As the academy falls silent, who will guard our stories?

The University of Sydney, where the chair of Australian literature is at risk for lack of funding. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

What on earth are we doing with the teaching of Australian literature and history at our univers­ities? The other day my brother, Greg Craven, vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, said that not one student in 50 would know who Ben Chifley was. And if that sounds like a neo-Tory lamentation, he was backed up by that eminent Marxist ­historian Stuart Macintyre, the former dean of arts at the University of Melbourne.

The chair of Australian literature at the University of Sydney that was established by subscription in the 1960s and was first held by Leonie Kramer, apparently is at risk because the university is not willing to come good with core funding. And if you think good riddance to that elitist eminence, bear in mind that Ken Gelder, head of Melbourne University’s Australian Centre — a man with whom I’ve clashed on issues of relativism and populism — says his pocket of Australian emphasis is also at risk.

David Carter, whom I remember as a fine critic back at Melbourne 30 years ago, has ­retired from the chair of literature and cultural studies at the Uni­versity of Queensland and that ­institution is not continuing with the position.

Of course, you can argue that professorships do not a culture make, nor do courses, but their derogation is symptomatic of something wrong.

When I was finishing high school 50-odd years ago, it was standard practice for a 17-year-old humanities student to study Australian history along with the history of the Renaissance and Reformation as a separate subject.

If you went to a university such as Monash, as I did in 1968, you would have found ­yourself studying Patrick White’s Voss, along with William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, as a novel that could bear comparison with Crime and Punishment or Bleak House or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

If, like me, you ended up spending a dozen or so years at Melbourne University, you would have encountered Vincent Buckley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, ­pioneers of teaching Aust­ralian literature; and in Year 12 (matric as we called it) you might have studied Wallace-­Crabbe’s anthology, Six Voices, which featured Kenneth Slessor, AD Hope, ­Judith Wright, James McAuley, Douglas Stewart and RD Fitzgerald.

If somewhere at the back of your mind you’re the sort of ageing Australian who can quote a bit of Slessor, like this, on sleep: “Do you give yourself to me utterly / body and no-body, flesh and no flesh / not as a fugitive blindly or bitterly / but as a child might, with no other wish? / Yes, utterly”; or Wright’s “The selfless, shapeless seed I hold”; or Hope’s Australia “hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come”; or that poem of exquisite poignancy, The Death of the Bird, “and the great earth, with neither grief nor malice / receives the tiny burden of her death” — well, you probably owe it to Wallace-Crabbe.

And bear in mind, if you’re young and sceptical and think you can live without this stuff, that it’s the shared heritage of older Australians. We came to know this stuff the way we first knew The Man from Snowy River or Clancy of the Overflow. My eyes can still mist up when I bring to mind:

I had written him a letter, which I had for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just “on spec”, addressed as follows, “Clancy, of the Overflow”.

Banjo Paterson was not the greatest poet nor for that matter was Hope, but they were good and they spoke intimately to us.

I remember I happened by the merest chance to be at Oxford, at his old college, Balliol, the day Manning Clark died, and all I could think to do was to stand at the altar of the empty chapel and quote, in garbled fashion, the ending — itself a garbled recollection of notions of resurrection — of Henry Lawson’s The Bush Undertaker. And the best of Lawson’s stories like this or The Union Buries Its Dead (how’s that for an Australian title?) are very fine, indeed.

Buckley and Wallace-Crabbe taught Australian literature partly because it was there (like Everest) and partly because they knew it was good. They wrote about Australian literature with plenty of wit and irony. Wallace-Crabbe once said of Buckley’s favourite Australian classic, Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life — it begins with another archetypal Australian line, ­“Unemployed at last!” — that he thought no one should have to read it a first time. And he ­reviewed the last volume of Clark, saying how much more it owed to Victorian sententiousness than to Clark’s favourite Russians.

Clark was the old grand narrative guide to Australian history whose shorter history we read. He has been attacked endlessly for his mythmaking, his emphasis on fatal flaws and echoes of Book of Common Prayer ­English, for the whole emphasis on Catholic Christendom versus the philosophy of the Enlightenment as embodied by socialism. But, as Don Watson, Paul Keating’s speechwriter and biographer, once said in a famous defence of Clark, no one has ever refuted the idealist view of history. No one has ever proved that ideas and mythologies and religions are not at least as ­important as economics.

As a very young man I was ­utterly moved by Clark saying: “The Australian temperament was formed by the clash between the Englishman’s idea of the upright man and the Irishman’s idea of man as larrikin and saint.” Yes, it’s essentialism, masculinism, ­absurdly generalising. So what?

Eventually you learned to ­realise the kind of substantive ­debate between people such as Geoffrey Blainey, who emphasised the role of free enterprise, and the Marxists such as Ian Turner, but they would at least have agreed that the ground they stood on was worth talking about.

I’m pleased to have published Clark in Scripsi — the literary magazine I started with Michael Heyward — saying that Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore showed that history could be “the greatest show on earth”, and even more proud to have published Bernard Smith, art historian and historian proper, saying that Hughes had done for the convicts and their inheritance what historian Jules Michelet had done for the people of France when he took their revolution and gave it back to them as a form of folk experience.

But my generation had the great advantage of growing up and discovering to their shock that the country to which we tended to have an attitude of “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” had produced a writer of the first rank, White.

There were the Penguin paperbacks of Voss and The Tree of Man and Riders in the Chariot with their Sidney Nolan covers and their dazzling blurbs from British critics such as Al Alvarez saying this was a level of novel writing most contemporary British fiction could not be mentioned in the same breath as.

The 1957 line drawing by artist Sidney Nolan for the cover of Voss, by Patrick White.

And they were not wrong. White was not one of the three or four greatest writers of the 20th century but he belongs immediately after them: his work will bear comparison with Samuel Beckett or ­Vladimir Nabokov. And that fact is an extraordinary blast; it is deeply, ­intensely enriching to any young person who discovers it and it is a criminal thing to neglect it.

If we do not attend to our own literature and history, no one else will. We come from a small country and we are only a small part of the Anglo-American imperium that rules the world. If we do not make the wholly appropriate claims for White and Christina Stead, and beyond them for Gerald Murnane and Helen Garner, no one else will.

I remember 30 years ago, when I was editing Scripsi and publishing her, being appalled that Susan Sontag, a woman who had read everything, had never read White.

Unless we treasure and analyse and argue over our national culture (Hope dismissed The Tree of Man as “illiterate, verbal sludge”) it will perish, even as a ­national memory.

Our children and our children’s children will never read White or realise why Robert Menzies and HV Evatt were remarkable political figures or the fact that Australian particularism, the argument for the central responsibility of government as benign and sustaining, goes back to governor Lachlan Macquarie.

They may forget the ancient power of the inheritance we take from our indigenous people, they may forget that we are one of the oldest democracies on earth.

One of the deeper paradoxes for anyone who tries to be an internationalist in this country is that it turns you into a cultural nationalist when you realise that the Garners and David Maloufs will bear comparison with the Sontags and Raymond Carvers.