The Anzac pulse is the key to our national mind and identity
Australia’s World War I legend still informs the Australian mind and identity, in mysterious and compelling ways.
Anzac Day is close to the nation’s soul in some strange, enigmatic way – and epic. Every April 25, the bugle catches the early dawn light as it sounds the melancholy, haunting strains of the Last Post out over city and town across the country. Meanwhile, Australia Day has become a troubled and peripheral space.
Oswald Spengler wrote, in The Decline of the West (1922), of the English being bound by a “wordless harmony of national pulse”. This phrase gestures to the essence of national identity, an unconscious collective sentiment built up over generations, that becomes instinctive.
The Anzac legend may seem dated – an anachronism today. Apart from championing warrior mateship, it incorporated bush romanticism, celebrating the tough resilience of outback life as the true Australia – a vast sunburnt country thinly populated by swagmen wanderers, drover’s wives, sheep shearing, swashbuckling bushrangers, and poets giving iconic form to figures such as the man from Snowy River.
Yet its vitality was demonstrated once again in the 1990s, when Anzac Day flooded back to dynamic life, as if coinciding with the passing of the last World War I veterans. Younger generations took it up, including journeying on backpacker pilgrimages to Gallipoli itself.
Anzac Day prompts wider reflection on the state of national identity. I want to suggest here that the formation of the Australian mind is significantly a post-1945 story, but one incorporating Anzac traits in mysterious and compelling ways.
The 1950s was a decade of boundless post-war optimism, of new booming prosperity and expansion. But on the cultural front, AA Phillips’s phrase, “the cultural cringe”, caught more the mood of the time among the literati and intellectuals.
Everything produced locally in the arts, in literature, even science was seen as second-rate or worse, compared with what was originating at the centre – in London, Paris and New York. Many of the most talented locals went to the big cosmopolitan cities to build expatriate careers – to name some: Barry Humphries, Clive James, Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, and future Nobel prize-winning scientists.
Donald Horne’s best-selling book, The Lucky Country, from 1964, continued the disparaging reading of the country and its European settlers as lazy mediocrities enjoying the sun and the ill-deserved wealth of a country bountiful in minerals and agricultural produce. Then, Ronald Conway’s The Great Australian Stupor (1971) added psychological bite to the cultural cringe perspective.
True, there was grudging acknowledgment of sporting excellence – world’s best tennis players and swimmers in the 1950s, top Test cricketers, and Australia’s third place in the medal count at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, extraordinary for its small population, still the nation’s best performance. But that generation of culture critics were snooty about sport, as they were about Anzac Day, putting both down as leisure activity for mindless philistines.
When discussing national identity and its values there comes an inevitable focus on excellence. The prestige of having the best, or being the best, is inescapable, as with returning tourists claiming to live in the best country.
The baby boomers tend to get a bad press these days, but I want to suggest here that it was their achievement to develop much of the consciousness that anchors Australia’s sense of itself today. The 1970s welcomed new cultural optimism to complement sporting triumphs.
A film industry emerged and flourished. Led by a new generation of directors – Peter Weir, George Miller, Bruce Beresford, and others – it created films of the first rank. Notable early were Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max. Weir would later go on to direct several Hollywood masterpieces, led by Dead Poets Society and Green Card. Miller would develop his Mad Max themes. Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy (1989) would win four Oscars including for Best Picture.
Oddly, as much as the 1970s saw the rise of a generation of brilliant directors, later generations would feature celebrated actors on the international stage – Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Geoffrey Rush, then Nicole Kidman, Eric Bana, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Chris Hemsworth, Rose Byrne and Margot Robbie.
Concurrently in the 1970s, local theatre emerged, centred on The Pram Factory and La Mama in Melbourne, with playwrights led by David Williamson and Jack Hibberd using the vernacular to develop a zany, comic, very Australian style.
Locally produced television series such as Homicide, Division 4, and Matlock Police also took a confidence out into Middle Australia that its own ways of life were legitimate and worth valuing – through hearing local accents, slang and colloquialisms on television. Film and television encouraged self-belief. Hollywood no longer had a monopoly on popular culture storytelling.
