, also a victim of the Bunyip aristocracy, this time in the form of the upper-class rulers of the racing industry. He is described by one as a ‘pushy little Jew’ (but significantly not disparaged as an American) and his horse (another Aussie battler even if he did originate in New Zealand) is victimised by the handicappers at the behest of the threatened upper-classes. It is rare but not unknown in these films for the American capitalist to get his comeuppance. Across the two Man From Snowy River films the colonising American is brought down from his capitalist place of power to a more Australian level of equality by events in the second half of the story. In Exchange Lifeguards, a trivial film as interested in tits-and-bums as anything else, the same process is at work. Exposure to the simple, ‘she’ll be right’ pleasures of Australian littoral living alerts a colonising American, this time a developer threatening the Australianness of a beach location, to the joys of Australianness. This re-culturalisation causes him to use his Yankee know-how against the agents of rampant capitalism. Interestingly, his father, who owns the company, has predicted this and wants it to happen. Palmer, the piratical rival in The Picture Show Man is defeated (deflected, actually) by Australian larrikinism; the truck with his projecting equipment ‘accidentally’ runs into a river. Some American capitalists are more resistant to the Australianising process. Rapacious and clearly crooked, Michael Bergman, the capitalist in Hunting, functions at some ‘rarefied’ level of capitalist activity that minimises his connections with ordinary, everyday Australians to barely existent. The exception is the Australian woman whom he seduces and rapes. He receives his comeuppance in the form of bullet from this excessively
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wronged Australian mistress. In filmic terms, this is an Americanisation – shooting the villain to provide resolution and narrative closure is the sine qua non of Hollywood cinema, as is amply demonstrated when bullets remove Marston in Quigley, but then he is not an American villain but something (in Australian eyes) much worse, an upper-class English villain. Agents of American capitalism also undergo a unique form of Australianisation whereby their exploitative tendencies are eroded by a slow but effective absorption. This is not always achieved without the agents’ colonising activities first having sometimes dire effects. In The Coca-Cola Kid, the piratical capitalistic techniques of Becker, the representative of Coca-Cola’s territorial expansionism, and thus of America itself, destroys the last holdout of Australian enterprise (of Australianness) against Cocoa-Cola/American imperialism. In so doing, and with the help of sexual attraction to an Australian woman, Becker comes to realise the consequences of his own actions and to abandon the trappings of capitalism (signified by his discarded wallet of credit cards) and embrace a ‘she’ll be right’ approach to life. Ironically, this decision is made easier by a tangential Americanisation of Australia – American dollars provided by a local ‘subversive’ group who believe him to be with the CIA. In Undercover, Max, the American marketing expert imported by an Australian undergarment manufacturer Fred Burley, is also won over from his abrasive Americanness by the charms of Liz, a young Australian woman, but not before he, rather like his counterpart in Exchange Lifeguards, and with the active cooperation of the Australian manufacturer, Americanises the business. With no apparent sense of irony, Burley thanks Max for helping Australian industry to be more Australian. Max completes his Australianisation when in response to Burley’s claim, ‘It isn’t even your country’. He replies, ‘But it’s my future’. Max, as with Becker and Bobby (Exchange Lifeguards), maintains the Australian filmic convention that American men are sexually irresistible, even if their Americanness sometimes takes a while to be broken down. Max has the full cultural stereotyping of abrasiveness, extroversion and vociferous over-assertiveness, but he also has shiny white teeth (which he shows constantly) and brilliantined, patent-leather hair, all of which combine to give him an American-sized male ego that insists upon the recognition of his own irresistibility. (The others have their own versions of American male beauty and matching egos.) The all-Australian country girl, of course, resists his charms – at first. Becker, on the other hand, is the instant focus of sexual desire for Terri, the Australian woman. Yet there is a strong measure of sexual ambiguity about Becker, his resistance
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to Terri’s obvious advances, display of certain ‘feminine’ traits (crying when upset, over-concern with appearance), and when he finally renounces capitalism and sheds the uniform (his three-piece suit), his new appearance (white shirt, open to the navel, tight blue jeans) gives him a more than vaguely gay appearance. A similar sexual ambiguity attaches itself to Bergman in Hunting, implicitly signified in an early sequence, a party Bergman is holding where the guests are all beautiful young men. He also has an ambiguous relationship with a young, saturnine (and presumably Australian) male personal assistant. In all other instances, rampant heterosexuality is twinned with the colonising impulse in the representation of Americans. True love (or old fashioned sex) finally deflects the colonising imperative. Americanisation is successful at both the level of capitalistic enterprise and sexual conquest but the two actually prove to be incompatible. To put it abruptly, Americanising impulse succumbs to Australianness not through resolving the cultural incompatibility or even by being absorbed by Australianness, but by sex – with an Australian. While these films place Americanness and Americanisation as sources of conflict with Australianness and shape their narratives to greater or lesser extent around the confrontation of the two cultures, they are also engaged in demonstrating the power of Australianness to resist such colonisation. While some films (The Man From Snowy River 2 and Exchange Lifeguards) may suggest that compromise is the best resolution, others effectively reject Americanisation and insist that Australianness will win through. The only true case of the ‘triumph’ of Americanisation is to be found in Quigley, with its OK Corral shootout (ie its fundamentally American) resolution. Even here, though, the true winners are the Aborigines; Quigley returns whence he came without being Australianised. In numerical terms alone, it is hard not to conclude that Americans and America are of no great importance to Australian filmmakers, at least in the sense of their being important components in narratives, or as a source of characters of significance because of their nationality or accepted national/cultural characteristics. The less easily detected influence of American culture on Australian films, leaving aside the matter of aesthetic and production practices, is perhaps more pervasive, as it is in Australian culture more generally but equally difficult to quantify. It exists in the occasional use of Hollywood genres and in the films designated ‘Mid-Pacific’ in which national identity is deliberately eschewed. Despite the wide variation in the content and styles of Australian film, over the nearly 30 years since the rebirth of the Australian cinema, the majority of films has been concerned with Australian matters, and in fact profoundly introspective.
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This introspection then confirms that America, Americans and Americanisation are not matters of overwhelming concern, and that they do not constitute a powerful cultural force requiring representation and reproduction in any more than a relative handful of films. This may be because Americanisation has become naturalised in Australia to the extent that it is invisible. But film is often concerned with making discernible the overlooked (the taken-as-natural), with allegorically and metaphorically raising matters from below the surface of the cultural subconscious. The limited number and limited modes of representations of Americans in Australian films do imply that whatever may be on the Australian cultural agenda, or whatever is lurking below its surface, it does not seem to have much to do in any direct sense with a concern over Americanisation. 1 Definitions of what is an ‘Australian’ film are difficult. Scott Murray attempts this before recognising that ‘there is no foolproof way of determining what constitutes an Australian film. Common sense must be applied, with all its attendant flaws’. Australian Film, 1978–1992, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 6. 2 My idea of the ‘not-American’ has an echo in a film mentioned in this paper, Frog Dreaming, where a husband attempts to deflect his wife from interrupting him further by telling her of the existence of the not-wind (a wind that can be heard when there is no wind to be heard) and the not-light. ‘The not-light’, she says, ‘Oh, you mean the dark’. ‘Exactly’, he replies. A not-American is an Australian for purposes of the diegesis, but retains a ghostly, extra-diegetic image as an American. 3 Why both have expressly Irish names is beyond my wit to explain. 4 Written, as was Roadgames and Razorback, by ex-patriate American Everett De Roche. 5 Line from a popular Tin Pan Alley song of the 1920s. 6 In fact, two, as Eva is a Czechoslovakian born immigrant. 7 Cited in S. Dermody and E. Jacka, The Screening of Australia, vol. 1. Currency Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 43. 8 The mysterious loss of the baby and the subsequent trial of Jake, together with the public disbelief that an animal took the child and personal vilification, gives Razorback a more than passing resemblance to the Azaria Chamberlain incident. 9 In a twist of the same scenario, the greedy (and in this case, crooked) landowning capitalist in Minnamurra (a sort of The Man From Snowy River 3) is an upper-class Englishman. 10 And not the first of these. For example, Rangel River (1936), The Kangaroo Kid (1950), and The Shadow of the Boomerang (1960).
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APPENDIX: FILMS DISCUSSED Attack Force Z, 1982, Tim Burstall Babe, 1996, Chris Noonan Blood Oath, 1990, Stephen Wallace The Coca-Cola Kid, 1985, Dusan Makavejev Crocodile Dundee, 1986, Peter Farman Crocodile Dundee II, 1988, John Cornell Dangerous Summer, 1982, Quentin Masters Dead Calm, 1989, Philip Noyce Death of a Soldier, 1986, Philippe Mora The Delinquents, 1989, Chris Thompson The Earthling, 1980, Peter Collinson Evil Angels, 1988, Fred Schepisi Exchange Life Guards, 1993, Maurice Murphy Frog Dreaming, 1985, Brian TenchardSmith Gross Misconduct, 1993, George Miller Harlequin, 1980, Simon Wincer High Rolling, 1977, Igor Auzins Hunting, 1991, Frank Howson The Last Wave, 1977, Peter Weir Mad Dog Morgan, 1976, Philippe Mora Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 1985, George Miller and George Ogilvie The Man From Snowy River, 1982, George Miller The Man From Snowy River 2, 1988, Geoff Burrows Minnamurra, 1989, Ian Barry Newsfront, 1979, Philip Noyce
‘Norman Loves Rose’, 1982 Henri Safran Now and Forever, 1983, Adrian Carr The Odd Angry Shot, 1979, Tom Jeffrey One Night Stand, 1984, John Duigan Over the Hill, 1992, George Miller Phar Lap, 1983, Simon Wincer The Picture Show Man, 1977, John Power The Pirate Movie, 1982, Ken Annakin Quigley, 1991, Simon Wincer Race for the Yankee Zephyr, 1981, David Hemmings Razorback, 1984, Russell Mulcahy Rebel, 1985, Michael Jenkins The Return of Captain Invincible, 1983, Philippe Mora Roadgames, 1981, Richard Franklin Star Struck, 1982, Gillian Armstrong The Survivor, 1981, David Hemmings That Eye, The Sky, 1993, John Ruane Thirst, 1979, Rod Hardy Tim, 1979, Michael Pate The Time Guardian, 1987, Brian Hannant Turkey Shoot, 1982, Brian TrenchardSmith Undercover, 1984, David Stevens Wendy Cracked a Walnut, 1990, Michael Pattinson The Year of Living Dangerously, 1982, Peter Weir
LITERATURE Joan Kirkby AUSTRALIAN GRUNGE: US IMPORT OR LOCAL PRODUCT? The relation between cultural texts and their contexts remains one of the most vexed issues of contemporary cultural study; unproblematised models of ‘influence’ or ‘zeitgeist’ have given way to more complex but still inconclusive models of ‘intertextuality’, ‘dialogism’, ‘thick description’. The grunge phenomenon is an interesting case in point. Australian grunge fiction has strong US connections on the part of all the cultural producers involved – the writers, the publishers, the reviewers, critics, academics – but it also simultaneously connects with specific pre-existing, long term concerns of Australian culture. In both the United States and Australia, the ‘grunge’ label signals a youth-based resistance or challenge to mainstream norms and values. However, in the United States ‘grunge’ has been associated with music, while in Australia ‘grunge’ is a literary phenomenon. Australian grunge fiction is produced by young culturally literate urban writers aware of US grunge music and contemporary US urban writers like Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney who write about new urban realities, pop culture and a general disaffection with mainstream values and norms. In the case of grunge, it would seem that Australian writers found affinities and corroboration in US cultural forms for what they wanted to say about things that concerned them in the Australian context, and publishers aware of the high recognition value of the grunge label found an attractive and viable way to publish and promote younger urban Australian writers exploring non mainstream styles and attitudes to gender, class, ethnicity, and writing itself.
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THE AUSTRALIAN GRUNGE PHENOMENON Somewhere around the middle of 1995 the arrival of Australian grunge fiction was heralded in the newspapers and literary journals of the land. The Australian Magazine featured Murray Waldren’s ‘LIT. GRIT invades OZLIT’, The Australian Barry Oakley’s ‘Disappointed Generation Finds A Voice’, The Sun Herald Marjory Bennett’s ‘The Grungy Australian Novel’ and Rolling Stone Sean Nicholls’ ‘Generation Next’.1 This coincided with the publication in the middle of that year of a number of exciting and challenging new works by younger Australian writers: Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (the blurb christens Ettler Sydney’s ‘Empress of Grunge’), Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded, Andrew McGahan’s 1988 (the prequel to his 1992 novel Praise retrospectively declared the first grunge novel), as well as Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me, Edward Berridge’s The Lives of the Saints and Clare Mendes’ Drift Street. Leonie Stevens’ Nature Strip was published in 1994 and Richard King’s Kindling Does for Firewood in 1996.2 And there is more on the way. Jose Borghino, former editor of Editions, has said that ‘as far as Australia goes, most of it is yet to be published ... I know several books are coming out in which younger writers take a dysfunctional view of the world or is that a view of the dysfunctional world?’3 Heralded as the voice of a new generation, ‘grunge’ as a label has been both embraced and rejected; writers are ambivalent about the label but acknowledge its high recognition factor among young people; critics argue that it is a marketing ploy that is both capitalising on and taming a radical resistance movement – or alternatively that it is a market-driven phenomenon that is lowering the standard of Australian writing; others argue that the imported label obscures the continuity of this new fiction with a tradition of urban writing and social protest that already existed in Australian literature; others emphasise that it makes obvious the fact that contemporary Australia is inextricably connected to the global.
US DERIVATION OF THE TERM GRUNGE The grunge label has more or less stuck in its reference to this group of younger Australian writers, though the term is not without controversy in the Australian context. For one thing it is a derivation of a US slang term with specific cultural references. The term grunge in the United States is a back formation of the adjective ‘grungy’ which is cited in the 1970 edition of the US standard dictionary, Webster, as deriving from ‘a blend of GRIMY, DINGY & grunt, childish euphemism for defecate’ and as slang, meaning‘dirty, messy, disreputable, etc.;
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unpleasant in any way’.4 In the early 1990s the word ‘grunge’ was used specifically to refer to the music of the so-called ‘grunge’ bands from the Seattle area, including primarily Nirvana, but also sometimes Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and others (Mudhoney, Green River). These bands started as alternative bands with a distinctive rough, ‘dirty’, ‘sludgy’ sound in defiance of the comfortable, easy listening style of mainstream rock bands and were directed at a young generation disaffected with lifestyles no longer meaningful or available to them, a generation whose lives were dominated by the prospect of long term unemployment, drugs and angst – ‘depression, anger, glumness and basic all round dark negative feelings’.5 They produced a ‘primitive’, ‘crude’, ‘live’ sound that was attributed in part to their conditions of production, a ‘garage sound’ rather than a studio sound. With stage diving, headbanging, crowd surfing, grunge shows were high energy and wild: ‘Nirvana liked to destroy everything on stage at the end of each show ... The musicians ... let out all their feelings, especially hate and anger.’6 In the United States grunge was a resistance to mainstream pop/rock and conveyed the pain and disillusion of a younger generation. Grunge music expressed the sense of economic and psychic futility that characterised the lives of young people in supposedly affluent America; disaffected with the glamour, hype and money associated with mainstream rock, they adopted a grunge look (flannels and ripped jeans) in defiance of the expensive leather jeans and fashion that they associated with mainstream rock. It is claimed that the authentic grunge moment in the States lasted for only two or three years in the early 1990s before it was taken over and commercialised by media and advertising in a slick music/lifestyle marketing package (grunge fashion, etc.). With the suicide of Kurt Cobain, leader of the band Nirvana in 1994, purists say the moment was over. However, before the commercialisation of grunge, it represented an alternative and a resistance to the mainstream; one critic has suggested that it is a 1990 term for counter culture.7
GRUNGE IN THE AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT In Australia grunge has been used almost exclusively in relation to literature. Although the first edition of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary (1981) contains no entry for either grunge or grungy, the second edition (1991) defines ‘grunge’ firstly as ‘a substance of an unpleasant nature, especially dirt, scum or slime’ and secondly as ‘a guitar-based form of heavy rock music using simple minor-chord progressions, on-the-beat rhythms and lyrics ranging from the frivolous to the unsavoury’, noting that it is a back formation of ‘grungy’.
