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    Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance
    Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance
    Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance
    Ebook146 pages2 hours

    Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance

    By David Malouf

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    In Made in England, David Malouf looks at Australia’s bond with Britain and wonders whether it wasn’t the Mother Country which did most of the giving. This is an essay which presents British civilisation, the civilisation of Shakespeare and the Enlightenment and the Westminster system, as the irreducible ground on which any Australian achievement is based. Britain has always been the tolerant parent, and an older Australia could be both intensely patriotic and see itself as what it was, a transplan- tation of Britain. This relationship did not exclude America but it made for a sometimes complicated threesome of nations. This is a brilliant, deeply meditated essay by one of our finest writers about the traditions that shaped Australia and which connect it to one of the mightier traditions in world history.

    “... Made in England is ... a case of one of Australia’s most eminent novelists allowing himself to imagine, and by imagining to analyse, the hopes and glories, once and future, that were part of this new Britannia.” —Peter Craven, Introduction

    “Any argument for [the republic] based on the need to make a final break with Britain will fail.” —David Malouf, Made in England
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateNov 1, 2003
    ISBN9781921825118
    Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance
    Author

    David Malouf

    David Malouf is the author of poems, fiction, libretti and essays. In 1996, his novel Remembering Babylon was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1998 Boyer Lectures were published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. In 2000 he was selected as the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His most recent novel is Ransom.

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      Book preview

      Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England - David Malouf

      Quarterly Essay

      Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

      Publisher: Morry Schwartz

      ISBN 186 395 3957

      Subscriptions (4 issues): $49.95 a year within Australia incl. GST (Institutional subs. $59.95). Outside Australia $79.95. Payment may be made by Mastercard,Visa or Bankcard, or by cheque made out to Schwartz Publishing. Payment includes postage and handling.

      To subscribe, fill out and post the subscription form on the last page of this essay, or subscribe online at:

      www.quarterlyessay.com

      Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to the Editor at:

      Black Inc.

      Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane

      Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia

      Phone: 61 3 9654 2000

      Fax: 61 3 9654 2290

      Email: quarterlyessay@blackincbooks.com

      http://www.quarterlyessay.com

      Editor: Peter Craven

      Management: Sophy Williams

      Managing Editor: Chris Feik

      Editorial Co-ordinator: Caitlin Yates

      Publicity: Meredith Kelly

      Design: Guy Mirabella

      Printer: Griffin Press

      CONTENTS

      Introduction Peter Craven

      MADEIN ENGLAND

      Australia’s British Inheritance

      David Malouf

      CORRESPONDENCE

      Les Murray, Lillian Holt, P.A. Durack Clancy, Fay Zwicky, Marcia Langton, Tony Birch, Mary Ellen Jordan, Geoff Sharp

      Contributors

      Quarterly Essay aims to present significant contributions to political, intellectual and cultural debate. It is a magazine in extended pamphlet form and by publishing in each issue a single writer at a length of at least 20,000 words we hope to mediate between the limitations of the newspaper column, where there is the danger that evidence and argument can be swallowed up by the form, and the kind of full-length study of a subject where the only readership is a necessarily specialised one. Quarterly Essay aims for the attention of the committed general reader. Although it is a periodical which wants subscribers, each number of the journal is the length of a short book because we want our writers to have the opportunity to speak to the broadest possible audience without condescension or populist shortcuts. Quarterly Essay wants to get away from the tyranny that space limits impose in contemporary journalism and we give our essayists the space to express the evidence for their views and those who disagree with them the chance to reply at whatever length is necessary. Quarterly Essay will not be confined to politics but is centrally concerned with it.We are not interested in occupying any particular point on the political map and we hope to bring our readership the widest range of political and cultural opinion which is compatible with truth-telling, style and command of the essay form.

      INTRODUCTION

      David Malouf’s Quarterly Essay is written in quiet defiance of everyone who would like to pretend that the bond with Britain was dead from the time of the fall of Singapore and that Curtin’s appeal to the United States during the Second World War was indicative of a new orientation, one which has indeed been augmented by the move towards Asia, the thrust for a republic, the fine fruits of multiculturalism, the whole set of doctrines that characterise the left-liberal position about Australian nationalism, cultural and otherwise.

      Made in England is not an essay that is written to any Keatingite agenda (though Keating did not have a left-liberal position on anything but nationhood); on the contrary it is an essay which goes out of its way to emphasise the significance of what Australia gained from Britain and how much the continuities with what was established by British settlement have made this country what it is.

      Dr Johnson says somewhere that a person more often needs to be reminded of something he knows than instructed about something which is new to him and Made in England is a manifest example of this truth.

      David Malouf emphasises with a sophistication that is the opposite of subservient just how much Australia got from the British: an Enlightenment sense of moderation, a much more eighteenth-century gradualism than our American cousins who cry Liberty! with what Malouf takes to be an early seventeenth-century clamour and eloquence but who nonetheless for the first eighty years of their independent history countenanced slavery and have not lost the stain.

      Not that this is an anti-American essay either. On the contrary it is an essay written in high appreciation of what Churchill called the English-speaking peoples, an essay which tends towards saying the greatest thing about that inheritance is that we speak the language Shakespeare wrote and are inward by our birthright with the glories of that great master of metaphor and association.