In the domain of high culture there was also success. Patrick White won the nation’s first Nobel prize for Literature in 1973 – it remains the only one. The Swedish Academy recognised a broad “epic and psychological narrative art” introducing a new continent to literature.
White charts the singularities of Australian experience in a string of novels, led by Voss and Riders in the Chariot. Voss is an allegory of a quixotic attempt by European settlers to possess the new land spiritually, to come to feel at home here, and White does so in tragi-heroic mode, as the novel tracks a doomed explorer journeying into the nation’s harsh interior. There was some echo of Sidney Nolan’s iconic paintings of the lonely, quixotic bushranger Ned Kelly, garbed in homemade armour riding through the landscape.
Riders in the Chariot portrays four ordinary characters in outer-suburban Sydney on their own religious quests to find transcendent meaning in their mundane lives – a European Jew, an Aboriginal painter, an other-worldly spinster and an earth mother. White’s work is not in the absolute top rank of world literature, in the company of Henry James, but it is close.
Poetry also flourished in the post-war years. It, too, was giving form to uniquely Australian experience. It reached its peak in the work of Les Murray, continuing the tradition of early bush poets, but in a style of high literary sophistication. Like White, Murray sought signals of transcendence in everyday life, as with his paradigmatic An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow. A man is crying in Sydney’s Martin Place, cocooned in a pentagram of sorrow, the dignity of his weeping holding the gathering crowd back:
Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit among us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.
There were also the strange, whimsical cartoons of Michael Leunig, starting in the 1970s, projecting strikingly similar sacred intimations to those of White and Murray. The nation had unwittingly fostered a quite unique religious sensibility within its very secular domains.
Comedy became a strong suit. Barry Humphries was the one to explore Aussie cadences, wit and biting satire in his suburban housewife creation, Edna Everage, going on to make her an international superstar. His Sir Les Patterson, a repulsive drunken lecher, was in the mode of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, displaying such Dionysian vitality and linguistic flair as to humiliate the tepid left intellectuals, phony cultural sophisticates and snobbish English whom he mercilessly lampooned. The Comedy Company (1988-90) took the colloquial into television, with hilarious caricature personalities imprinting on the national imagination, led by Greek greengrocer Con the Fruiterer, unemployable Col’n Carpenter, and coarse, scowling gum-chewing schoolgirl Kylie Mole – with her signature line, “She goes, she goes, she just goes”.
In 1997, feature film The Castle projected the qualities of a very “everage” suburban family living on the edge of the Melbourne airport. Darryl Kerrigan, the father, is utterly devoted to his family, holding it together with lavish enthusiasm. He is portrayed with the same ambivalence of satirical mockery and affection that Barry Humphries had blended into his characters. The Castle would coin phrases that became part of the national vocabulary, such as Darryl’s response to his son about the price being asked for household bric-a-brac – “Tell ’em they’re dreaming!”, or the sole argument put in the Supreme Court by their bumbling suburban lawyer, Dennis Denuto: “It’s the vibe, Your Honour, the vibe!”
More recently, children’s television series Bluey, made in Brisbane, took a distinctive Australian ambience out to what became a vast global audience, despite its use of homegrown slang. Its sitcom tale of a family of Blue Heeler dogs spiced a very ordinary, everyday life with upbeat fun, its easygoing ways centred on sending up the father with affectionate playfulness. Bluey has an ear for the tone of the local culture at its best.
This parade of characters, the nation’s most original outpourings, exhibits a recurring temper. Bluey, Darryl Kerrigan, Kylie Mole, Les Patterson, Leunig’s Vasco Pyjama, Hibberd’s Monk O’Neill, Murray’s crying man, White’s riders, and even Mad Max, echo the Anzac pulse, and its unique character type. That type combines gravelly directness and laconic friendliness with impish self-mocking wit, free from insecurity; and with cheerful acceptance of life’s trials, weirdly vivified by sacred yearnings.