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The third edition (1997) adds a third meaning, ‘a fashion in which clothes are worn which are normally considered shabby or unfashionable, as those bought in second-hand shops’ and contains a new entry on ‘grunge literature’: ‘literature which explores the values of those usually considered to be part of an underclass’.8 Grunge literature has been ‘canonised’ in the Australian context. It is of interest in this context to note that the term grunge does not appear to be used with reference to literature at all in the United States where it remains a term associated with the Seattle bands of the early 1990s. However, there are problems with the appropriation of the label grunge in Australia. Characterised as ‘piss’n tell’ or ‘sniff, snort’n sex sells’, these texts have been written off as fashion exercises: ‘The hottest trend in publishing is so-called grunge or dirty realism – works by young writers, representing a fairly nihilistic, depressed view of life with lashings of sex, drugs, alcohol and violence, echoing trends in music and film over the past five years’ – without reference to their relevance to the Australian context.9 In ‘Where Does the Misery Come From?’ Henderson and Rowlands argue that media articles such as Waldren’s ‘LIT. GRIT’ and Oakley’s ‘Disappointed Generation’ have created a myth of grunge fiction in Australia, a ‘hip and “cutting edge” genre which trades off global popular cultural currency of the music industry’s wild boys and bad girls of grunge’ and includes ‘any book which has a youngish author, and represents some sex and/or some drugs and/or music which is nonBoring-Adult-Oriented’.10 While they approve ‘the wild girl persona’ of grunge music which allows non-reproductive sex for women and foregrounds; ‘an assertive, aggressive feminine sexuality (bodily functions and drugs included)’, their concern is that the grunge label adopted from US culture obscures the Australian lineage of these books (Mother I’m Rooted, Elizabeth Riley’s All That False Instruction, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, poets Pamela Brown, Joanne Burns, Gig Ryan) and what they have to say about contemporary Australian youth culture: ‘homelessness, unemployment, reduction in the dole and youth wages, introduction of tertiary fees, a pessimistic future conditioned by the globalisation of the economy and economic rationalism’.11 Similarly, in gangland, Mark Davis points out that ‘when young writers have addressed these new realities, their work has been ghetto-ised and dismissed under the tag “grunge”, as if all they offered was a pale Antipodean reflection of the “authentic” American “grunge”’ and that it is a shock to find that ‘some of the themes of this fiction drew not so much on an American fashion as on a current Australian urban reality
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for many younger people finding ways to live with high suicide rates, high unemployment rates, reduced access to education and high rates of infection with HIV/AIDS’. Or that these young people might also ‘be alienated by the failures of soft, fuzzy liberalism’ or ‘any social movement’.12 He points out that ‘No reviewer spoke of any of the “grunge” books as literatures of cultural dispossession’. ‘Instead the books were spoken of in terms of a 1970s paradigm, as existential, individual rites of passages,’13 He argues that it is no coincidence in a society in which there is widespread moral panic involving youth that ‘debates about the emergence of “grunge” are linked to the “decline” of literature.’14 Ian Syson in his Overland essay ‘Smells Like Market Spirit’ is also concerned that the grunge label is a marketing ploy to capture the 25 to 40-year-old reading market and he argues that ‘grunge is much more a continuation of a tradition of Australian literature than it is a new and revolutionary development’, providing a genealogy that includes Barbara Baynton, William Lane’s Working Man’s Paradise, Dorothy Hewett’s Bobbin Up, David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, Garner’s Monkey Grip, Eric Lambert’s Twenty Thousand Thieves, Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watchtower.15 He speaks of ‘the politics of the long-term marginalisation of urban realism’ in the decisions about what kind of fiction gets published in Australia and the tendency of the Australian publishing industry to cater to middle class tastes and to regard the middle class as its target group, concluding that ‘Grunge refers to a growing and exciting force in Australian literature but it also refers to the process in which the same writing is emptied of a lot of the radicalism and force it contains’.16 Each of the writers who spoke at the grunge panel of the Melbourne Writers Festival in 1995 resisted the label feeling that it obscured their dominant and differing interests. Nevertheless the grunge label had a high recognition factor and the grunge panel at the festival was completely packed out, having the largest and youngest audience of any other panel at the festival.
USEFULNESS OF THE TERM ‘GRUNGE’ The ‘grunge’ label has more or less stuck with reference to a group of younger Australian writers resisting or challenging mainstream (middle class Anglo) values including the values of ‘fine writing’. While I do not disagree with the critiques of the writers and commentators recording their ambivalence towards the term, I think ‘grunge’ is a useful term in the Australian context. Without homogenising the writers or their differing projects, the label grunge does signal a number of important interrelated features of this writing:
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It is produced by a younger generation of writers disaffected with mainstream norms, values and expectations and living in very different worlds; grunge writing is concerned with the particular problems of young people; the evidence is that it is appealing to an entirely new readership. (The River Ophelia has sold over 40 000 copies and Praise over 20 000 copies in a market in which the sale of 5000 copies is 17 considered a runaway best seller.) It calls attention to the existence of a significant, newly self conscious and disaffected urban youth subculture; while the writers come from different class backgrounds, they are all disaffected with middle class values and norms. Grunge literature arises in response to cultural issues that are both local and global (underlining the fact that the global is now the local). It is part of a larger phenomenon characteristic of post-industrial, urban cultures. The grunge phenomenon is a moment in popular culture rather than a high cultural moment to which the literary scene has usually responded. It marks a revolt against and a challenge to the fetishisastion of ‘fine writing’ by the mainstream, largely middle class, colonial Australian literary establishment who have reacted with shock, consternation and dismay to the phenomenon and lamented the decline of literature with the very publication of these books (thereby denying the function of literature as ‘social knowledge’ and ‘the fullest realisation of the 18 signifying subject’s condition’). It is a positioned knowledge which asserts a class-based, gender-based, youth-based voice and ethos – as opposed to the supposedly universalist stance of literature with a capital L.
GRUNGE AND THE AUSTRALIAN ABJECT Moreover, grunge with its defining association with foul substances and defecation, is closely related to the abject, cultural theorist Julia Kristeva’s term for a visceral identity crisis in which the insides of the body erupt within signification in an obsessive imagery of ruptured bowels and wombs and excrement and blood and slime, rendering unstable the subject’s sense of social and symbolic identity. The abject, before its new manifestation as grunge (which might be defined as the abject made conscious, owned, integrated and demystified), has been curiously significant in the context of Australian canonical literature. Kristeva’s theories of abjection have particular resonance in the colonial situation and ‘the lure of abjection’ would appear to be part of the colonial legacy.19 Australian grunge writing makes explicit an obsession with bodily effluvia (blood, excrement, decay) that has haunted canonical Australian literature since John Rex escaped the penal settlement only to fall into the belly of the blow-hole in For the Term of His Natural Life; there,
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outside the confines of the colonial establishment he is menaced by the spectre of the abject insides of the body: ‘the laborious advent of some mis-shapen and ungainly abortion of the ooze’, ‘some shapeless mass of mid-sea birth – some voracious polyp, with far-reaching arms and jellied mouth ever open to devour ... and drain out his chilled blood’.20 One of the important aspects of grunge fiction is that it challenges the covert abjection of canonical Australian fiction and goes a long way towards demystifying its pathology, functioning as both critique and liberation. It is a healthier literature in comparison to the pathology of the earlier tradition, a healthier reaction to that inevitable aspect of life – the abjection which earlier writers furtively indulged and displaced onto the working classes (‘the masses’), women, foreigners. Until the advent of grunge fiction (in particular Ettler, McGahan, Tsiolkas) abjection was one of those ‘hegemonic irrationalities’ that Zoe Sofia talks about in ‘Hegemonic Irrationalities and Psychoanalytic Cultural Critique’: The phrase is meant to remind us that cultures produce (and endlessly transform) their own sets of fantasies, symbols, favoured stories, rituals, etc. Such excesses to more rationalised cultural forms are only unnameable if one chooses to remain in polite conspiracy with those embarrassed by too close a scrutiny of their psycho-political investments. For the fact that these irrationalities and pleasures are not necessarily ‘legitimated’ (that is, overtly expressed and sanctioned as ‘official culture’) does not mean they are counter-hegemonic or outside of history. Lacking the force of law, they may nevertheless be potent organisers of sense. To borrow a metaphor from chaos theory, hegemonic irrationalities (or myths) act like ‘strange attractors’ in a cultural field: they represent impossible states of a system whose oscillations are nevertheless configured in relation to these gravitational points.21
Her argument is that ‘a culture will pick up on, repeat and reinscribe those symbols and symptoms that accord with dominant interests’ and that effective cultural change would require ‘transforming the strange attractors that shape ideology and cultural practice’.22 That would seem to be precisely what the writers of grunge may well have effected. In The River Ophelia the narrator completely owns and demystifies the abject; in Praise the abject is no longer abject; and in Loaded the abject is powerfully manipulated as social critique. Australian grunge fiction is perhaps a genuine post-colonial literary moment in which a group of younger writers without an investment in British high culture have found allies in some US writers and musicians in the project to explore their new urban realities – and to challenge the
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fetishisation of ‘fine writing’ in an attempt to maintain a distance from uncomfortable realities and to make middle class taste a cultural norm and a position from which to condemn and denounce other interests and tastes (‘fine writing’ is rarely unseemly, angry, uncomfortable, embarrassing, outrageous, disturbing, puzzling, difficult). In an interview with Murray Waldren Justine Ettler speaks freely of the importance of US writing to her work: ‘It was only when I read Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero and Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City that I felt any personal connection between books and my life. Australian books did not give me that, did not fit with my experience’.23 In the same article Christos Tsiolkas cites Easton Ellis, Acker, the Beats, Kurt Cobain, (as well as Kazantzakis, Genet, Pasolini) noting that music is ‘probably our strongest influence – it’s more immediate, more accessible, where you feel some echo of the angst and estrangement or urban centres world-wide’. Loaded was born from anger at ‘eighties Gekko-style materialism’: ‘the ascendancy of United States culture has been a primary force in that; its greed and materialism left us alienated, yet paradoxically its music and films really spoke to us’.24 In an earlier book examining the relations between Australian and US literatures, The American Model. Influence and Independence in Australian Poetry, Andrew Taylor writes about the impact of US writing on Australian writing in terms of US writing striking him not so much as ‘American’ as ‘familiar’: ‘such diverse poets as Berryman, Bly and Kinnell communicated more meaningfully to me in the act of communicating with themselves than any Australian did’. (The Australian poet ‘talked about himself, as though he were a stranger who had only recently been introduced, and in the kind of language one uses with new acquaintances, children and other foreigners’.)25 For Taylor the encounter with US writing ‘could be described as a liberation from the influence of one’s immediate environment’ providing ‘new voices, new personalities to explore, new circumstances within which to imagine himself’.26 He suggests that cultural borrowers are eclectic, taking what they find relevant from other cultures; they are inevitably critics of their own culture, effecting their native cultures by ‘lateral change’ – pushing it ‘a bit sideways, instead of continuing its growth from its own origins’. He also argues that ‘the cultural importer will be city-orientated rather than rural-orientated’ and that ‘Virtually all the poets in Australia who have shown American influence have concerned their poetry with urban experience’: ‘For most of us writing today, the bush, the farm life ... are more remote from us than O’Hara’s New York’.27 Australian grunge writers share many of these characteristics.
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JUSTINE ETTLER’S THE RIVER OPHELIA The River Ophelia is a modern love story in its negotiation of the uneasy balance between meditation and obscenity that Kristeva argues is characteristic of contemporary love narratives. For Kristeva the amatory relationship is ‘a questioning, unsettling process for its subjects’ and the narrative that would explore this questioning, unsettling process must assume a double function: ‘First, it becomes obscene; it follows fantasy as far as possible down to its innermost perverse recesses’ where ‘Erotic fantasy merges with philosophical meditation in order to reach the focus where the sublime and the abject, making up the pedestal of love, come together in the “flash”: The one in which the “I” reaches the paranoid dimensions of the sublime divinity while remaining close to abject collapse, disgust with the Self ... ‘.28 It is a space that Ettler achieves with consummate artistry. The River Ophelia is divided into five sections entitled ‘Sade’, ‘Ophelia’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Juliette’, ‘Justine’, names conspicuously taken from high cultural texts which examine among other things the corruption of male authority structures and the impossible fate accorded to women, whether Virgin or whore, virtuous or vicious, within those texts. The impulse of the three middle sections is parodic. In Ettler’s words, ‘Taking the piss out of the literary canon (which disproportionately privileges certain kinds of writers and aesthetic politics over others) has always gone handin-hand in the twisted passageways of my imagination with playing around with pop cultural Utopias.’29 However, the narratives that frame the novel – ‘Sade’ and ‘Justine’ – are the ones that interest me in this context; in these sections the narrator relentlessly explores the problematics of abjection without trying to sidestep the genuine threats to subjectivity and the profound embarrassments of embodiment. Significantly, Justine owns the experience of abjection as part of her subject-position as intellectual, white, female in a colonial culture.30 One of the most important aspects of this novel is that the narrator does not except herself from the problems of abjection in which we are all implicated, whether she is rolling around in her own green and orange vomit on a grungy carpet outside the door of Sade’s flat, sucking up the green slime that oozes out from the holes in the toes of his socks, watching crap ooze from a defecating dog or graphically recording her own abdomen ripped apart by violent turbulence. Ettler offers the exhilarating spectacle of a heroine who is prepared to go all the way in chronicling the extremes of self-abasement and selfmutilation to which her obsessive love for Sade impels her; in this as
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Ettler points out, ‘Justine has her pop culture side – she’s a kind of female Terminator who keeps coming back for more, no matter how tough things get’.31 ‘After a day of unexpected euphoria (spending the day in bed waiting for Sade to call she hears that the woman who had cut off her husband’s penis has been acquitted) she decides to become a spy’. When the feckless Sade whom she has relentlessly tracked for days appears unexpectedly at her door, drunk and helpless, she ‘considered taking advantage of the situation by tying him up, gagging him and then maybe torturing him with kitchen utensils for a few hours, but his helplessness repulsed me, so I dribbled stale-smelling spit into his face instead’. Then she half drowns him in the bathtub. The novel is simultaneously painful and funny as it lays bare the ontology of abjection. In Kristeva’s cosmology, abjection is not just the imagery of dog shit or green slime, bleeding bodies or suppurating wounds; rather it signals a crisis of subjectivity, a state of boundaryconfusion in which one has trouble knowing where one’s own body/subjectivity ends and another begins – both psychically and physically – and hence the violence of feelings released in sexual relationships. Abjection is first experienced in the infant’s earliest attempts at separation when it simultaneously resists, fears and loathes the object (usually the mother) it needs, desires, and is obsessed by. For Kristeva (as for Klein) infancy is a perpetual present; throughout our lives we must negotiate the boundary confusion of abjection. However, abjection is not negatively coded in Kristeva. Indeed she observes that abjection ‘seems to be the first authentic feeling of a subject in the process of constituting itself as such’: ‘Abjection of self the first approach to a self that would otherwise be walled in’. The ‘outburst of abjection’ occupies a ‘key position’ in ‘the dynamics of the subject’s constitution’. The experience of abjection is the originary experience of subjectivity, the moment when the nascent subject first slides ‘the bolt of narcissism’ and changes ‘the walls behind which he protected himself into a barely pervious limit’.32 The River Ophelia offers the rare spectacle of a successful negotiation of the crisis of abjection in its painful, funny, intelligent, courageous account of the trials and tribulations of a heroine who owns, names and finally takes responsibility for the unownable aspects of subjectivity.
