On The Cultural Cringe

A.A. Phillips

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780522852219
• eBook ISBN: 9780522863888
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Family Relationship

Australia is an English colony. Its cultural pattern is based on that fact of history or, more precisely, on that pair of facts. Direct English inheritance determines the general design of our living and much of its detail, ranging from our enthusiasm about cricket to our indifference to the admirable wines which we produce. But the fact of our colonialism has a pervasive psychological influence, setting up a relationship as intimate and uneasy as that between an adolescent and his parent. That influence has been nowhere stronger than in our literature—naturally enough, since all art is grounded in tradition, and of all the arts literature is most ruled by national influences. French impressionism could teach Australian painters how to see and render their country’s light; we can, partly at least, escape the faith and morals of Milton and draw our inspiration from such alien sources as Christ or Karl Marx; but the writer cannot be free who speaks the tongue that Shakespeare spoke, for his art is the art of words, and his words draw their life from the accretive traditions which have alone created them.

This umbilical connection, incident to our colonial situation, has affected each stage of our literary development, although it has affected each stage differently.

For the first hundred years of our history, such Australian writing as sporadically appeared was a literature of emigrants nostalgically trying to sing their own songs in a strange land. Gordon suggests something of the tone of the Australian life of his time in the easy canter of his rhythms and in his preoccupation with horses; and he could produce the first resounding platitude of the Australian doctrine of Mateship-cum-independence.¹ But even Gordon could write of Australia as a land

Where bright blossoms are scentless

And songless bright birds.²

Yet in the poem containing this monstrous piece of insensitiveness, Gordon conveyed well enough those aspects of the landscape which an immigrant might be expected to feel—the inhuman largeness and the touch of terror.

More startling is the emigrant quality of the writing of even the Australian-born. Kendall writes of September in Australia in these terms:

September, the maid with the swift, silver feet!
She glides and she graces

The valleys of coolness, the slopes of the heat,
With her blossomy traces;

Sweet month, with a mouth that is made of a rose,
She lightens and lingers

In spots where the harp of the evening glows,
Attuned by her fingers.

A stock English spring, deftly turned out according to the best Romantic specifications; even the rose is there, blandly transported to forests where she had never bloomed. And yet you can hardly blame Kendall. To be a poet at all, he had to have the capacity to get drunk on words—English words. Once he had surrendered to that intoxication, he was powerless to escape the tradition of their use.³

Every now and then a writer felt something wrong about this surrender. George Essex Evans, striking the recurrent note of prophecy in Australian writing, declares:

Not as the song of other lands

Her songs shall be.⁴

But he does nothing effective about it. A few lines later he is writing of the ‘sun-kissed plain’. It is the English sun that kisses; the harsh, direct stroke of the Australian light does not dally with the amatory preliminaries. Ask the Mallee housewife, bent over her outdoor wash-trough.

The prose-writers of the first century were naturally less affected by this verbal hypnotism, but their values are as obstinately emigrant and are sometimes tainted by an anti-Australian snobbism. It is perhaps misleading to include Henry Kingsley in any catalogue of Australian writers. He wrote in England for Englishmen; when he chose Australia as a subject for his novels, it was because the literary sales-value of exotic experience was the sole nugget he had brought back from his colonial venture. The one real point of sympathy he had with the country was an enthusiasm for the charm of the landscape—an enthusiasm which was seldom shared by the Australian-born of his own or the succeeding generation.

Despite his essentially touristic view of the country, certain facets of Australian life do emerge, with an unexpected vitality, in his pages. One hardly expects to meet, in the work of an observer who had left Australia before 1860, such a portrait as this:

One of those long-legged, slab-sided, lean, sunburnt, cabbage-tree-hatted lads, of whom Captain Brentwood kept always, say half-a-dozen and the Major four or five (I should fancy, no relation to one another, and yet so exactly alike, that Captain Brentwood never called them by their right names by any chance); lads who were employed about the stable and the paddock, always in some way with the horses; one of those representatives of the rising Australian generation, I say, looked in, and without announcing himself, or touching his hat (an Australian never touches his hat if he is a free man, because the prisoners are forced to), came up to Jim across the drawing-room, as quiet and self-possessed as if he was quite used to good society, and, putting a letter in his hand, said merely ‘Miss Alice’, and relapsed into silence, amusing himself by looking round Mrs Buckley’s drawing-room, the like of which he had never seen before…

The lad—I always call that sort of an individual a lad; there is no other word for them, though they are of all ages, from sixteen to twenty—the lad, I say, was so taken up with the contemplation of a blown-glass pressepapier on the table, that Jim had to say, ‘Hallo there, John!’

The lad turned round, and asked in a perfectly easy manner, ‘What the deuce is this thing for, now?’

‘That,’ said Jim, ‘is the button of a Chinese Mandarin’s hat, who was killed at the battle of Waterloo in the United States by Major Buckley.’