Architecture is an important part of the identity story. The Sydney Opera House, while designed by a Dane, would quickly become a national symbol – of a bright and airy people vitally tied to the sea, its white sails gleaming in the sunlight, as if there to catch an ocean breeze and soar aloft. At the same time, a tradition of high-quality domestic architecture has developed a vernacular style – one that can be appreciated in architectural awards. Ideal homes connect large living rooms – lounge, dining and kitchen – with visually open access to a garden, with plate-glass doors opening on to ample verandas, including barbecue facilities. Garden and sky become integrated into domestic space, and living more intimately with the climate and plants encourages an outgoing, optimistic cast of mind.
In essence, what was going on in these key post-war decades was building a culture, filling it out, giving distinctiveness to the people, helping them feel at home in their new country. It was building on the nation’s mythology that had taken its first major step after World War I, with the Anzac legend, articulated by Charles Bean in his official history and enshrined in memorials erected in every suburb and town around the country. Those war memorials themselves became local sacred sites, places of remembrance especially for mothers, whose sons were buried in some unknown grave in faraway Europe. The shrines signal that the Anzac disposition itself blended earthy jocular humour with grave spiritual yearnings. The mythology was supplemented in the inter-war period by sporting heroes Phar Lap and Don Bradman. Bradman’s voice, by the way, was itself a marker, a touch nasal with Australian vowels, its undertone slow with reticence and modesty, yet resonating with cheerful playfulness, words carefully chosen, combining a touch of humour with serious intent.
Post-1945, national awareness was expanded and amplified, with the baby boomers growing in confidence and self-belief. The emerging consciousness of what it was to be Australian incorporated the Anzac belief in giving everybody a “fair go”, and a sceptical dislike of pretension, and of fanaticism and extremism in religion or politics. This extended into a new attitude to the millions of post-war immigrants from hundreds of national and ethnic backgrounds, in effect saying you are welcome and can live here however you like in private if, in the public sphere, you conform to Australian ways, which are pretty easygoing – that means fitting in.
Australians are innately democratic, having what historian John Hirst termed a democracy of manners – soldiers at Gallipoli were infamous for disobediently mocking stuck-up British officers. Australians are the paradigm democratic people.
The baby boomers switched focus from bush to city, in effect bringing about a cultural revolution. This transition in nation-forming mythology away from the bush was crucial, as modern Western culture is city-centric. The city is where most live, and their imaginations are shaped by urban living, whatever fantasies they may harbour about arcadian retreats to nature.
Mind, the Australian ideal is represented in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, living in a city fronting on to the ocean, with the beach its favoured sacred site. Likewise, the Sydney Opera House joined the kangaroo as the best-known national symbol, reflecting life in the centre of a city, on the edge of water, under the summer heavens.
By the 1990s, Australia had managed to develop arguably the most liveable cities in the world. It turned out to have a talent for them, developing a unique symbiosis of urban and suburban making for congenial living. This drew on the upbeat Anzac spirit of good-humoured earthy practicality, a source of DIY inventiveness, but incorporating a cafe and eating culture that travelling baby boomers had experienced in Europe and adapted back home. The climate helped. In the coming years, Melbourne was judged by The Economist the world’s most liveable city, seven times. The returning tourist’s insecure brag about living in the best country was gaining some plausibility, as echoed by Clive James in his final poems.
Spengler’s evocation of a national pulse is in the liberal conservative tradition of Edmund Burke, who wrote of the English still being able to cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments that are the faithful guardians and active monitors of their duties. Love of country is natural, coming instinctively – its lack, a kind of cultural pathology.
The vitality of national consciousness lies in the subterranean ties and partialities that bind across generations, the wordless harmony of the country’s pulse. The power of incubated cultural instincts, sounded once a year by the mournful Anzac bugle, will endure long after the turbulence of the passing moment. Accordingly, raucous minorities today, chest-thumping in public, proclaiming their own identities in mantras for diversity, equality and inclusion, non-binary gender, and other divisive issues, are being quietly countered across the suburbs and towns of Australia with a rolling of the eyes and a dismissive: “Tell ’em they’re dreaming.”
John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University.
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