ANDREW MCGAHAN’S PRAISE Praise is similarly up-front with matters of the abject, from Cynthia’s skin disease to Gordon’s careful observation of everything about sex that smells and gurgles. No other Australian male character has owned his
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gutless prick nor abjured its sovereignty more eloquently: ‘My prick had no guts. It couldn’t take over my brain like pricks were supposed to. I couldn’t subject everything to the whim of the Lord Penis’.33 Nor thought so much and written so effusively about vaginas and what they go through: ‘They bleed, they stink, they exude pus, they collapse, they grow tumours, they fall out.’ In Praise there is a high incidence of the matter of the abject but it is not abject. Instead the text is concerned with calmly, deliberately recording what bodies do – in contrast to bodies erupting guiltily into the text in the surprising orgiastic ways characteristic of the nonintegrated abjection of canonical texts. The novel domesticates by documenting what has been taken as abject by the dominant culture. Primarily concerned with Cynthia and Gordon’s getting to know each other’s bodies very well the text demystifies the abject, becoming an affirmation of the everyday and of bodies as the basis of subjectivity. Gordon tries to explain while watching the porno movie at Carla’s party: ‘The bodies were the important things. They were real. The people were real. They thrust and bounced and the raw flesh gurgled. You could see what humanity was all about.’ In the context of this book, Rachel is the one who seems obscene, using euphemistic language and the rules of decorum to avoid the realities of bodies. For Rachel sex is about communication and precise understanding of ‘What you mean to them. And what they mean to you’. Rachel is obsessed with the meaning of sex, its emotional content, in marked contrast to Gordon’s laconicism which might be seen as a working class refusal of the euphemism and decorum of the upper and middle classes (though they come from similar backgrounds, Rachel is middle-class identified whereas Gordon is striving towards a workingclass ethos). In contrast to Rachel who values communication and understanding and verbalisation and meaning, Gordon feels that ‘Speech is such a definite thing’ and that it is better ‘To act what you feel’. ‘Actions are softer. They can be interpreted in lots of different ways, and emotions should be interpreted in lots of different ways.’ The closest that Praise comes to abjection is in Gordon’s post Cynthia encounters with Rachel. In their encounters Gordon does become a somewhat ludicrous devotee of the abject looking within what flows from the other’s ‘“Innermost being”, for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body’.34 Aware that Rachel lacked a certain sympathy for people who let their lives ‘get out of control’ and ‘didn’t appreciate just how sex and self-indulgence could completely take over’, Gordon finds himself
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overwhelmed when he finds his tongue in her vagina: ‘My mouth was wrapped around the straw that led to her soul ... The Virgin Saint was going to suck my prick’. In Gordon’s words, ‘We couldn’t just fuck. I wasn’t there for sex or love. I was there for adoration. Self-abasement. The impulses were all diseased, rooted in darkness.’ When he subsequently reverts to type and asks her why she chooses tampons over pads, their relationship is over. Ultimately Gordon remains loyal to the knowledges learned with Cynthia. He continues his difficult dialogue with her and accepts the unconscious logic of his chosen path; he seeks out new friendships aware that Cynthia was right, ‘it wasn’t over’: ‘It was bad now, but it’d get better. Something could be saved. Something had to be saved’.
CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS’ LOADED: ABJECTION AS SOCIAL PROTEST Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded, another Australian novel lumped loosely into the grunge category, manipulates abjection as social protest. Primarily the novel engages with abjection to demonstrate the obscenity of capitalism and to convey revulsion against the individualistic greed and materialism that have destroyed the possibility of community, turning migrant against migrant and class against class, creating an underclass from which the narrator can see no escape. All cities from Melbourne to Karachi, New York to Istanbul, Paris to Nairobi, include sewers for the international human refuse that keeps being churned out through war, famine, unemployment, poverty ... There is no America. There is no New World. There is no future available to the refo and the wog any more ... The sewers keep filling up, they are fucking overflowing and the refuse is choking up the atmosphere ... I am surfing on the down-curve of capital. There’s no jobs, no work, no factories, no wage packet, and no half-acre block. There is no more land. I am sliding towards the sewer. I’m not even struggling against the flow. I can smell the pungent aroma of shit, but I’m still breathing.35
His anger and frustration result in a corrosive hatred and lack of sympathy: ‘Thou shalt despise all humanity, regardless of race, creed or religion’. In the context of ‘this fucking shithole of a planet’ which will soon be ‘history’ the narrator uses drugs and sexuality as a buffer against a world destroyed by materialism. More problematically he reifies masculinity to distance himself from a sense of contamination. Every time I look at a gay man, even if I think he’s attractive, I can’t forget he’s a faggot. I get off on real men, masculinity is what causes my cock to get hard, makes me feel the sweet frenzy and danger of sex
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... I sleep with faggots but they always disappoint me. The desperate effort to hide his effeminacy always betrays him. I can see it in myself But I do a good job of talking-like, walking-like, being a man. I’ve got the build, the swagger, the look. More, I’ve got the fuck-ya-I-don’t givea-shit attitude perfected to an art form.
He experiences abjection by assuming the position of feminised ‘whore’, unable to experience abjection as male.36 The insults my father threw at me when I first challenged his authority were words meant for a woman ... Whore, dog. His one English obscenity. Cunt. Those insults have formed me, they have nourished me. In latrines and underneath piers I have enjoyed pleasures that are made sweeter by the contempt I know they bestow on me in the eyes of the respectable world I abhor. And the danger I face in pursuing my pleasures is the guarantee I have that I am not forsaking my masculinity. The constraints placed on me by my family can only be destroyed by a debasement that allows me to run along dark paths and silent alleyways forbidden to most of my clan and my peers. To be free, for me as a Greek, is to be a whore. To resist the path of marriage and convention, of tradition and obedience, I must make myself an object of derision and contempt.
In terms of the negotiation of abjection there are problems with this stance; it is a misrecognition in which the narrator is limited and trapped – a position that is different from the acceptance of the everyday abject of Ettler’s Justine and McGahan’s Gordon. However, the text is not complicit with the narrator. Loaded is an ambitious novel which for all the narrator’s fatalism about social movements goes after the big issues: class, capitalism and the destruction of community. The text provides a detailed geographical class map of Melbourne: the East (‘the rich cunts’, ‘the whitest part of my city’); the North (‘where they put most of the wogs’, ‘the flat ugly little brick boxes where the labouring and unemployed classes roam circular streets’); the West (‘a dumping ground, a sewer of refugees, the migrants, the poor, the insane’). Moreover, the narrative is littered with characters with a vision of alternatives which the narrator refuses to hear: Stephen who argues that Marxism is not dead, ‘It’s the only theory that makes sense of alienation’ and ‘I’m never going to stop resisting capitalism’; Ariadne who wants to form ‘a new left, of young people, artists, deviants, troublemakers from all the communities’; the taxi driver who remembers the students gunned down by fascist tanks and the Polytechnic. What haunts Ari is an unfulfilled communitarian instinct which he attempts to sublimate. By rejecting that impulse and staying subserviently with the
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parents he loathes for their blind subservience to authority structures which they do not challenge, he remains infantilised. Even his ‘skip’ lover, George, accuses him of not wanting to grow up, of not wanting to tell the truth, but in the gaze of George’s blue eyes (‘Foreign eyes’) Ari mutely asserts his different reality and social position. In Loaded the problematic relation to abjection stems from the narrator’s awareness of his position as part of a migrant underclass in Australia. His sense of powerlessness and his opting out are directly related to the economics of a life without choice and dignity. The lure of abjection is part of the abasement of being forced to live under the authority structures of multinational imperialism.
CONCLUSION As stated at the outset US grunge and Australian grunge both signal a youth-based challenge to mainstream norms and values. However, the grunge phenomenon takes a different form and has a particular inflection in Australia. In Australia, grunge has manifested primarily as a literary phenomenon (the novel) where it has connected with the problematic of the Australian abject. Its challenge has been to the cultural establishment, to literature with a capital L, to a non-positioned and non-theorised English studies, to the centralist and centralising concept of English Literature, and to high culture defined in relation to English and European cultural centres. That grunge has manifested differently in Australia to the United States is in part due to the fact that the United States has not had the same investment in high culture that Australia has had. In ‘Why the United States?’ Kristeva, Pleynet, and Sollers remark the polyvalence (and modernity) of US culture and aesthetic practice in comparison to European. They argue that the United States is a ‘nonverbal’ culture in which there are ‘no inherited centralist pretensions’ and where aesthetic experiments are more frequent and varied, more passionate and committed: ‘there are so many discourses and their subjects are multiple’.37 Baudrillard argues that in the United States ‘life is so liquid, signs and messages are so liquid’ that the European finds it almost unbearable. He portrays Europeans as ‘fanatics of aesthetics and meaning and culture’ who are shocked by the United States – ‘the fascination of nonsense and vertiginous disconnection, the liquidation of all culture and the consecration of indifference’.38 There is no culture here, no cultural discourse. There is none of the sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage, nor of our sentimental invocation of culture ... Not only does centralisation not exist, but the idea of a cultivated culture does not exist either ... there is something wild in
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everything specifically American, something that has not been kitted out in the gaudy finery of cultural distinction. Here in the US, culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space ... 39
In this context, it might be argued that the Australian establishment has adopted the European stance to modernity. For many years it was regarded as aberrant to look to the United States for anything of cultural significance. As far back as the framing of the Constitution, the Australian establishment has been challenged by US culture and its lack of regard for traditional social stratifications, seeing itself (in its identification with the high culture of England and Europe) as ‘the older and finer culture’ in danger of being swamped by ‘the crude new barbarian one’. Indeed the United States has been a code word for contemporaneity and unculture. As Bob de Graaff has written in words that are relevant here: ‘The European [Australian] fear of “Americanisation” was really a fear of mass democracy and mass consumption’.40 In this context, Australian grunge fiction marks a significant cultural moment; while very much a local product it has significant connections with US popular culture. 1 M. Bennett, ‘The Grungy Australian Novel’, Sun-Herald: Sunday Review, 24 September 1995, pp. 118–19; S. Nicholls, ‘Generation Next’, Rolling Stone, October 1995, pp. 68–72; B. Oakley, ‘Disappointed generation finds a voice’, the Australian, 20 September 1995, p. 4; M. Waldren, ‘LIT. GRIT invades OZLIT’, the Australian Magazine, 24–25 June 1995, pp. 13–17. 2 E. Berridge, The Lives of the Saints, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1995; J. Ettler, The River Ophelia, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1995; L. Jaivin, Eat Me, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, 1995; R. King, Kindling Does for Firewood, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996; A. McGahan, 1988, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1995; A. McGahan, Praise, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992; C. Mendes, Drift Street, Harper Collins, Sydney, 1995; L. Stevens, Nature Strip, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, South Australia, 1994; C. Tsiolkas, Loaded, Random House, Sydney, 1995. 3 M. Waldren, p. 17. 4 D. B. Guralnik, Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language Second College Edition, William Collins & World Publishing Co. Inc, US, 1978, p. 619. 5 H. Heuser, ‘An Approach to Grunge as a Cultural Phenomenon’, Hendrik Heuser Homepage (‘
[email protected]’). 6 ibid. 7 ibid. 8 A. Delbridge, The Macquarie Dictionary, Macquarie Library Pty. Ltd., St Leonards, 1991, 1997, pp. 778, 945. 9 M. Bennett, p. 118.
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10 M. Henderson and S. Rowlands, ‘Where Does the Misery Come From?: Clubs, Drugs, and Other Four Letter Words: A Survey of Grunge Fiction’, Australian Woman’s Book Review, vol. 8, no. 1, March, 1996, p. 3. 11 ibid., pp. 3–4. 12 M. Davis, gangland: cultural elites and the new generationalism, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, p. 14. 13 ibid., p. 131. 14 ibid., p. 234. 15 I. Syson, ‘Smells Like Market Spirit: Grunge Literature, Australia’, Overland, no. 142, Autumn 1996, p. 23. 16 ibid., pp. 24, 26. 17 Waldren, p. 16. 18 See S. Aronowitz, DEAD artists LIVE theories and Other Cultural Problems, Routledge, New York, 1984; and J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984. 19 See J. Kirkby, ‘Abject Discourse and the Imperial Gaze’, in R. Cappiello, Oh Lucky Country, A Talent(ed) Digger, H. Maes-Jelinek, G. Collier, G. V. Davis (eds), Rodolphi, Amsterdam, 1996, pp. 221–26; ‘Barbara Baynton: An Australian Jocasta’, Westerly, No. 4 December, 1989, pp. 114–24; ‘The Lure of Abjection: Kristeva’s Borderliner and Australian masculinity in Hal Porter, A. D. Hope and Patrick White’, Representation, Discourse and Desire: Contemporary Australian Culture and Critical Theory, P. Fuery (ed.), Longmann, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 138–63; ‘The Joseph Complex or the Father/Daughter Bond in the Fiction of Elizabeth Jolley’, Elizabeth Jolley: A Collection of Critical Essays, D. Bird and B. Walker (eds), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991, pp. 63–82; ‘Fetishizing the Father: D. Tacey on Patrick White’, Meridian, vol. 10, no. 1 May 1991, pp. 35–45; ‘The Lure of Abjection: A Colonial Legacy?’, An Australian Mind: Papers of the 1993 Literature and Psychiatry Conference, C. Powell (ed.) Sydney: Psychoanalytic Association, 1997, pp. 21–35; ‘The Politics of Self-Hatred: The Fiction of David Ireland’, forthcoming in The Roots of Aggression, Dr. C. Powell (ed.), Sydney: Literature and Psychiatry Association, 1998; ‘The Spinster and the Missing Mother in the Fiction of Elizabeth Jolley’, Old Maids to Radical Spinsters, L. Doan (ed.), University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1994, pp. 235–58; ‘The Verdigris of Glory: The Lure of Abjection in Thea Astley’s The Acolyte’, Into the Nineties: PostColonial Women’s Writing, A. Rutherford, L. Jensen and S. Chew (eds), Dangaroo, Australia and Denmark, 1994, pp. 27–45. 20 M. Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, Eden, Sydney, 108, p. 334. 21 Z. Sofia, ‘Hegemonic irrationalities and psychoanalytic cultural critique’, Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, October, 1992, pp. 377–78. 22 ibid., pp. 383, 378. 23 M. Waldren, p. 14. 24 ibid., pp. 16–17. 25 J. Kirkby (ed.), The American Model: Influence and Independence in Australian Poetry, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, p. 63. 26 ibid., pp. 64, 67. 27 ibid., p. 67. 28 J. Kristeva, ‘Bataille and the Sun, or the Guilty Text’, Tales of Love, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 366, 368. 29 J. Ettler, ‘I Want Readers to Get Their Hands Dirty’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1997, p. 8. 30 J. Ettler, The River Ophelia, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1995, p. 151. Subsequent page numbers are from this edition and will be incorporated into the text. 31 J. Ettler, ‘I Want Readers to Get Their Hands Dirty’, p. 8.
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32 J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, pp. 47–48. 33 A. McGahan, Praise, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992, pp. 7, 19. Subsequent page numbers are from this edition and will be incorporated into the text. 34 J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 54. 35 C. Tsiolkas, Loaded, Random House, Sydney, 1995, p. 143. Subsequent page numbers are from this edition and will be incorporated into the text. 36 J. Kirkby, ‘The Lure of Abjection: Kristeva’s Borderliner and Australian Masculinity in Hal Porter, A. D. Hope, Patrick White’, Representation, Discourse and Desire, pp. 138–63. 37 T. Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, p. 285. 38 J. Baudrillard, America, Verso, London and New York, 1988, pp. 122–23. 39 ibid., p. 100. 40 R. Kroes and M. Van Rossem, Anti-Americanism in Europe, Free University Press, Amsterdam, 1986, p. 138.
