editorial | Nathan Hollier

SPIRIT IN AUSTRALIA & AUSTRALIAN SPIRIT

IN A REVIEW of our previous issue for the Melbourne Age, Fiona Capp wrote that it was presided over by “the spirit of poet Judith Wright”. This new issue, I would suggest, is animated by the spirit of Patrick White.
      White presented during the postwar period a powerful and sustained critique of Australian society’s narrow utilitarianism and materialism and attempted to articulate a positive alternative to this culture in his richly symbolic, metaphysical fiction. He believed that unless Australians placed certain fundamental cultural values above the imperative of maximising profit, then the society would finally self destruct. He criticised the conformity, conservative Anglocentrism and lack of imagination of his New England squattocratic family and the Australian ruling class of which it was part. He was equally intolerant of the anti-intellectualism and greed of the union movement and the radical left, though he reserved his really impressive hatred for the nouveau riche of the post-Whitlam free-market age: the developers, bankers, financiers and advertisers, and for the ‘mates’, such as Bob Hawke, who spoke the language of social justice, in an Aussie drawl, while doing the bidding of big business at home and abroad. In the first Overland lecture of 2005, a printed version of which appears here, Veronica Brady builds on White’s anti-materialist legacy, suggesting that Australia’s “sceptical and utilitarian spirit . . . may be the reason for many of the problems which confront us as a community today”.
      White espoused an idiosyncratic and eclectic spirituality, emphasising humility and humanity. Brady writes that the essential “message” of religion “should be one of mutual respect and concern for the well-being of all, particularly the less privileged”. Perhaps these two thinkers have in mind something like Gandhi’s ‘Satyagraha’, loving non-violence, which lay at the heart of his political actions. The movement Gandhi led, after all, can be seen as providing the practical and philosophical inspiration for the later struggles for social justice of ‘third world’ nations and oppressed ‘first world’ minorities. In this issue, Paul Magin writes on the spirituality of the Burarra people of remote central Arnhem Land, part of Australia’s ‘fourth world’ minority. White thought there would come a time when people would find it impossible to believe that a person of Gandhi’s vision and integrity lived on our earth.
      Of course, questions of religion, culture and politics have been at the forefront of public debate in recent months, a discussion spurred along by the impact of the Family First Party during the 2004 federal election. All of a sudden it seemed that the political landscape had changed, that issues of personal morality were going to assume a greater importance within formal political contests. ABC television and radio, corporate television and the broadsheet press, and writers across Australia’s ‘fifth estate’, the independent journals, have all commented on this phenomenon. One sensationalist exposé that did not appear is revealed by Linton Besser in this issue. Within scholarly circles, the identification of often unconsciously held religious bases of morality and ideology appears to be a growth area: David Marr wrote on the rise of morally conservative Christianity in his 1999 The High Price of Heaven; Judith Brett in 2003 examined the Protestant origins of Liberalism; and in her new book, God Under Howard, Marion Maddox argues that democratic and egalitarian Australian traditions are now under threat from the Right’s co-option of characteristically American, socially conservative forms of Christianity.
      Brady notes here that the rise of fundamentalist Christianity is linked to its commercialisation. Emotive marketing campaigns claiming that belief will induce material ‘blessings’ from God are likely to advance the Christian product. Patrick White, who in his later years was increasingly angered by American cultural influences, railed against this process. In a customarily clear-eyed piece, however, Peter Holding reminds us of the differences between US and Australian culture and suggests that, rather than panicking about the rise of right-wing Christianity, political progressives should concentrate on working with that bulk of Christians for whom social justice is consistent with their religious beliefs.
      ‘Spirit’ is a very complex word. As a noun alone, the Macquarie Dictionary lists twenty-five meanings. In writing about the spirit in Australia, Brady inevitably writes about the spirit of Australia, described by A.G. Stephens in her piece as “that undefined, indefinable resultant of earth, and air, and conditions of climate and life”. If such a thing exists, it must contain within it a great many internal differences and realise its final form through the dominance, or at least pre-eminence, of a particular group.
      Until at least the 1970s, ‘Australianness’ tended to be defined by its perceived difference from the spirit of the ‘parent’ nation, England, or alternatively by the perceived dominance of that English spirit within Australia. Overland was founded as part of a wider intellectual and political struggle to assert Australia’s uniqueness, its difference and independence from Britain. But as Robert Pascoe recounts in this issue, Humphrey McQueen argued in 1970 that it made much more sense to see Australians as British loyalists, founders of a Roman style colony, of ‘a new Britannia’.
      White’s British-Australian aristocratic heritage and hostility to materialist philosophy contributed to his rocky relationship with the Left, though as McQueen noted upon White’s death in 1990, he had opened up important new spaces for the development of Australian intellectual and cultural life. Moreover, if White’s conservatism was a product of his British heritage, so too was his radicalism. His latent puritanism left White a vehement opponent of his society’s rampant individualism, egoism and consumerism. The liberal tradition provided the foundations of his unyielding concern for the less fortunate, his tolerance for and empathy with society’s outsiders, and his strident commitment to truth.
      These debates between the radical nationalists and their opponents are in some ways echoed in present arguments over whether or not Australia still has a dominant culture, or is indeed multicultural. The nature of Australian identity is examined in this issue by Mary Kalantzis. She suggests that in spite of Prime Minister Howard’s ‘Queen and country’ posturing, the multicultural realities of Australian society are such that the imposition of a monocultural national identity is simply untenable. Australian culture, she suggests, has been profoundly de-centred by “underlying historical trajectories”.
      Kalantzis rejects the peculiarly British pessimism of White, his puritan association of materialist greed with personal and social corruption. Where White remained preoccupied with those missing out within free-market capitalism, with the tendency of wealth within this society to trickle up, rather than down, Kalantzis finds a positive relationship between free-market forces, economic growth, social cohesion and individual happiness. Intriguingly, there is evidence to support each interpretation. It is perhaps only in the longer term, and with greater awareness of the cultural bases of competing political ideologies, that the effects of this economic and social policycontext will become clear.