      And you, good yeoman, whose limbs were made in England/ Show us here the mettle of your pasture. So Henry V as Shakespeare imagined him on the field of Agincourt. (And his appeal even in 1598 or so was pan-British with his Fluellens and MacMorrises and all his captains.) David Malouf is intensely interested in the fact that old British Australia (with its Irish and Scottish strains) was a dog’s breakfast like the land of the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes and the Normans. The complexity of Australia – in its subsequent waves of European and Asian immigration – is only a mirror that reflects the complexities of the Mother Country and, besides, Australia was always a dominion rather than a colony.

      In other words it was a transplanted form of England itself, and its nineteenth-century cities – especially but not simply Melbourne – had the relation to London, the seat of Empire, that provincial cities like Birmingham and Leeds had.

      All of this may sound in an Australian context like a form of romantic conservatism and there is at points at least a hint that Malouf sees a cultural underpinning to the Coalition of the Willing but it is, in fact, closer to a form of old-fashioned liberal idealism that refuses to gainsay the reality and complexity of the past.

      That’s one reason why Made in England includes such a lingering and engrossed description of the Yorkshire Pudding/God Save the Queen Australia that spans Malouf’s childhood in the ’30s and ’40s and my own in the ’50s and early ’60s. He is intent on emphasising that the world that idealised Don Bradman and venerated Gallipoli was also the world that listened to Peter Dawson, that felt (why wouldn’t it?) British to its bootstraps even – and no one has ever been as canny about this before – when the Britishness of Australian life expressed itself in ways that were distinctly Scottish and Irish, as little boys in Brisbane went to do the messages as they would in Edinburgh, and their fathers, of Lebanese Christian background, grew up tyke with the map of Irish Catholicism stamped all over them.

      For Malouf Australian life was British life; that was both the enrichment and the fascination of what was difficult. He cites a very telling moment in a Kipling story where an Australian sitting down with some toff in a London club confesses that real annoyance of the British is a version avant la lettre of what the ’60s would know, courtesy of the Frankfurt School, as repressive tolerance. Or indeed a tolerance that repressed very little, it simply precluded – and therefore retarded – the impulse towards rebellion.

      David Malouf is brilliant in the deftness with which he negotiates the generalised images of the British and Australian relation (in a way that would have charmed that old idealist Manning Clark, though with an opposite emphasis) but he is always shrewd and toughly evidential in his sense of the grit of historical incident and its interpretation.

      He emphasises, for instance, that the Balfour Declaration was Britain pushing Australia out of the nursery and that there is a parallel in the ’60s when Britain betrays Australia over the Common Market. Isn’t this precisely when little old Australia has to start making sense of a world that is not as small as the one its carefully preserved British pieties clung to? Doesn’t the end of the White Australia policy come just at the point when the British seem to be saying, Bother you chaps with your wool and wheat, we are starting to see that we’re European, don’t you know?

      For David Malouf that seems to be part of the ongoing transformative character of how the Made in England marking has led to something sunlit and hopeful in Australia and he is strongly inclined to believe that the genesis is an Englishness that inheres in the language and culture of the people who produced the mother of all Parliaments and the Westminster system.

      His affection is for it in its Australian moment – which is the moment of Hume and Dr Johnson – rather than the storm and stress of all that Puritan rage and idealism that produced both the English Civil War and American transcendentalism and Jeffersonian panting for glory.

      David Malouf is hyperconscious, with an ambivalent nostalgia, of how there is an older Britain that may still subsist which preserves like an afterlife the patterns and privations of a Depression childhood in Brisbane. Part of the glory of Made in England is his parallel awareness of how Australia (at least in its campy Sydney aspect but also in the blue insolent eyes of a sophisticated Perth waiter) is a thing of sunlight and savour, of litheness and look.

      But, both in its sense of the present (recalling his Boyer lectures) and its evocation of Brisbane fifty or sixty years ago (which is so obviously the work Johnno and 12 Edmondstone Street) this is vintage Malouf.

      Behind it one can detect some Coleridgean gleam, some R.G. Collingwood-like intuition that nothing can be known by the mind of history that has not been first taken in and developed by the imagination. (And here there may be a parallel with Don Watson’s Rabbit Syndrome, the Quarterly Essay published almost exactly two years ago which focused on Australia’s relation with America).

      David Malouf himself is conscious of the longevity of the significance of the Australian relationship with America and the discomforts which may inhere in triangularity when it comes to nations.

      But Made in England is most centrally a case of one of Australia’s most eminent novelists allowing himself to imagine, and by imagining to analyse, the hopes and glories, once and future, that were part of this New Britannia. As for the future, he thinks we are more likely to become a commonwealth than a republic and we’ll do it in due course for our own sakes, not in order to dispel phantoms of Britishness.

      How, after all, could they be dispelled? Sports-mad Australia is itself the creation and the extension of a world where boys on village greens or on Eton playing fields prepared themselves for Waterloo and more.And who, Malouf seems to ask, is so patriotic or so offensively Australian that they don’t, deep in the blood of the language they speak, feel the pull of playing the game or of reinventing Jerusalem?

      It’s these things, at the end of the day, that give us our ties with the Asian and African peoples of the Commonwealth and perhaps they whisper the heresy that Empire, with all its faults, was not all bad.

      David Malouf has written a temperate, supple essay which is a defence of the traditions Australia has, the traditions it seems destined to maintain, in spite of whatever degree of cant.

      This is a remarkable meditation by a superb writer around the fact that Australia is absolutely shaped by its British background and because that was

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