ART Terry Smith Taking the long view – as a preamble to a more personal account – of professional art practice in the United States and Australia, some clear trajectories of mutuality and differentiation can be quickly seen. Both countries began as settler colonies of England, with English and then more broadly British visual cultures setting the terms of image making in and of the colonies. Settlement called forth an imagery calibrated to local purposes, usually a matter of applying British frameworks to colonial scenes and subjects. Gradually, however, this local demand gave rise to its own settings, which sought to house its own particular detail, and narrate settlement itself. On the North American continent, this process increased dramatically as the states united into an independent nation, and then took off towards the symbolisation of nationality during the Westward expansion and the territorial exploration of the region. In the Australian colonies, landscapes of exploration and pasturing, and scenes of city life, heralded more and more an Australian distinctiveness. But it remained, for the most part, ideologically tied within ‘the golden chains that bind the Empire’ – Federation according to Henry Parkes, Tom Roberts and most others. These developments occurred in parallel rather than in tandem. There was some traffic of artists between the two places but it was not regular. A team of American engravers came out to work on the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, published 1886–1888, and some – outstandingly Livingstone Hopkins (‘Hop’) – stayed to work on the Bulletin. Australianborn artists such as Miles Evergood (Myer Blashki) and Leon Gellert contributed importantly to social realist imagery in the 1920s and 1930s
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in America. Sydney abstract expressionist Charles Reddington came from Chicago, and Los Angeles painter James Doolin was pivotal to the emergence of hard-edge painting in Melbourne and Sydney in the mid1960s. Many Australian artists have studied in the United States., especially since the 1960s. Prior to that, most went to London or Paris for further study, artists such as the sculptors Frank and Margel Hinder and, in the 1950s, painters such as Nancy Borlase and Yvonne Audette, being exceptional in heading for Chicago and New York. The remarkable growth of professional art in both countries from the 1880s onwards secured a key role for art as the provider of symbols of national identity. This process continues, and may even be said to be accelerating, through the spread of reproductions, blockbuster exhibitions, and the continuing creation of special galleries of Australian and American art in major museums. Yet artmaking everywhere since the 1890s has been inexorably connected with the emergence and worldAide impact of French modernism, not only the art of Manet and the Post-Impressionists, but also the extraordinary outpouring of avantgarde inventiveness which occurred in Paris between 1906 and 1916. There are many parallels in the responses of artists, critics, curators, dealers and collectors in both countries to modernism. It is fair to say, however, that during the between wars period American artists were generally quicker to adopt, adapt and eventually transform early modernist models than their counterparts in Australia. They did so in the context of a massively more robust and expansionist economy, and of similarly large-scale patronage for the arts, including contemporary art. All this provided the base from which a successful and persuasive claim could be launched, in the immediate post-war years, that American artists – such as Jackson Pollock – had, by virtue of their achievement as innovative artists, taken over from French artists – such as Picasso and Matisse, by then old men without evident local successors – the responsibility for ‘advancing art’ as such. This left Australian artists of the postwar generation in dependence to not one but two great streams of modernist invention: that of the early French modernists, and that exploding from New York. A flavour of ‘export nationalism’ accompanied this art. What was ‘American’ about American art? was a topic pushed in the circulation of these exhibitions (as they travelled around the economic and cultural colonies of an expansionist United States). Certain qualities, regarded as ‘essentially American’ – such as a straightforwardness in the handling of materials, a raw energy of statement, a direct address to the spectator and an emphasis on the experience of both artist and spectator – were seen as definitive of the Abstract Expressionists’ art. During the past three
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decades, however, the response to art in the United States and Australia has mostly moved beyond these cliches. My visits to the United States began in 1972: some have coincided with the flow of American influence on our visual culture, some have rubbed against it. During this time I have lived and worked primarily in Australian art worlds – those of art-making, writing, criticism, historical research, exchanging gossip and (by osmosis) marketing. Each has its own particularities and imperatives, but all have felt the impact of American art world practices deeply. What follows is a personal account of key shifts in Australian art during the past thirty years, and their relationship to changes in American art as seen from here. The first exhibitions of postwar American painting in the early 1950s made a world-wide impression, but most Australians knew nothing of it. Few people attended the state galleries, those austere classical mausoleums, rumoured to house expensive objects from elsewhere. Commercial galleries were rare, although gift shops did a brisk trade in amateur art. The regional landscape was by far the most popular subject for art (it still is), and the best-known exponent was the Aboriginal watercolourist Albert Namatjira. Reproductions of his outback scenes covered the walls of homes – such as mine – where the word ‘art’ was not part of the family vocabulary. My first experience of art was as far removed from American art as possible. It occurred in the National Gallery of Victoria which, until 1968, shared a building on Swanston Street with the State Library and the Natural History Museum. My father and I (aged perhaps eight or nine) were making one of our regular visits to the museum to pay homage to the stuffed body of Phar Lap, the champion racehorse. Part of the animal’s legend was an unforgiving enmity towards the United States, for it was there that his career was brought to an end – by deliberate poisoning, it was said. I turned from the glass case, trying to trace the source of an incandescent blue and white reflection. It glowed from the landing of some stairs above me. In three tall white cases were jewel-like scenes of fantastic people-creatures, doing things stranger yet more horribly fascinating than anything in the daily newspaper cartoons or in my comic-books. Many years later Dr Ursula Hoff, who for decades was curator of prints and drawings at the Gallery, told me that she often put on that stairwell certain pieces from the Gallery’s unmatched collection of William Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, hoping for just that response. I became a devotee, not of the Gallery’s long, empty salons of British academics and unevenly dispersed Australian landscapes, but of
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Blake’s drawings and etchings, especially the obsessively detailed agonising of The Book of Job. They worked as my own adventure comics. Watch it, Buck Rogers! Holy gazebo, Batman! US consumer culture, already popular because of the movies of the 1930s, spread apace after World War II, especially after the introduction of television in 1956. Australia entered a ‘developmentalist’ period, experiencing an economic boom based on mass manufacturing, much of it financed by US capital, and a rapid population growth, including significant immigration from Europe. To a teenager, however, the most important American was not General Eisenhower, McCarthy the witchhunter, any of the Rockefellers or Jackson Pollock – it was Elvis Presley. Although I personally did not feel the power of American art for some years, Australian artists during the 1950s were acutely aware of it. More pervasive than direct stylistic influence was the model of artistic practice embodied in the mythology of the ‘action painters’. This was conveyed most convincingly by the artists themselves, in their pithy statements about totality of commitment. It was amplified by critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Frank O’Hara, and reinforced by the shock registered in news magazine stories about ‘Jack the Dripper’ and ‘Willem the Walloper’. Copies of exhibition catalogues, such as New American Painting, touring 1956, were brought over from England and Europe, Art News found a ready readership, particularly with its series ‘Artist X Paints a Picture’, and local converts like Sydney painter–critic Elwyn Lynn enthusiastically spread the word through the contemporary art societies. US popular culture reinforced the messages being read in US art. In the fervid imaginings of young artists, Jackson Pollock’s self-absorbed extremity merged with James Dean’s angry alienation, a Presley concert with Pollock’s performed paintings as photographed and filmed by Hans Namuth. At another level, the attraction to absolutes in the art of those Abstract Expressionists who began with universal symbols and ended with resonant fields of colour (Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Clyfford Still) confirmed the interest some white Australian artists felt for Aboriginal art – the local ‘primitive’ match for imported modernism. More often, however, the American Abstract Expressionists were seen through the admiring filter of a deep-seated romanticism, less as the inheritors of the erudite elegance of European modernism than as the most committed expressionists to date. To these artists every painting was a new beginning, an invitation for adventures into the unknown. While the example was powerful, there were many delays and
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deferrals. In the mid-1950s, when the new director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Eric Westbrook, drew the attention of Melbourne artists to the historical inevitability and expressive power of abstract painting, he was greeted with hurt abuse. Artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Brack and Charles Blackman had already developed an art that strongly embodied both their personal concerns and those of the period. That it was figurative only made it more accessible to wider audiences. This was the argument of the 1959 Antipodean Manifesto, written by art historian Bernard Smith, with the artists just mentioned, to accompany an exhibition intended for international circulation, particularly in London, where cultural value in Australia was still coined. The exhibition aimed to stem, by sheer power of example, what Smith and the artists felt was a lemming-like rush of other artists into ‘mindless abstraction’. Very few Australian artists, it may be said with hindsight, produced imitation American Abstract Expressionist paintings. Most applied certain ideas to local problems, such as landscape space, or how to notate burnt-out scrub. John Olsen, for example, added a sense of Pollock’s pouring run of black line bursting out of a blotch of unspecific form to the idea of free-flowing linearity which he had already sensed in Paul Klee and in Spanish abstraction. Fred Williams’ idea of using a single colour as a setting for the markings of semi-arid bush vegetation probably came from watching acid etch copper plates, but it was reinforced by the chromatics of the colourfield branch of Abstract Expressionism, and then by 1960s minimal painting. The violent brushstrokes of Stanislaus Rapotec’s Experience series parallel those of American Franz Kline as explosive gestures, but lack that artist’s sense of tying everything to a dry, flat surface – instead, Rapotec’s shape swirl in an almost underwater space. The point of these comparisons is to show that adopting does not happen in a vacuum – it is an incorporative act, absorbing a particular artistic idea into an already-developing practice. Adapting the adoption to a local demand – such as the picturing of place in these three cases – is a way of adding another option for picturing to the local repertoire. Transforming occurs when something altogether innovative occurs, something which usually obliterates the previous two steps, and which becomes a benchmark for subsequent local practice. In tracing this occurrence, we need to be alert to the ways it happens within an individual artist’s work as distinct from asking the question of whether it is happening in the entire tendency, or style, or school, of which that artist is a member. For a high-school student in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
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equally entranced by art and existentialism, Abstract Expressionism would have been a natural fit. But my teachers still dabbled in late, decorative Cubism, and the most advanced art I could glean from their books, their example and local exhibitions was the pleasantries of Italian abstractionists such as Afro and Tomasso, rather than the impasto slashes of Fontana or the burnt-out canvas tracts of Burri, which seemed fascinating but contextless. Yet the tide could not be stemmed. As an art history student at Melbourne University in the mid-1960s, I petitioned Bernard Smith not to end his course on modern art with van Gogh, but to begin with him and go on to Pollock. Unaware of the Antipodean struggle, I was puzzled at his angry refusal. Perhaps this innocent request was one small sign to him that, while the Antipodeans might have won the local battle, they had lost the larger war. By then the international success of American-style abstraction was overwhelming. In 1968 the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney began offering courses to undergraduates and interested adults. The benefactor of the Institute was John Power, a medical graduate who had never practised but instead became a not inconsiderable neo-Cubist painter in Paris and Bournemouth during the 1920s and 1930s. His Bequest charged the university with bringing ‘the latest ideas and theories concerning contemporary art to the people of Australia’. As founding director, Bernard Smith taught a course on painting that stretched from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth, culminating in American abstraction; British sculptor Donald Brook, mainly using European examples, raised questions in aesthetics, and the late David Saunders charted the innovations of the European Modern Master architects, with liberal reference to Frank Lloyd Wright, the shingle style and the skyscraper, particularly as they affected Australian architecture. I learnt much in my first teaching job as a tutor for these men. In contrast, our textbooks were the early editions of those hardbound American institutions, the magisterial surveys by Janson and Arnason of all of the history of art culminating in ‘The New York School’. ‘From Palaeolithic to Pollock’ was a catchy course title of the time. The late 1960s were the high point of American cultural influence in Australia. It is no coincidence that they were also the moment of the greatest economic penetration and political impact. The proudly conservative Australian government supported the US war against Vietnam, dividing the country and precipitating a widespread revolt by young people against the ‘military-industrial complex’. It took little imagination to add cultural and educational institutions to this list, and to condemn what was seen as the older generation’s grand, yet fragile,
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conspiracy to maintain an inequitable and systemically violent status quo. But the United States was also sending another, contrary set of messages: the rebelliousness of rock-’n’-roll, the effectiveness of the protest movements, the energy and fun of the counter-culture added up to a liberating alternative. It was eagerly imitated and adapted. Frank Moorhouse’s 1972 ‘discontinuous narrative’, The Americans, Baby, expresses with acute irony the impact both of these values and of US experimental writers such as Donald Barthelme. Don Anderson traced this years ago in a Meanjin article (4/1982) entitled ‘American Graffiti: or “I’m still living in the ‘Seventies”’. (Sometimes I feel that he is not the only one.) Hard-edge painting and minimal sculpture seemed to many British and Australian artists a model of artistic practice that brought the heroic, ever-more-extreme innovations of the avant-garde back into line with these liberating social changes. Pop art, on the other hand, seemed too complicit in consumerist superficiality, too much a celebration of commodity culture. The first US colourfield paintings seen in Australia were those in the 1964 tour of the James A. Michener collection: late works by Gottlieb and Rothko, current work by Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Jules Olitski. In 1967 the Museum of Modern Art toured Two Decades of American Painting, the almost totally black images of Ad Reinhardt attracting most astonished comment. Although this was the first wide-scale public showing of ‘post-painterly abstraction’, younger Australian artists were already well advanced in their version of this style. Central Street Gallery in Sydney specialised in it; Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne regularly showed ironic versions of it. By 1968 it became institutionalised in a national survey exhibition, The Field, which opened the new National Gallery of Victoria, now a self-contained modernist box coated in the local bluestone. The Central Street painters taught me to admire Johns’ pictorial intelligence, Stella’s toughness of shape, Noland’s bravura colour, and Olitski’s delicacy of drawing. Against this, European art seemed gutless, and previous Australian painting confused and compromised. The impassioned objectivity of Michael Fried’s Three American Painters became a model of critical commitment. My first writings attempted a similarly close reading of local artists such as David Aspden and Gunter Christmann. My first published art history essay was a long historical study of this movement as it was happening; and my criticism in a weekly newspaper attempted the same mix of partisanship and detachment. Everything I and many others did at the time was marked by the excitement of being part of an avant-garde – though it was an imitative, uncertain one. The journal Other Voices, which I edited with Paul
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McGillick through three issues in 1970–71, is a testimony to this moment. If we return to the adopt-adapt-transform model which I broached above, and relate the art of this moment to it, it would seem that here we have the one clear case in the history of Australian art where it can be said that the artists concerned began their art with a clean slate, went on to adopt hard-edge, colourfield and minimal painting as their model, and then froze. Very little adapting, with the exception of Dick Watkins. Not a transformation in sight. The only changes they subsequently made echoed those happening in art in New York – the shift to ‘lyrical abstraction’ in 1970 and 1971, for example. It was, however, a short-lived movement. The assumption of identity between hard-edge, colourfield painting and late 1960s revolutionary counter-culture turned out to be naive. Colourfield was the ideal corporate art, less powerful than the IBM logo. Modernist art history and criticism collapsed, under close inspection, into a set of reductive tautologies. A salutary disappointment was Clement Greenberg’s 1968 visit as the first John Power Memorial Lecturer. Greenberg failed to praise the local abstractionists, and argued a reading of modernist avantgardism that returned it to Old Master values. The great modernist institutions – like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, educator of millions – now seemed oppressive, obstacles to innovation. The interests of formalist critics, the museums and the burgeoning art market became so manifestly convergent that they no longer followed and supported artmaking, but instead actively seduced artists and predicted practice. The art system itself – in New York evidently, but also in its local versions – suddenly seemed the greatest danger to art. Visions of fundamental artistic innovation switched from lyrical painted surfaces to obscure shapes dimly glimpsed in out-of-focus black and white photographs, odd rearrangements of natural objects, blurred records of performances, gallery spaces empty but for traces of measurement or gases or excrement. But the deepest challenges lay in an imagery as yet unformed, in media as yet unknown, in processes of questioning that threatened to evacuate the ‘as yet’ in our thinking processes and the visual as a carrier of thought. Avalanche magazine carried something of this: the industrial geometries of Carl Andre’s laid and placed squares, the Dada-minimalism of Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson’s elegant yet huge-scale earthworks. As well, there were the ‘gaseous’ sculpture-events of Robert Barry, and Douglas Heubler’s exercises in measuring social systems. These artists became the most daring American inventors of the moment. For me, a highlight