‘Is it now,’ said the lad, quite contented. ‘It’s very pretty; may I take it up?’

‘Of course you may,’ said Jim. ‘Now, what’s the foal like?’

‘Rather leggy, I should say,’ he returned. ‘Is there any answer?’

Jim wrote a few lines with a pencil on half his sister’s note, and gave it him. He put it in the lining of his hat, and had got as far as the door, when he turned again. He looked wistfully towards the table where the pressepapier was lying. It was too much for him. He came back and took it up again. What he wanted with it, or what he would have done with it if he had got it, I cannot conceive, but it had taken his simple fancy more, probably, than an emerald of the same size would have done. At last he put it to his eye.

‘Why, darn my cabbage-tree,’ he said, ‘if you can’t see through it! He wouldn’t sell it, I suppose, now?’

Jim pursed his lips and shook his head, as though to say that such an idea was not to be entertained, and the lad, with a sigh, laid it down and departed.⁵

There he is, already out of the chrysalis—the Dinkum Aussie in person, physique, casualness, assurance, horseyness, and all. There, too, is an early expression of the Conflict of Manners between Englishman and Australian. Kingsley, of course, does not see it in that light. For him, the Englishman—of the right class—has manners, and the Currency Lad has none. The young cub who thinks it amusing to take a rise out of the ignorance of the uneducated, is one of the Goodies of Kingsley’s book; there is no hint that his creator disapproves of him, or that the Currency Lad, whose name his employer cannot be bothered remembering, might have some salty comments to make when he is back in the stables with his own kind.

The distance of Kingsley from Australian ideas is well illustrated by a later speech of Sam Buckley’s:

‘Think of you and I [sic] taking the place we are entitled to by birth and education, in the splendid society of that noble island. Don’t let me hear all that balderdash about the founding of new empires. Empires take too long in growing for me.

‘What honours, what society, has this little colony to give, compared to those that open to a fourth-rate gentleman in England? I want to be a real Englishman, not half a one. I want to throw in my lot heart and hand with the greatest nation in the world. I don’t want to be young Sam Buckley of Baroona. I want to be the Buckley of Clere. Is not that a noble ambition?’

‘My whole soul goes with you, Sam,’ said Alice. ‘My whole heart and soul. Let us consult, and see how this is to be done.’⁶

It is a shame to be unmoved by so much nobility of sentiment; but an irreverent Australian can hardly forbear quoting further:

‘This is the way the thing stands,’ said Sam. ‘The house and park at Clere were sold by my father for £12,000 to a brewer. Since then, this brewer, a most excellent fellow by all accounts, has bought back, acre by acre, nearly half the old original property as it existed in my great-grandfather’s time… We should have to pay very highly for it, but consider what a position we should buy with it. The county would receive us with open arms. That is all I know at present.’

‘A noble idea,’ said Alice.

Rolf Boldrewood, twenty years later, saw the relationship of the two countries in very different terms. He shared Kingsley’s faith in the virtues and civilising powers of a landed gentry; but he had lived from childhood in Australia, and his patriotic prejudices often invert the values of Kingsley. The hero of A Sydney-Side Saxon, for example, is an English agricultural labourer’s son who has seen his decent and industrious father brought to the workhouse through no fault of his own. The lad determines that he will not submit to the narrow injustice which is all England offers him. So he migrates to Australia, where his vigour and capacity for hard work soon make him the founder of a pastoral dynasty.

The Conflict of Manners, too, is very differently adjudicated when Boldrewood is the referee. In Robbery Under Arms Dick Marston is visited in jail by Ada Falkland, the squatter’s daughter whom he has twice rescued (once from death, once from worse than death). She is accompanied by her fiancé, an English baronet. On parting Ada offers the condemned man her hand:

Sir George, or whatever his name was, didn’t seem to fancy it overmuch, for he said—

‘You colonists are strange people. Our friend here may think himself highly favoured.’

Miss Falkland turned towards him and held up her head, looking like a queen, as she was, and says she—⁷

What she says is unfortunately cast in the improbably eloquent rhetoric proper to a heroine of Victorian fiction; but she certainly gives the baronet a proper dressing-down, and we are left in no doubt which code of manners has Boldrewood’s sympathy. By a happily illustrative coincidence, this time it is the English lordling’s name which is not worth remembering. Although Boldrewood admirably reflects the developing Australian rebellion against conventional English values, he has not entirely escaped the hypnotic influence of English literary custom. It appears most clearly in his style. Here is the opening paragraph of Robbery Under Arms:

My name’s Dick Marston, Sydney-side native. I’m twenty-nine years old, six feet in my stocking soles, and thirteen stone weight. Pretty strong and active with it, so they say. I don’t want to blow—not here, any road—but it takes a good man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About this book
• Contents
• The Cultural Cringe
• Culture and Canberra
• The Family Relationship
• Arthur Phillips
• The Status of a Colonial: Like that of a Jew
• Notes