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of a 20-day tour of Renaissance Italy in 1970 was the multi-panel projection at the Venice Biennale of Michael Heizer’s just-completed earthwork Double-Negative, two massive geometrical cuts across a valley in the Nevada desert. Yet, while Minimal Art seemed an American phenomenon, Conceptualism was not. It soon became apparent that it was European performance and installation artists such as Joseph Beuys and Piero Manzoni who were the real masters of this beguiling otherness, that their efforts echoed back to Marcel Duchamp via Yves Klein, and that their present-day inheritors were artists as different as Jannis Kounellis, famous then for exhibiting a gallery full of horses, and the English group Art & Language, who eschewed objects altogether in the pursuit of understanding conceptually the limiting conditions of art practice itself. Few were aware of it at the time, but a number of artists from the region played important roles in the first moment of conceptualism. Auckland artist Barrie Bates transformed himself into an art event in London in 1962, inventing a persona as a conceptual performance artist ‘Billy Apple’. Ian Burn, born in Geelong, met Mel Ramsden from Nottingham at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, in 1964. They worked in London together from the following year, making works which – in Burn’s case – questioned the physical presence of the spectator of art by confronting him or her with mirrors, and – in Ramsden’s case – queried the nature of artistic intention by presenting blank, black canvases alongside statements declaring their content to be secret. This taste for what-ever-it-takes experimentation is typical of artists in transit between the provincial peripheries and the metropolitan centres of international art. The out-of-the-suitcase, small scale, found object ephemerality of their work might be the revenge of the settlers on the home colonisers. It led to an art extremely difficult to pin down and institutionalise, one which changed the top-down distribution of power in the previous systems of dependency. In 1971, for the first (and only) show at the Contemporary Art Society Gallery in Sydney, Tony McGillick and I staged The Situation Now, displaying a spectrum of current art from formalist abstraction to a bodywork in which occasional artist Neil Evans swallowed tapeworms. Its subtitle, Object or Post-Object Art?, evoked Donald Brook’s question about whether art was in flight from its traditional objectness – was ‘dematerialising’, in Lucy Lippard’s better-known formulation. Some kind of conceptuality, tied closely to social criticism, seemed the best hope for avant-garde art in Australia. Fundamental rethinking of the
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concept of art, I reasoned in a series of ‘Propositions’ which tried to list the conditions of self-made avantgardism in Australia, could occur anywhere; it did not need the huge concentration of artists, the massive material supports, the elaborate discourses or the voracious art market that existed in New York. Were not the Futurists more volatile artistperformers than the Cubists, the Dadaists more aggressive to audiences than the Surrealists, and the Russian Constructivists more artistically and politically radical than all of them put together? I busied myself with a long chapter for a never-to-be-published book that calibrated modern art movements and political gestures against these nuances of radicality. Lyndon Johnson had resigned in disgrace at the failure of his Vietnam policy; Richard Nixon extended the war in the guise of peace, and his duplicity contaminated all American government. Conservative governments in Australia lost credibility, and, spearheaded by Gough Whitlam, with his heady brew of economic nationalism and cultural internationalism, Labor swept into office late in 1972. Meanwhile, against this historical grain, I left for two years’ study in the United States on a Harkness Fellowship. I chose the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University because it was then widely regarded as having the best art history graduate program in the world. I had begun a master’s thesis on the question of ethics so frequently evoked in the statements of the Abstract Expressionists: a topic that combined a typical late- 1960s passion for morality with the need to fill an obvious gap in the discourse around this art – the critics’ near-total failure to address its putative content directly. Its form, yes; its expressivity, of course; but its core, no. It took me some years to recognise that the topic also echoed the powerful impact of the mythology of Action Painting in Australia in the 1950s – that, even in this choice, I was wrestling with my immediate predecessors. Living on the lower East Side, beside the Manhattan Bridge, on a street that was a fulcrum for Jewish, Italian, black and Chinese neighbourhoods, my wife and I soon overcame the negative urban myths (and realities) of first-time New York. Exploring its many villages excitedly, constantly travelling its multi-levelled networks, we came to love the whole city. Although we had to take care about buying books, eating out and concert-going, we were conscious of our privileged situation. Above all, it was a time to grow, and to do so in this incredibly dynamic place (I almost wrote paradise) of possibility ... what a time it was! After the hot, riot-torn summers of the late 1960s the city seemed to set itself against the putrescent polity of Washington, against the moral stench being aired each day in the televised Watergate hearings. I see now that I was holding at arm’s length all that I found most politically and morally objectionable about the United States as a nation-
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state and New York as an accumulation of modernity’s excesses. Inside that gesture was space – narrow, yes, but also close and seemingly infinite. My diary records those days, from September 1972 to the end of 1974, and a return trip of some months late in 1975. Meeting Joseph Kosuth by chance in the Nadi airport lounge, then talking non-stop across the Pacific; the echoes of flower power at Haight-Ashbury; John Lee Hooker live. The Hoffmanns in the Berkeley Art Museum; dumbstruck awe before Pollock’s One 1948 at MOMA; and, during director Alfred Barr’s retirement party, anger at that Museum’s magnetism mingled with entrancement at the treasures it had in storage and in its library. Struggling with the thesis on Abstract Expressionist ethics; experiencing the generosity of scholars such as Irving Sandier, the challenges of teachers at the Institute of Fine Arts – Goldwater, Rosenblum, Rubin, the delights of Meyer Schapiro’s course on methodology at Columbia, of his precious company, and the frustrations of still learning while so desperately wanting to say something original. In Boston to write, thoughts drifting from snow on the Fenway outside to the steamy heat of Sargeant’s El Jaleo in the Gardener Museum; stepping over Bowery bums en route to Art & Language meetings; the sustained inspiration of Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden; my anxious input into the most mobile art discourse ever. Quixotic visits from English Art & Language founders Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson; strange sideways travels to villages in the Midlands, such as Chipping Norton, and ancient towns like Warwick. Joseph’s loft, an acre of polished floor broken by his piranha tank, a transparent toilet-bowl and his own photocopier; writing for Coplans and Kozloff at Artforum during the lead-up to their dismissal; a five-month drive across the country – 64 museums in 32 states – including side-trips to Mexico City and the Yucatan; Alan Kaprow introducing me to his Cal Arts students as a ‘living dodo’, a representative of that ‘extinct form of art practice, the avant-garde’... it goes on to the Artists’ Meetings for Cultural Change, secret night excursions to Harlem, while broad daylight shone on the sidewalks of ever-gentrifying Soho. It still goes on in vivid memory, less as these cultural tourist highlights than as the everyday life of an epochal fulcrum, the always-ultimate moment of the modernist avant-garde. This was the time when that great adventure in innovation was simultaneously being cast in institutional concrete, seemingly forever, and collapsing under attacks from within (by post-minimal, conceptual, performance, political art – all of it determinedly anti-modernist – driving the marketeers to despair, hee! hee!), and re-spawning as a hyper-conscious simulacrum, as both the last
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– we promise you – the truly terminal, finally implosive act of the historical avant-garde and the beginnings of something genuinely, really new, a post-avant-garde (soon to be called a postmodernist) formation. I learnt that the New York art world, headquarters of a system that dispersed apparently universal art values all round the world, was itself irredeemably provincial. Such realisations broke the spell, releasing many of us marginals from the bind of always needing to follow its false trails. It opened us to the achievements of artists in Europe and elsewhere but, most importantly, it returned us to local traditions. We began to see them less as a debilitating inheritance of failures of nerve, modified modernisms and retreats into chauvinistic compromise, and more as sensitive adaptations to local conditions, or as resistances to externally imposed models, sometimes as searching for another route for art. Language-based conceptual art – the over-the-top endpoint of the avant-garde adventure – began to seem impotent in the face of the social demands of the mid-1970s. It was fitting that we left the United States with Nixon’s impending impeachment echoing through the aeroplane cabin, but how to address the dismissal of the Labor Government by that unelected puppet, the Governor-General? Returning to Australia in 1975 meant turning against the example of conformist American art. Sensitivity to ‘US cultural imperialism’ led to noisy attacks on travelling exhibitions. The urgent task became to build up a local culture, one that was aggressively independent, alert to its own traditions and supportive of those social groups most disadvantaged by the old arrangements. To some ex-New-York conceptualists in Australia this meant working-class culture: Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon and I began Media Action Group as a way of offering our skills to the local labour movement. With others such as Ian Milliss – an outstanding young Sydney conceptualist – this became Union Media Services, a graphic design outfit that transformed the visual culture of trade-union publications and communication. To other artists, the mid-1970s moment meant the culture-in-formation of the women’s movement; to still others, the struggles of immigrant groups. Younger artists began to see an optional model of art practice: murals proliferated, four-colour posters advertised the constant protest rallies, photographers entered communities, unions appointed arts officers, and federal and state governments rushed to set up supportive funding agencies. American art virtually disappeared from consciousness, except as the ultimate negative example. This situation continued until the early 1980s. From the mid-1970s
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Marxist structuralism had been supplying the most suggestive cultural theory, particularly that developed in France by Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre Machery and others. When allied with Roland Barthes’ semiotics, it gave rise to a potent analytical mix, which was adopted most effectively in English cultural studies. T. J. Clark’s social history of art is one influential instance; others include the work of Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, the Screen project of the British Film Institute in London, and political art, especially feminist photography, throughout the United Kingdom. With the exception of such complex and powerful (and, it has to be admitted, delayed) statements as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, and the imaginative art history of Leo Steinberg and others, advanced art and scholarship in the United States had little to offer in comparison. It was this French and British work that was most useful to the increasingly independent art community that emerged in Australia in the late 1970s and 1980s. Following the success of Australian films and rock’n’-roll, certain Australian artists, critics and theorists received acknowledgment abroad. The quaint mix of conformity decked out in down-home exotica was no longer necessary. Australian artists and writers developed a take – it-or-leave-it attitude to these exchanges. Was this the longed-for nirvana of maturity beyond provincialism? If so, it was certainly no paradise. My own intellectual journeying during the 1980s – again, against the obvious grain – brought me often to the United States. Like many others, I was provoked by superficial postmodernism’s claims to have outmoded modernism into a re-examination of the long history of the modern in art. Refusing to concede that modernism could be reduced to the closures of 1960s, corporate-style, Greenbergian high modernism, we were driven to revalue positively the truly dispersive, history-breaking inventiveness of earlier modernists. Modernism became a resource again, for thinking, for artmaking. My own driving intuition was about the broader currents of visual culture, and about ways of answering such questions as ‘How does the appearance of a modern object in the world suddenly make everything around it look old?’ While I aimed, and still aim, to answer this kind of question for Australia, I spent most of the 1980s on a book, Making the Modern, that began at one of the obvious starting points: revisualising the nature of productive work, a process crucial to the invention of the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company plant at Highland Park, Michigan in 1913– 14. From there I traced its many ripples – through Albert Kahn’s
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genuinely functionalist architecture, Charles Sheeler and the advertising men, the modernist anachronism of Greenfield Village, the otherness of vision that Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo brought to Detroit, then the reformist drives of documentary photography. I looked at its fusion in the 1930s with the elegant aesthetics of Margaret Bourke-White in businessmen’s journals such as Fortune and more popular magazines such as Life to create the imagery of New Corporate/Welfare State America, which culminated in the public art of wartime, from populist films to the fantasy-factory on Flushing Meadow, the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40. This was the visual culture of modernity, unfolding through one of its most vital phases. This research adventure made me see that the moment of mass production would soon follow the mills of New England into the limbo of the museum. I enjoyed my journeys through archives and galleries, my visits to islands of privilege at the centres of great cities, some over the edge of self-destruction. Everywhere I was generously helped, and warmly challenged – not least by historians of American art such as Patricia Hills and Alan Wallach, and writers on photography such as Allan Sekula and Sally Stein. I have been increasingly stimulated by the resurgence of critical theory in the United States, by the journals Critical Inquiry, October and Zone, and by the freshly relevant work of Hans Haacke and other artists who were formed in those crucial years around 1970. During the last two decades advanced art in the United States has been less and less impressive. While the German Neo-expressionists and the Italian Transavantgarde led that largely unexpected return of the repressed – the revival of painting around 1980 – the New York market was quick to respond with local product. This, at least, was how the sudden emergence to superstardom of David Salle and Julian Schnabel appeared from abroad, and is how the febrile obviousness of the work of an artist such as Jeff Koons looks now. While Salle has matured as a serious, even considerable artist, few others in America have survived the mismatch of a new mobility of imagery with the craft traditions of painting and sculpture – that strangely mutated interplay of the 1980s. Instead, the American mainstream was filled by a kind of Neoconceptual Academy. The most interesting contemporary American art now seems to treat the New York neo-avant-garde as a negative reference-point, as artists outside the United States have been doing for a decade or more. Living in San Diego during the Gulf War, with my idyllic outlook over the Pacific beach front frequently shattered by olive-green border patrol helicopters and fighters at practice, made me freshly alert to art that
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questions conformity. Like Koori, Murri, Nunga and Nyungar artists in Australia, Black artists, Native Americans, Chicanos and Puerto Rican artists in the United States are making more and more compelling statements, often about their cultural hybridity. Like many women artists during the previous decade, they are moving beyond claims for equality of mainstream recognition, searching for different communicative contexts for their art – an old need, to be sure, but one with forms specific to the communities in and for this art. But this risks implying a fake homogenisation, as if otherness from the residual mainstream was the most important quality this art shared. It is, in fact, the least significant. All the other qualities of this art – its street-smart subcultural awareness, its free-wheeling conventionlessness, its respect for individuality, its angry rejection of Jesse Helms-type censoriousness – attest to something more vital: to the variety of possible kinds of art being made within the multiplicity of cultures which is America – and Australia – today. This variety means that it is no longer accurate to generalise, even about the art of a particular community, let alone about ‘American’ or ‘Australian’ art in any more general sense. Indeed, artists all over the world are increasingly seeing the implications of the fact that First, Second, Third and Fourth cultural worlds are no longer distributed in separate places around the globe. While there may be huge institutional efforts to secure specific distinctiveness and brandrecognition national styles, the international art market is less patriotic, and artists everywhere now see nationalism as a public sphere game in which they may occasionally be called upon to participate – designing a new flag, for example – but which is scarcely serious. The fact is that a non-commercial system of exchanging artistic ideas, projects and personnel has evolved during the past 25 years as the major visual arts legacy of the 1960s. Certain museums, community galleries, universities, artist’s spaces and cooperatives now constitute an international network which values criticality of art and theoretical practice more than representativeness or individuality. It drives even national flagship events such as the Biennales of Venice, Sydney and Johannesberg. The much-heralded globalisation of world culture does not govern this practice. Nor is it in any evident way an ‘American’ phenomena. American artworld powers-that-be no more drive this system than do American multinationals the world economy. The kind of metropolitan-provincial structure which set in train cycles of dependence and release, which located American and Australian art as, at one time, parallel, and at another, locked in an economy of dominance
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and subjugation, is now longer how the world works. It may be that the dispersive energies of globalisation and the localising energies of big company survival are most powerfully setting the agendas of the postmodern world (dis)order at the moment. Innovative art has its eye on these formations, and has often celebrated their stylish edges, but many artists are sufficiently conscious of the modern history of iniquitous exchange, and sufficiently grounded in hard-won structures of independence, to keep a wary, critical and productive distance. Note This essay has been extensively adapted from the article ‘Out From Under; Australian and American Art – a personal view’, Meanjin, vol. 51, no. 5, Summer 1992, pp. 865–67.
REFERENCES R. Butler, (ed.), What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Critical Writing on Australian Art in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Brisbane, IMA, Power Publications, Sydney, 1996. G. Catalano, The Years of Hope, Australian Art and Criticism 1959–1968, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1981. C. Heathcote, A Quiet Revolution, The Rise of Australian Art 1946–1968, Text, Melbourne, 1995. H. W. Janson, History of Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 1991. L. Lippard, Six Years: the Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Praeger, New York, 1973. B. Smith with T. Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1990, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991. T. Smith, ‘Propositions’ 1971 and ‘The Provincialism Problem’, reproduced in P. Taylor, (ed.), Anything Goes: Australian Art of the 1970s, Art & Text, Melbourne, 1984. T. Smith (ed.), Art & Language: Australia 1975, Art & Language Press, Banbury, New York, Sydney, 1975. Terry Smith interviewed by J. Stojanovic, ‘Conceptual Art. Then and Since’, Agenda, 26/27, Nov.–Dec., 1992. Jan.–Feb., 1993. T. Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993. T. Smith, Figuring the Ground: Landscape, Colony and Nation in Australia, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998. T. Smith, Transformations: Modernism and Aboriginality in Australian Art, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998. A. M. Willis, Illusions of Identity, The Art of Nation, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1993.
VIRTUAL EMPIRE McKenzie Wark
LINES OF FLIGHT I’m coming home. The last inflight movie reels to an end. The lights are out and it’s almost quiet. The plane hums and murmurs to itself All who fly in it are one big sleeping body, quietly respirating, dreaming through the night, on autopilot. Not being able to sleep, I’m writing these notes for The Virtual Republic. It’s a book about the relentless swelling and breaking of sense called the media, and what lurks beneath it, those dark reservoirs and currents of memory called culture, which together make up this dream, that ocean – my country. Perhaps it is your country too, wherever you are. A fuselage of dreams. Don’t mind me, fellow traveller. It’s the wine talking. We may be heading for the future in our dreams, but when we wake we will be circling over Sydney. For those straight below, our flight booms loud enough to wake the dead. I might feel a bit groggy when we land, but by the time I get to passport control, I’ll be looking the customs officer in the eye while she checks me against my mug shot. I’ll be back to my own self, my home self. Perhaps it is that commercial Qantas airlines screened before the inflight movies that’s made me all sentimental. You might have seen it – the one that features all these great Australian singers, each of whom performs a verse of ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, while the camera whisks over the sublime panorama of desert. What do you make of it? I’m not usually prone to feelings of naive nationalism, but I have had a few, so perhaps I’m just in a gooey mood. I could stop right now and
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analyse this Qantas ad – I am, after all, a lecturer in media studies. It’s what I trained, and what I train others, to do. But these days I’m equally interested in the feeling the ad gives me. Rather than critique it rationally, peeking beneath its surfaces for its hidden ideologies and agendas, I want to think about what to make of it in a different sense. What is the feeling it generates good for? To what extent do we need this palpable sensation of belonging, that we are all aboard the same flight, buffeted by the same turbulence? We could all just go our separate ways, pursue our private lives, even if, as that great American essayist Henry David Thoreau said, they are mostly lives of ‘quiet desperation’.1 Do we need to be ‘we’ at all – why not just a collection of I and I and I?
TECHNICS OF THE PUBLIC For my flight from New York home to Sydney, I bought my ticket and put my life in the hands of the pilots. One can’t seriously imagine an aircraft piloted by the democratic argy-bargy of all aboard. Or so I thought, until me and 1000 other people landed a plane together. Admittedly, it wasn’t a real plane, but it was pretty amazing experience, all the same. I was at Siggraph 95, a big computer graphics industry conference and convention. Little paddles were handed out among the audience in the big auditorium. The paddles had a green reflector or one side, red on the other. Different sections of the audience were assigned different aspects of the flight plan to control – height, direction, and speed. Each person turned the little paddle one way or the other, while watching the flight’s progress on the big screen. A computer took data from sensors monitoring the paddles, averaged it out and sent our aggregate decisions to the aircraft, which we brought down safely, every time. Kevin Kelly, the editor of the techno-geek magazine Wired and an infectious enthusiast for such things, describes this in his book Out of Control an example of the ‘hive mind’ at work.2 I was pretty thrilled by it too. But whereas the lesson for Kelly is all about private initiative and its virtues, for me this experience was a simple little demonstration of the lost art of being a public. We all did something together, and were aware of doing it together while we did it. We entered the big hall at Siggraph as private consumers: buying our tickets and taking our seats. We became, for a moment, public actors: participating in something together without being forced to be other than as we are. It’s a sign of the times that in America today it is mostly instances of being a public that employ gee-whiz technology which appear as
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the cause for celebration. It’s a curious thing, but there’s a mantra chanted throughout the media, to the effect that the media have killed the public.3 The only media sometimes exempted are new media, which supposedly make up for the failings of the old. I suspect that ‘publicness’ may be alive and well, even in America, in its school boards and city boroughs, on talk back radio and even talk show TV. What is lacking is a language within which to talk about the shifting spaces through which publics form, the changing nature of the things publics talk about, and the variable geometry of media technologies, from the telephone to the internet, that network it together.
RHETORICS OF THE NATION The public piloting of a virtual plane, or consumers buying tickets to a real one; these are only figures of speech for the way national cultures might work. Like all figures of speech, they capture a likeness at the expense of ignoring some attributes of the thing. Unlike a scheduled flight, a country cannot know its future ‘destination’. Who knows what events await? But then ‘nation’ is itself something only graspable as a figure of speech. A nation is never all together in the same place, everyone in plain view of one another, like in a plane, or at the theatre or the marketplace. The people come together in an imaginary space. So it matters which figures of speech we choose to represent that space. What’s clear about the 1980s and 1990s is that it is a time when market metaphors captured the imaginations of the nation’s pilots more than its passengers. In the wake of the reduction of nation to market, to the point where pundits seriously questioned whether one needs a nation at all if one has markets, something seemed missing. The dismal discourse of economics offered, in the end, nothing beyond the path of working, eating, and distracting ourselves until we die – all with the utmost efficiency. What had promised to be a discourse that would rationalise those parts of life not worth spending any more time on than necessary, leaving more time for things worthwhile, had promoted itself to the only thing worth anything. What had once been merely the means to the good life touted itself as if it were the ends of the good life itself. Where once we worked to live, now we live to work. But this fool’s philosophy had by the 1990s become enshrined as a state religion. Any questioning of its sacred dogmas quickly brought down the wrath of the new inquisition, who delight in torturing enemies of the faith with their pocket calculators. And so the lack that lurked so palpably, just below the surface of everyday life, was not taken for what it really was – the symptom of a deep public disgust with this confusion of work with life, of efficiency with justice, of price with quality.
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As happens in such circumstances, what was wanting was a figure of speech that could describe this lack, this need, this yearning. What the market forgets as a figure of speech could only be remembered in another figure – but which? Neither society nor nation quite managed to claim this lost part of our collective selves. And so, in order to name this missing limb of collective life, the figure of speech that came to stand in for what was lacking ended up being ‘culture’. Everything lacking in a world made over in the image of the economy was sheeted home to culture, which at one and same time was held to be the source of all our problems, and the remedy. The problem with culture was that postmodernism, political correctness, multiculturalism and crypto closet Marxists had stuffed it up. What was needed was a return to the one true value. How curious that when economic theory offered the aura of a way of conceiving of the whole of life that made it all hinge on something simple, true and eternal, those who wanted to rescue culture sought to make it over in this same theological image. What was needed were ‘values’. Needless to say, a great deal was said in defence of the idea of eternal and absolutely true cultural values. What these God-given sacraments actually arc, nobody quite got around to announcing. The tablets were not brought down from the mountain. As if we could swallow that old routine anyway. Having spent time in both the United States and Australia during the 1990s, what I noticed was a curious playing out of the same conversations in both places, where the figure of speech of the economy was never really questioned, and where culture accumulated all the lost hopes and fears that the economy could not answer. The strangest side of it was that people who spend their time imagining, describing and analysing this world of the economy-gone-mad, such as writers, artists, scholars, teachers, thinkers, were being held to blame for the world they (we) tried to invoke. As if to prove once and for all that this really is a postmodern world, the images, descriptions and stories about this world were held to be the cause of its problems, rather than their effects.
MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO I wake with a start. Where am I? On a plane. It’s OK, it’s only a paranoid dream. Perhaps I should have stayed awake and watched the movie. Something set in New York involving men armed with guns and a girl shod in pumps. ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ – but I have thought about leaving it. I guess a lot of people, when travelling, entertain this fantasy – particularly on long plane flights. I dream about moving to America, becoming an expatriate, pitting myself against the challenge of
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making it there, in the world’s biggest market for the kind of things that I do – writing and reading, speaking and listening, teaching and learning. I’m an optimistic person in some ways, so these fantasies always work out well, in my head at least. I move to New York, struggle along, but in the end, I make it. I mention this because the kinds of fantasies I feel I can have about being in America seem to me to be a bit different from the ones I feel I can have about being in Australia. My American fantasies are all about my fabulous life, my brilliant career, my wonderful family and small circle of friends. Not because I don’t care about other people. I care about other people – even Americans. It’s just that I find it hard to have any optimism when I’m in America about what it might be possible to do beyond the individual. It’s as if the structures that hold private lives together in some wider framework simply aren’t there any more. But when I think about Australia, I can dream about being part of something more than my own private Idaho. When I think about Australians, I feel a particular kind of sympathy. It is as if the sympathy I feel for my family and friends, for people I know and see, somehow extended beyond those little circles to a wider, abstract circle of people whom I do not really know. And yet I wish for these people what I wish for my family and friends – I ‘wish the kind of things silly little greetings and toasts announce. Australians are people I really want to have a good day, a happy anniversary, and a pleasant flight. In America, at least in that wide-screen dream most Australians still often have of America, sympathy feels much more particular. Australians are fellow passengers; Americans are people who just occupy adjacent space. In America, I feel like I am governed by a social contract. I walk around, buy the new issue of the New Yorker, ride the subway, read my magazine. It is as if all that connected me to other people was something that kept each of us within a certain limit. The social contract, the myth of America as a society, seems to be that it is a contract that limits the passions and actions of people. Those desires always seem like they threaten to break out at any moment. Americans dream of being mugged, bashed, carjacked or serially killed, so Americans grudgingly pay a few taxes to keep the police up to speed in an arms race with gangsters, hoodlums, thugs and punks, and to keep 1.5 million former fellow citizens in prison.4 It isn’t really quite like that, of course. But in the Australian nightmare rerun of the American dream, it appears so, and in a quite widespread Australian reading of Hollywood, it is so. American society is a contract enforced by the police to keep everyone’s raging desires within limits. Once, those desires could escape westward, to the frontier, but now they
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seem all bottled up, ready to go off like a bomb on the subway. The only desires let free aren’t those of people any more, they are the desires of money. People are hemmed in on all sides, but money does what it pleases. To an Australian, it appears as if Americans dream of not losing their jobs, not getting mugged, not getting sick before they can afford it. There is a poverty in American life. You feel it not just in the way the welfare system has gone freelance and you are solicited for contributions on every other street corner. It’s a poverty of the imagination. A poverty of ways of thinking of America other than as cash and combat.
INTIMATIONS OF SYMPATHY Many Australians fear it may be getting like that in Australia too, and this diminishing of the social imagination is associated with a creeping Americanisation. Against this Americanised Australia is another Australia, the one that makes possible that strange feeling of sympathy I and many other Australians have for each other, as something one just sort of feels without thinking. It’s that feeling I had watching that Qantas ad – the feeling of feeling together, with others, the feeling of belonging to a community of sense. As cultural studies theorist Larry Grossberg argues, feeling is a much underrated quality of what it is that cements people into the wider world.5 In both analysis and in culture itself, the affections have been relentless privatised, pushed back toward the secret worlds of romance, sex and family, but these are really particular instances of a structure of feeling, points from which to reimagine the whole of life and create new figures of speech for it. Let’s take just one such affection – sympathy. You feel something, I empathise with the way you feel. We are in sympathy. Some people believe that our feelings of sympathy for those close to us has its roots in biological nature. That may be so, but the feeling I can have for other Australians, or that an American might feel for ‘my fellow Americans’ is clearly a cultural thing. It is an extension of those feelings for a small circle of intimates to a wider circle of strangers – by the artificial means of culture. In the Australian reading of America, everything begins with the individual, as if we were born, whole and complete, with unlimited passions and desires, which can only be tamed and limited by the social contract. The big guy with the gun is a loner, but in the end he always restores the law. But as the philosopher and essayist David Hume argued, we are only ever individuals after having been part of some small
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clump of human life: a family, pack, tribe, gang or clan. It is in those little containers of familiars that sympathy begins, with sexual ‘lust’ and love of the (resultant) children. ‘Consult common experience,’ Hume would say, and one finds that even the most cutthroat gangster who will rob you with a switchblade, or the most rapacious speculator who will rob you with a fountain pen, even they have buddies or family somewhere, for whose benefit they think they are stealing from you. Perhaps the problem is not so much that the rampant natural passions of individuals have to be forcibly limited by a social contract but that our partial sympathies for those close to us have to be artificially extended by a sociable culture. As Hume says in his Treatise of Human Nature, ‘... the sense of justice and injustice is not derived from nature, but arises artificially, though necessarily from education, and human convention.’ The aims of which are modest: ‘experience sufficiently proves, that men, in the ordinary conduct of life, look not so far as the public interest ... That is a motive too remote and too sublime ...’.6 Rather convention instils such a concern for reputation that people internalise conventions and channel their passions accordingly. The result: ‘By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability increases: And by mutual succour we are less exposed to fortune and accidents. It is by this additional force, ability and security, that society becomes advantageous.’ This from the book that Adam Smith was nearly thrown out of Oxford University for possessing. Smith will write in the Wealth of Nations that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest’.7 As with Hume’s artifice of justice, Smith’s invisible hand of the market has its roots in the passions, in a ‘trucking disposition’, a desire less to do with having other people than having what they have. As with Hume, it only works for the conjunction of forces when raised to the level of a convention. Consult your own experience: ‘nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog’. The market is as much an artifice as any other institution. Depending on whether one thinks of a social institution as something that limits individual desires, or one that extends partial sympathies, one can imagine it as either a restraint on the natural energies of the human organism, or as a positive means of artificially extending and integrating the kinds of creative and productive ingenuity of our particular little sympathetic worlds, to enable us to fly. In place of plain stealing, the conventions of property; in place of violence, a common world of conversation.
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VIRTUAL EMPIRE In the Australian context, this dichotomy can express itself as one between the economic and the cultural, or it can express itself as a conflict between Australian and American values: It’s Crocodile Dundee versus The Coca Cola Kid. In these two films, America – or at least an Australian cinematic expression of appropriated images of Hollywood’s America – appears as a world without sympathy. Perhaps it is no accident that in Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome, Max finds himself alternately in a rapacious Bartertown presided over the brash and American Tina Turner, and with a lost tribe who tell stories in a fabulously mutated Australian vernacular. What is left out of the picture is any sense of an American culture of sympathy. The identification of the American with the pure exchangeability of the market and a society of limit is an image left over from the era of the Vietnam war, a remnant of the politics of resistance to America as empire. A certain irony is at work here. Hollywood is assumed, on this most prevalent reading, to be synonymous with American empire, and indeed a subsidiary part of that empire in its own right. But this view leaves out two of the more interesting, and more productive, aspects of the Americanisation of Australian popular culture: firstly, that Hollywood presents far more images of the tensions and crises within America than images of its power; secondly, that there might be an audience, in both America and Australia, that is adept at reading a politics of sympathy into Hollywood texts, rather than a politics of individualism and of the war of all against all. So, in the rest of this essay, what I want to do is look at the way a discourse of republican sympathy works through even the most supposedly aggressive and imperial of American texts – the Hollywood action movie. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of being in a packed cinema, watching some engrossing big-budget movie, feeling the whole audience swoon and sway with every twist and turn in the story. Watching the movie Independence Day in a New York cinema, two images in it stand out as moments when I felt a mass audience experience the collective ecstasy of cinema. One such moment is when the President unites America in the common cause of fighting the enemy. I found it genuinely moving, watching the last act of the movie, as people with a purpose come together, in spite of their differences, and form an association strong enough and flexible enough to defeat the invaders. But then the other moment that is really striking is the image of the White House exploding. This image seems to contradict the other one.
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In the theatre where I first saw the film, there was a palpable rush of excitement in the crowd at bits of White House blasted so realistically towards us, the multispeaker sound system booming. But then that charge pulsed through the audience again when the President rallied the nation, indeed the world, and led the people to victory. The two images are not in contradiction. The first image makes the second possible, and the two together are part of a strong narrative tradition in American popular political culture. The birth of a fresh, green spirit of the republic requires that the husk of the old one be torn asunder. A slightly more sceptical version of this same story is in the film The Rock. Here an American general, a Vietnam ‘black ops’ veteran, steals missiles armed with deadly Sarin gas, takes over the Alcatraz prison island, and threatens to bomb San Francisco if compensation is not paid to the widows and orphans of covert operatives who died in Desert Storm. (Oh, and he also wants a rather large sum of money for himself) Ranged against the general and his crack unit are Nicholas Cage, a ‘lab rat’ chemical threat specialist from the FBI, and Scan Connery, a mysterious Britisher who is the only man ever held prisoner on ‘The Rock’ who escaped from it. We learn, as the movie cranks through its paces, that Connery is an M15 agent who stole all the top secrets of the FBI before they nabbed him at the Canadian border. He is also an erudite chap. The mad general quotes Thomas Jefferson at him: ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots’. Connery retorts with Oscar Wilde: ‘patriotism is the virtue of the vicious’. As if to prove his point, the general cuffs him on the head with his pistol. The bad guys eventually fall out among themselves. Their motives are not pure, but a mixture of crank patriotism and sheer mercenary greed. Whatever the general might want, most of his men are just in it for the money, and money is not a subtle enough binding force to keep them together. But the film is not entirely against the general’s thesis, conveyed in his quote from Jefferson. Connery, in this witty reprise of his James Bond roles, discloses to Cage where he hid the FBI’s secrets. The last shot is of Cage scrutinising microfilm, and asking his fiancee if she wants to know who killed JFK In good liberal fashion, the renewal of the republic won’t come from violence, militias or coups, but from the combined efforts of unlikely associations of people who believe that ‘the truth is out there’, and that it makes a difference to seek it and tell it as it is.
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One of the most striking things about action movies is how often they see the fruits of American empire as what has corrupted the republic. A founding ideology for America has it that the new republic should have nothing to do with the corrupt old empires of Europe and their devious ways, but should stay aloof and isolated. This isolationism gave way to ‘manifest destiny’, an elastic principle which held that the republic had the right to extend the light of liberty across the continent, from east to west – and indeed need not stop there, but keep right on going all the way to the Philippines. The further it extended its sense of manifest destiny, the more isolation from world affairs seemed like a forlorn hope. Particularly when world affairs started extending themselves in America’s direction. It was clear to President Roosevelt that the 1938 Munich crisis represented the end of America’s isolation from the world – particularly in an era in which radio broadcasts could convey the very last glimmer and tremor of peace and war at the meeting from Munich to New York – and from there, right across the United States. Roosevelt knew the power of radio – he invented the ‘fireside chat’ later revived by Ronald Reagan in the television age.8 He knew that the United States had to arm itself against a world brought ever closer by the vectors of modern media – and modern weaponry. An America not really reconciled to the centralisation of power Roosevelt created to fight the depression was obliged to watch an even greater state machine assume control of the war. A striking symbol of which is the Pentagon building itself. Hastily thrown up in the war years, when it was built it was the single largest administrative building on the planet, running the larges logistical operation ever known – the American war effort in Europe and the Pacific. The defence of the republic, and the defence of the wider sphere of influence legitimated by manifest destiny, called forth a new machinery of power, the machinery of empire. American became what it was founded to oppose. Out of its manifest destiny arose its latent destiny – as a complex, corruptible, conflicted machinery of empire. Roosevelt began the construction of what president Eisenhower would call the military industrial complex. There’s no longer much ‘industrial’ about it. Its name these days is the military entertainment complex – after the two economic and political structures that shape its culture. Hollywood and the Pentagon – the logistics of images and the logistics of weapons – the two things postmodern America does best. The action movie is one of the most publicly visible places where they meet. In the movie Eraser, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a special agent who works for the Witness Protection Program at the Department of
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Justice. He has to protect Vanessa Williams, an employee at a high tech arms company, who has evidence of shady dealings involving the company and top brass at the Pentagon and the White House. Realising that he can’t trust anyone at the Justice Department, not even James Caan, his old mentor, he vows to protect Williams as his personal mission. She is not like the usual run of turncoat gangster who requires witness protection. She is not Ray Liota in Wiseguys. She provided the FBI with evidence against her own company out of a sense of justice, and Schwarzenegger respects that. Her company has developed a powerful energy beam weapon with Pentagon money, but kept the success of the research a secret. It is not selling this weapon to the Pentagon, but to the highest bidder. This is pretty standard fare for an action movie, and not half as witty as the earthquake-causing satellite Eric Bogosian wants to sell to the Arabs in Under Siege 2, or the very jaunty John Travolta stealing nuclear weapons in Broken Arrow. The consistent theme here is corruption of empire. Like Rome before its fall, the very wealth and power accumulated by the empire is the source of its undoing. With no major foe to fear – the alien invasion hasn’t arrived in these films – Pentagon culture and political culture generally corrode from within. Without patriotism, there is only the market, and in the marketplace there is no honour and no common good. When Adam Smith’s followers speak of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market that can turn private vices like greed into a public good like wealth, they are not thinking that the hand now also has a trigger finger of incalculable destructive power. But neither patriotic duty to the state nor free market self-interest is enough to protect common interest from the very tools the Pentagon developed, supposedly to protect state and market. Much as it would be comforting to think that Val Kilmer watches over us on a free lance basis, The Saint is more of a camp sendup of an action movie than the thing itself. This might be a rather depressing scenario: The republic is no more. It’s been swallowed whole by the empire. Without a common enemy, nothing holds America together. There’s no alternative to empire other than the market, and the market will not see to it that dangerous force is always in safe hands. But there is a third option, and it crops up in some of these movies, if a little tentatively. It’s what I would call the ‘virtual republic’, In Eraser, Arnold finds he can no longer work alone, but has to call on friends for help. This is a step forward, of sorts. Arnold is the John Wayne of the empire in decline. Like Wayne he is a purely physical presence on screen, the spitting image of the tough and self reliant loner. When he starts to work cooperatively, then you know it’s an important moment.
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He isn’t doing it out of sentiment or dependency. He’s the tough guy’s tough guy. Just as Wayne knew when to become a team player and shoot Liberty Valence so that Jimmy Stewart could unite the people and establish law and order, so too Arnie knows when it’s time to act for the greater good. In Eraser, when Schwarzenegger calls on people who have helped him, forms of association arise in which people combine their different talents. But this is based on a rather strained sense of altruism. It appears as if acting collectively is some saintly exception to the norm of acting as an atomised individual. It’s rather like the tedious spectacle of Colin Powell and President Clinton painting out graffiti as part of a campaign to encourage people to be volunteer do-gooders. But in Eraser there’s one great exception to this paralysing notion of the social. The bad guys are shipping high tech weapons to the Russian mafia through Baltimore shipyards. Arnold goes to the good old fashioned American mafia who run the waterfront and confronts them with this news. They are not amused. But it’s ambiguous why they decide to help Schwarzenegger. Is it out of patriotism, or self interest, or maybe both? There’s even a great joke on this. The mob boss speaks of how they have to get the evil Commies. One of his associates points out that Russia has been ‘liberated’ and is now a Commonwealth of Independent States. ‘I really don’t want to hurt you,’ the mob boss replies. Sometimes it’s best not to enquire too closely into the mixed origins of sympathies, upon which people act. If the mob boss wants to pretend he’s Richard Widmark in Sam Fuller’s cold war film noir classic Pick Up on South Street, playing the hood with a political conscience, then that’s his funeral. The mob are persuaded to help Arnie by a former mobster whom Schwarzenegger has helped when he turned state’s evidence. Speaking mobster to mobster, he draws them into having sympathy for Arnie and his problem, as an extension for sympathy for himself as a fellow mobster. From sympathy for other mobsters, to friends of mobsters, sympathy is then extended to friends of friends of mobsters – Vanessa Williams, the witness with evidence against the arms smugglers. It’s a nice if not quite convincing example of the theory of sentiments worked out by David Hume, (a friend of Adam Smith, discussed above). Hollywood action movies grapple with the Humean view of what the republic could become, if in an intuitive and muddled way. These films tend to be as suspicious of empire as the general public and, like it, suspicious also of the right wing libertarian solutions to the problem. Neither the market on its own, nor information technology on its own, nor constitutional fundamentalism on its own is enough to return the
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republic to its roots. The gesture of blowing up the White House, figuratively if not literally, appears in many of these films. There is often some venal weasel who gets it with both barrels somewhere along the way. But there is more to the virtual republic than destroying the decaying crust of empire and replacing it with one or other simple minded libertarian panaceas. The problem is not one of destruction but of creation. It’s about finding the kinds of everyday sympathy out of which the artifice of institutions might make a web of connections that make the republic imaginable. This has little to do with the rather and debate between liberals and communitarians. That debate sees things flattened out as a choice between the liberty of the individual and the stability of the community. But there is no such thing as an individual or a community. There are just different kinds of clumps of people whose limited sympathies can be extended in particular kinds of ways. Those sympathies both limit and guarantee liberty. The institutions that result both form individuals and instil them with an internalised sense of right and duty. Hollywood has had a better grasp of this than academic political science or Washington punditry, for after all it is Hollywood that lives or dies by creating acceptable compromise versions of America’s collective myths. Hollywood is an institution in its own right, and one totally dependent on public sympathy that might give it a free space in which to invent and might patronise it enough to pay for its mythic imaginings of the virtual republic. Not surprisingly, Hollywood is itself often under attack, supposedly for ‘violence’, but I suspect more truthfully for political honesty. Hollywood action movies tell the truth about the state of the republic. They tell it in a highly coded way, as epic narrative. They negotiate new versions of the common stock of myths about action, about character, and about the republic itself.
NARRATIVES OF EMERGENCY In John Ford’s The Searchers, John Wayne is a disillusioned old soldier, a veteran of the civil war, but he can still be motivated to fight Indians. There is something genuinely frightening about Wayne in this film, when you realise that he will not only kill the Indian chief for abducting a white woman, he will kill the white woman for her sexual ‘betrayal’ of the white world. It’s an extraordinary meditation on just how much energy white America can generate in the service of violence against the ‘other’. During the depression, the world war and the cold war, the motivating force for the attempt to forge institutions was always some
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overhanging sense of emergency. The cold war may be over, but this sense of the mobilisation of sympathy against a common foe dies hard – and with a vengeance. The main strategy pursued in Hollywood movies is to find substitutes for the lapse of the cold war emergency. In Clear and Present Danger, it was the central American drug cartels. In True Lies, Arab extremists. In Eraser, Russian mafias. The Saint is an interesting film to the extent that the idea of emergency is played out as camp. A Russian populist demagogue is the nominal villain, but it’s mostly played for laughs. Men in Black takes another tack. Taking a cue from the success of The X Files, it takes up the alien threat, but in a high comic mode. So perhaps it’s possible to think of acts of extended sympathy that don’t require a threat from without as their pretext. What this requires is a rethinking of the very idea of the republic, which is to say, the idea of the ‘public thing’. The public thing is that event or object about which people can exchange stories and opinions, as seen from their particular point of view. Action movies present the public thing as something else – a news story about an external threat. What action movies do not quite own up to is the fact that they are the public thing. The movie is the principal mode of American public storytelling. In small countries, books can still play this role of articulating a story for public reflection. Amos Oz often talks about the way that in Israel, if a writer such as himself writes about, say, the state of the roads, a public discussion inevitably follows about the state of the roads. In my book The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 90s, I talk about the role of books and plays in providing common objects around which cultural differences can express themselves in Australia. But in America, it seems to me that only Hollywood movies consistently play this role – for everyone, that is, except political and cultural elites. Those elites seem to think that the problem with America is that Americans don’t pay enough attention to their cultural and political elites. But the problem seems to me rather the other way around – those elites have lost touch with the public thing that preoccupies the rest of America. For all its limitations – the way only a threat can prompt collective action, the way sympathy arises from altruism, and so on – Hollywood still does a remarkably good job of articulating the virtual republic.9 By that I mean the possibility of forms of action which combine particular sympathies into the artifice of institutions that extend and expand the capacities of different kinds of people. Too often the debate lies between the call to suppress cultural difference in the name of the alleged
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unifying properties of a dominant culture, or disposing with the whole idea of the republic in the name of the specific needs of this or that corner of cultural difference. But Hollywood is way ahead of both the conservative and radical option for American culture. Its stories propose instead the forging of new forms of association, from the bottom up. In Broken Arrow the greenie park ranger, Samantha Mathis, works together with the bulletheaded military flyboy Christian Slater. In the third of the Die Hard films, Samuel Jackson teams up with Bruce Willis. There is a frank acknowledgement, in both cases, that even an emergency isn’t enough to make the differences of race and gender disappear in the interests of the common good. Differences aren’t erased by the need to expand sympathy and force an artifice of cooperation. But they can be made productive, creative. Difference can be a resource for the republic rather than a hindrance. The republic can be the productive combination of difference rather than its suppression. Either way, it’s less of a cinematic hit than blowing the White House to bits, but it does sustain a good 90minute story. America has often functioned as an other to Australian culture, an emblem of a modernisation that might be in equal parts desired and feared.10 Hollywood, in particular, has become a figure for what is the opposite to culture – violence. But I think such a reading does an injustice, and not just to Hollywood films. Even Hollywood action movies can contain strong elements of a republic sympathy, built from the bottom up, and as opposed to an America of economic individualism as any other culture. And this, I suspect, is how these films may in part be read in a place like Australia. Not as advertisements for empire, but as narrative reconstructions and imaginary solutions to the conflicts generated by a republic in conflict with an empire. H. D. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Penguin Books, New York, 1986, p. 50. K. Kelly, Out of Control, Addison-Wesley, Reading Mass., 1994, pp. 5–28. See J. Katz, Virtuous Reality, Random House, New York, 1997. E. Schlosser, ‘America Busted’, New Yorker, 24 February 1997, p. 49. L. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Routledge, New York, 1992, p. 83. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 529–52. My reading of Hume has been particularly influenced by that of Gilles Deleuze in Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991. 7 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I-III, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1986, p.118. 8 See J. Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985. 1 2 3 4 5 6
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9 The Virtual Republic, 1997, includes an earlier version of part of this chapter (see M. Wark, The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Cultural Wars of the 90s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997. 10 See P. Bell and K Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Phillip, ‘Dolls on the American Knee’ the Australian, 12 September 1993, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 1994. Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’ in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism. Globalisation and Modernity, Sage, London, 1990. Bakhtin, Michael, The Dialogic Imagination, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981. Bamet, Richard and Ronald Miller, Global Reach: The Rise of Multinational Corporations, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1974. Baudrillard, Jean, America, Trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 1989. Bell, Philip and Roger Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993. Bell, Roger, ‘Testing the Open Door Thesis in Australia, 1941–1946’, Pacific Historical Review, LI:3, August 1982. Blonsky, Marshall, American Mythologies, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992. Blum, John M. et al. (eds), The National Experience: A History of the US, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1988. Breckenridge, Carol. (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, University of Minneapolis Press, London, 1995. Grant, Bruce, The Australian Dilemma: A New Kind of Western Society, McDonald Futura, Sydney, 1983. Hill, Howard C, ‘The Americanisation Movement’, American Journal of Sociology, 24, May 1919. Hollander, Paul, Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad 1965–1990, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992. Iriye, Akira, The Globalising of America, 1913–1945, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1993. Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000, Random House, New York, 1987. Kroes, Rob et al. (eds), Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe, VU University Press, Amsterdam, 1993. Kuisel, Richard, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, University of California Press, London, 1993.
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Lacorne, Denis, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception, St Martins Press, London, 1990. Lotman, Yuri M., Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990. Nye, Joseph, ‘Popular Culture: Images and Issues’, in Dialogue 99:1/93, ‘Understanding US Strength’, Foreign Policy, 72, Fall 1988. O’Regan, Tom, Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, 1996. Reynolds, David, ‘Power, Wealth and War in the Modern World’, The Historical Journal, 32:2, June 1989. Rosenberg, Emily, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Culture Expansion 1890–1945, Hill and Wang, New York, 1982. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, New York, Vintage, 1993. Thorne, Christopher, ‘American Political Culture and the Asian Frontier, 1943–1973’, S. Tryphena Phillips Lecture Proceedings of the British Academy, read 3 December 1986. Tumer, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History, Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1920. Von Laue, T. H., The World Revolution of Westernisation: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987. Worsley, Peter, ‘Models Or the Modern World System’ in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalisation and Modernity Sage, London, 1990.
INDEX
Acker, Kathy 228, 235 Adams, Phillip 7, 179 Adelman, M. L. 53 Agar, Alex 181 Allison, John 68 Althusser, Louis 257 Anderson, Don 251 Andre, Carl 252 Ang, I. 196 Appadurai, A. 11–12, 200, 206 Arbib, Mark 117 Aristotle 62 Arquette, Rosanna 211 Aspden, David 251 Atkinson, Terry 255 Audette, Yvonne 246 Autrey, Gene 188 Bacon, Wendy 174 Baker, S. J. 37 Baker, Snowy 191 Bakhtin, M. 9–10 Baldwin, Michael 255 Banton, Michael 83 Barr, Alfred 255 Barry, Robert 252 Barthelme, Donald 251 Barthes, Roland 257 Baudrillard, Jean 241 Baynton, Barbara 232 Beazley, Kim 119 Beck, Ulrich 145–46 Bell, P. and Bell, R. 6–7, 10–11, 47, 53, 180, 194, 196 Benaud, Richie 187
Bennett, Darren 191 Bennett, Marjory 229 Berridge, Edward 229 Beuys, Joseph 253 Blackman, Charles 249 Blair, Tony 117 Blake, William 247–48 Blashki, Myer 245 Blauner, Robert 89 Bogosian, Eric 271 Borghino, Jose 229 Borlase, Nancy 246 Bourke-White, Margaret 258 Boyd, Arthur 249 Boyd, Robin 70 Brack, John 249 Brady, W. A. 49 Breckenridge, C. A. 12, 200 Brennan, Chief Justice Sir Gerard 112 Brewer, Captain J. L. 181 Brook, Donald 250, 253 Brookes, Herbert 66 Broome, Richard 182 Brown, Brian 220 Brown, Pamela 231 Brown, Wendy 176–77 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne 22, 65 Bulbeck, Chilla 168 Burley Griffin, Walter 65, 67 Burn, Ian 253, 255–56 Burnham, James 135, 137 Burns, James MacGregor 137
Burns, Joanne 231 Burns, Tommy 182–83 Butler, Judith 169 Caan, James 271 Cage, Nicholas 269 Cain, John 74 Cameron, Deborah 32 Carey, G., and Lette, K. 231 Carmichael, Stokely 89 Carr, Bob 119 Carter, President Jimmy 115 Carver, ‘Doc’ 49 Casey, R. G. 185 Castles, F. 64 Castles, Steven 102 Chafee, Zachariah 128– 29, 130, 135 Chamberlain, Lindy 211 Chamberlain, Richard 211 Chatterjee, P. 11 Chicago, Judy 257 Chief Little Wolf 183, 191 Chifley, Ben 69 Christmann, Gunter 251 Churchward, L. G. 153 Clark, T. J. 257 Clarke, Lewis 181 Claxton, Norman ‘Norrie’ 187 Climpson, Roger 203 Clinton, President Bill 109, 117, 119, 166, 272 Cobain, Kurt 230, 235 Cody, Buffalo Bill 215 Coleman, Peter 173
280 Coles, George 68 Collier John 84 Collins, Peter 170 Combe, David 117 Connery, Sean 269 Cooper, Walter 49 Costello, Vice Consul Walter T. 19–23, 26 Cotton, Joseph 211 Cox, Eva 171 Coyote, Peter 211–12 Crawford, Broderick 211 Crean, Simon 116 Cropley, A. J. and Kovacs, M. L. 95 Cunningham, S. & Jacka, E. 194 Curthoys, A. 194 Curtin, John 220 Dampier, Alfred 49 Dante 247 Darcy, Les 183, 189 Darrell, George 50 Davis, Mark 231 Davison, G. 63 de Graaff, Bob 242 De Mille, Cecil B. 55–56 Deakin, Alfred 45, 110 Dean, James 248 Deason, Esther 185 Dennis, C. J. 206 Dermody, S. and Jacka, E. 195 Diana, Princess of Wales 200 Dicey, Albert Venn 139– 40 Dickson, Chicka see Dixon, Chicka Dilke, Sir Charles 63 Diver, Stuart 200 Dixon, Chicka 92 Doolin, James 246 Douglas, Kirk 210 Downs, William C. 17– 19, 21–22 Duchamp, Marcel 253 Dunstan, Don 116 Duvernet, Sergeant William 185 Dworkin, Andrea 172–73 Dwyer, Marj 185 Eisenhower, General Dwight D. 248, 270 Eisenstein, Hester 167, 169, 171 Elliot, John 74 Ellis, Bob 218 Ellis, Bret Easton 228, 235
AMERICANIZATION AND AUSTRALIA Embrey, Lynn 184 Emerson, T. 130 Epstein, David 117 Esson, Louis 46, 64 Ettler, Justine 229, 234– 37, 240 Evans, Neil 253 Evergood, Miles 245 Faust, Beatrice 174 Ferrin, A. W. 21 Fischer, Tim 112 Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. 202 Fitzgerald, Jack 65 Ford, Henry 68 Ford, John 273 Foucault, M. 176 Franklin, M. A. 88 Fraser, A. 140–41, 145 Fraser, Malcolm 113, 116, 119 Fried, Michael 251 Fuller, Sam 272 Garner, Helen 175, 231– 32 Gates, Merrill 15 Gaudron, J. 138 Gellert, Leon 245 George, Henry 153 Gepp, Herbert 66–68 Gibson, Sir Robert 66 Gilley, Mark 185 Gitlin, Todd 101 Goldwater, Barry 255 Gompers, Samuel 155 Gorton, John 115 Gottlieb, Adolph 248, 251 Greenberg, Clement 252, 257 Greig, A. 69 Grossberg, Larry 266 Gunew, Sneja 100–101 Gunn, J. 38 Gutman, Herbert 54–55 Haacke, Hans 258 Habermas, Jurgen 28 Haig, General William 36 Haldeman, Bob 116 Hall, Stuart 257 Hamnett, Olivia 213 Hansen, Miriam 28 Hanson, Pauline 93, 100 Harradine, Senator Brian 108 Harris, Mark 191 Harris, Max 72 Harrison, H. C. A. 51 Harrower, Elizabeth 232
Hawke, Bob 73, 118, 195 Hayden, Bill 117 Hays, Will 22 Heizer, Michael 253 Helms, Jesse 259 Henderson, M. and Rowlands, S. 231 Heubler, Douglas 252 Hewett, Dorothy 232 Hewitt, Sir Lenox 115 Hewson, John 118 Higgins, Henry Bournes 154, 158 Higginson, Henry Lee 52 Higham, John 94 Hills, Patricia 258 Hinder, Frank and Margel 246 Hoff, Ursula 247 Hogan, Paul 206 Holden, William 213 Holt, Bland 49 Hooker, John Lee 255 Hopkins, Livingstone ‘Hop’ 245 Hopman, Harry 191 Hopper, Dennis 211 Horne, Donald 72, 96 Howard, John 61, 73, 108–109, 115–16, 118–19, 195 Hughes, Robert 101 Hughes, William Morris 65–66 Hume, David 267, 272 Humphries, Barry 206 Hussey, Frank 49 Ireland, David 232 Irvine, Robert 65 Isaacs, J. 140–41 Jackson, Samuel 275 Jaivin, Linda 229 Jefferson, Thomas 269 Jennings, A. V. 71 Johnson, Jack 182, 183 Johnson, President Lyndon 86, 254 Jordan, Michael 179–80, 189 Jull, David 109 Jupp, James 97 Kahanomoku, Duke 184, 191 Kahlo, Frida 258 Kahn, Albert 258 Kaiser, Mike 117
INDEX Kane, Carol 213 Kaprow, Alan 255 Keach, Stacy 214 Keating, Paul 73–74, 109, 118–19, 166, 195 Kellerman, Annette 191 Kelly, Kevin 262 Kelly, Ros 109 Kelly, Theo 68 Kennedy, President J. F. 3, 52 Kennett, Jeff 74 Kilmer, Val 271 King, Martin Luther 85– 86 King, N. and Rowse, T. 196, 200–201, 205 King, Richard 229 King, Rodney 93 Kipling, Rudyard 193, 207 Kirby, Justice Michael 109, 112 Klee, Paul 249 Klein, Yves 253 Koons, Jeff 258 Kosuth, Joseph 255 Kounellis, Jannis 253 Kristeva, Julia 233, 236– 37, 241 Kroes, Rob 6, 10–11 Kuisel, Richard 6 Labow, W. 41 Lacan, Jacques 9 Lambert, Eric 232 Lane, William 232 Latham, Mark 119 Latham, Sir John 185 Laurie, Piper 211 Lawler, Ray 52 Lawson, G. 137 Lawson, James 181 Lee, Jamie 214 Lendon, Nigel 256 Leonski, Private Eddie 220 Lette, K. and Carey, G. 231 Lewis, Essington 68 Liota, Ray 271 Lippard, Lucy 253 Litchfield, Stephen 117 Longley, Luc 191 Lord, Sharon 171 Lotman, Yuri 7–8, 206 Lynn, Elwyn 248 MacArthur, General Douglas 220 Machery, Pierre 257 MacKinnon, Catharine
172–73, 176
Macklin, Jenny 119 Mahoney, J. 144 Malcolm X 85, 87 Mandle, Bill 182–83 Manet 246 Manzoni, Piero 253 Marsh, Rod 188 Martin, Ray 201–202 Mason, Chief Justice Sir Anthony 112–13, 126 Mathis, Samantha 275 Matisse 246 McCarthy, Joseph R. 248 McCormack, Mark 187 McDermott, Craig 187 McGahan, Andrew 229, 234, 240 McGauran, Peter 109 McGillick, Paul 252 McGillick, Tony 253 McGowen, James 64, 65 McGrath, John Storey Charles 68 McGregor, Craig 93 McGuiness, Bruce 88 McHugh, J. 138, 143 McInerney, Jay 228, 235 McLennan, Ian 68 Meagher, R. D. 65 Meiklejohn, A. 130 Melville, H. 50 Mendes, Clare 229 Menzies, Robert G. 52, 69, 71 Meriam, Lewis 84 Michener, James A. 251 Milliss, Ian 256 Mills, Stephen 116 Monash, Sir John 67 Moore, John 109 Moorhouse, Frank 251 Morris, Grahame 116 Morris, Meaghan 169 Morris, Robert 252 Morton, Tex 188 Mount, L. 181 Murphy, Justice Lionel 111 Murray-Smith, Stephen 36 Murrell, Joseph 45 Myer, Ken 72 Myer, Norman 68 Nagel, Robert 128–33, 139, 142–43 Nagle, J. 82 Naismith, James 186 Namatjira, Albert 203, 247 Namuth, Hans 248
Nicholls, Sean 229
281 Nightingale, V. 202 Niland, Carmel 117 Nilsson, Dave 188 Nixon, President Richard 117, 254, 256 Noble, Monty 187 Nolan, Sidney 249 Noland, Kenneth 251 O’Hara, Frank 248 O’Leary, Dan 181 O’Neill, Eugene 52 O’Regan, Tom 7, 199 O’Reilly, W. 27 Oakley, Barry 229 Olitski, Jules 251 Olsen, John 249 Ormandy, Eugene 52 Oz, Amos 274 Packer, Kerry 186–87 Page, Earle 22, 65 Palmer, Nettie 26 Palmer, Vance 46 Parkes, Henry 45, 245 Peiss, Kathy 55 Perkins, Charles 86, 88 Perlman, Mark 149 Picasso 246 Piddington, K. C. and Piddington, A. B. 26 Plato 62 Pollock, Jackson 246, 248–50, 255 Pope Pius XI 24, 26–27 Potter, Ian 68 Poulantzas, Nicos 257 Powell, Colin 272 Powell, Enoch 92 Power, John 250, 252 Presley, Elvis 248 Pringle, J. D. 73 Pringle, Rosemary 174 Prosser, Geoff 109 Queale, William 68 Ramsden, Mel 253, 255 Ramson, W. 37 Ramster, P. J. 56 Rapotec, Stanislaus 249 Read, Peter 86 Reagan, Ronald 270 Reddington, Charles 246 Reinhardt, Ad 251 Rickard, John 183 Riley, Elizabeth 231 Ritter, Rick 117 Rivera, Diego 258
282
Roberts, Tom 245 Rockefeller (family) 248 Roe, Michael 153 Roosevelt, President Theodore 52, 135, 153, 270 Rosenberg, Emily 3 Rosenberg, Harold 248 Rosenfeld, Michael 98 Rothco, Mark 248, 251 Rowley, C. D. 84, 89–90 Rowse, T., and King, N. 200–201, 205 Rubin 255 Rushdie, Salman 11 Ryan, Gig 231 Said, E. 4–5 Salle, David 258 Sandler, Irving 255 Santamaria, B. A. 102 Saunders, David 250 Savage, John 211 Schapiro, Meyer 255 Schatter, Charlie 214 Schlesinger Jr, Arthur 101 Schnabel, Julian 258 Schroder, Ricky 213 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 271–72 Scott, Joan 101 Seidler, Harry 70 Sekula Allan 258 Serle, Geoffrey 47 Sharp, John 109 Sheeler, Charles 258 Short, Merle 185 Simpson, O. J. 92, 102 Skerritt, Tom 211 Slater, Christian 275 Smith, Adam 267, 271– 72 Smith, Aurel 68 Smith, Bernard 249–50 Smith, Dick 202 Smith, Terry 167, 253, 256 Smithson, Robert 252 Smits, Jimmy 215 Sofia, Zoe 234 Spalding, Albert Goodwill 182, 184, 187
AMERICANIZATION AND AUSTRALIA
Spencer, Charles 47 Squire, Robert 117 Squires, E. C. 23 Stanton, Richard 65–66 Stein, Sally 258 Steinberg, Leo 257 Stella, Frank 251 Stephensen, P. R. ‘Inky’ 46, 51 Stevens, Frank 89 Stevens, Leonie 229 Stewart, Bob 187 Stewart, Jimmy 272 Still, Clifford 248 Streep, Meryl 211 Streeter, T. 127, 131 Strossen, Nadine 173 Sulman, J. 65, 67 Summers, Anne 166–68, 172, 177 Sunstein, C. 145–46 Sussex, R. 34–8 Swan, Wayne 117 Swindell, Frederik 181 Swindell, Judge Alfred 48 Sykes, Roberta 87–88, 91–92, 98 Syson, Ian 232 Taylor, Andrew 235 Taylor, B. 35–36, 38 Taylor, Linton 187 Taylor, Sir Allen 65 Texter, Mark 117 Thomas, Henry 211 Thompson, Jack 213 Thoreau, Henry David 262 Tickey, Bertha 185 Tieck, Norman 72 Tildesley, Beatrice 25–26 Toohey, Justice 111 Toqueville, Alexis de 136, 162 Travolta, John 271 Truman, President Harry M. 3 Tsiolkas, Christos 229, 234–35, 239 Tucker, Albert 249 Tucker, D. 111 Turner, Frederick Jackson 1 Turner, Tina 211, 268
Valence, Liberty 272 van der Heide 8 van Gogh, Vincent 250 Vanstone, Amanda 33 Von Laue, T. H. 4 Walch, Garnet 49 Waldren, Murray 229, 231, 235 Walker, Kath 87 Walker, Ron 74 Wallach, Alan 258 Warburton, Henry 212 Warner, Arthur 68 Warren, C. 134, 136 Waterhouse, Richard 182, 184 Watkins, Dick 252 Wayne, John 272–73 Weaver, M. 91 Webb, S. and Webb, B. 151 Wenders, Wim 215 Westbrook, Eric 249 White, Edward G. 133, 135–36 White, Richard 51–53, 68, 182 Whitlam, Gough 97, 113, 116, 118–19, 254 Widmark, Richard 272 Wilde, Oscar 269 Wilenski, Peter 115 Williams, Fred 249 Williams, J. D. 47 Williams, Tennessee 52 Williams, Vanessa 271– 72 Williamson, John 203 Willis, Bruce 275 Wills, T. W. 51 Wilson, President Woodrow 2, 52 Windeyer, R. 26 Woodward, B. and Bernstein, C. 116 Wooldridge, Michael 109 Worsley, Peter 5 Wright, Christopher 153 Wright, Frank Lloyd 67, 70, 250 Yeatman, Anna 170–71 Young, Gordon 185
