editorial | Nathan Hollier

THE FRIGHTENED COUNTRY

DONALD HORNE’S highly influential The Lucky Country (1964), hailed by Max Harris as a “full-scale Dobellian national portrait”, was in part an attempt to frighten Australians, to shock them out of an insular, innocent, self-satisfied complacency, in preparation for the dramatic technological, political, intellectual and economic challenges that Horne predicted were on the immediate horizon: “if change does not proceed fairly rapidly Australia in its present form may cease to exist”. Horne thought that Australians needed to become more capable of interacting with their Asian neighbours and more ‘clever’:

It does not seem likely that in this new age material progress can continue at the highest rate unless society jumps into new life with higher standards of training, with an increasing proportion of scientists, technologists and technicians, with a greater emphasis on administrative and managerial capacity and an absorption of the technocratic approach into ways of thinking.

    Australian society has not become ‘Asianised’, as Horne expected, and its dominant cultures remain steadfastly Anglo-American. The ‘clever country’ of course failed to materialise under Hawke and Keating, despite the efforts of Barry Jones, and the present Federal Government, almost alone around the world, has made research and training very low national priorities. Where Horne, drawing on the common sense of the day, stated: “It is already becoming obvious that the belief in hard work may become one of the impediments to happiness in the future technological societies”, because “some way will have to be found in which most people will work less without suffering comparative economic hardship”, Australians have clearly maintained their puritan belief in hard work. We now work harder and longer than almost any other OECD nation. What has been abandoned instead, after Whitlam, is the commitment to some notion of social equality. In the midst of an unprecedented economic boom, the nation becomes steadily more unequal and less egalitarian.
    It has also become more frightened. Where Horne saw the need to scare Australians into action, Carmen Lawrence suggests in her recent Fear and Politics (2006) that “today, the scope and range of our anxieties has ballooned to the point where it is reasonable to argue that fear is the dominant currency of modern public life – fears about terrorists and obesity, about flu pandemics and paedophiles, about flesh-eating viruses, and so on and so on”. “Although it may be argued that exploitation of fear is the politicians’ stock in trade”, she adds, “ours is a time in which the politics of fear is in full cry”.
    “One of the defining characteristics of the Howard government”, Lawrence argues, “is its exploitation of fear for political purposes”. This government:

has used fear to legitimise questionable actions, to attack its detractors, and to foster a climate of timidity throughout the public service and among those in receipt of government grants. Its apologists have made an art form of vilifying critics, apparently hoping to muzzle them with abuse. Fear has proved a potent device for managing dissent and silencing those who object to government policy or who seek a greater share of power and resources. A drift toward authoritarianism has likewise been evident in many areas of government policy.

Lawrence also suggests that “it is the media amplification of political obsessions that fuel our cycles of worry”. Here she echoes the view put by Mike Moore in Bowling for Columbine (2003), a film which sought to explain the high levels of personal fear existing in the US. As Noam Chomsky noted in a 2003 Z Magazine: “Whatever the reasons . . . the United States happens to be a very frightened country by comparative standards. Levels of fear here of almost everything, crime, aliens, you pick it, are just off the spectrum”. Lawrence points out that in becoming more fearful Australia is becoming more like the United States. This is, perhaps, not a coincidence: a cultural Americanisation may well follow our adoption of American political and economic policies and trends, and it is hardly surprising that high levels of fear and paranoia should exist in societies characterised by both radically individualist thought and behaviour and various residual puritanisms.
    “In reality”, Lawrence points out:

the developed world has never been safer. Our life expectancy in Australia, for example, is 40 per cent longer in 2000 than it was in 1900; childhood mortality has declined dramatically; we are better able to prevent and cure diseases than at any time in our history; civil strife, even allowing for the riots in Cronulla, is rare; and the murder rate is low by international standards and unchanged for over a century.

She also reasons, persuasively, that “fear cannot be a foundation of moral and political argument”, and that “the necessary antidote to the toxin of fear is a wholehearted embrace of the principles of freedom, equality, and co-operation”.
    Nevertheless, as Lawrence herself is aware, the politics of fear have been used by governments, and not least the Howard Government, to introduce laws and powers for themselves that are genuinely frightening. In a deeply unsurprising turn of events, most of the corporate media have not seen fit to focus on these developments. In this issue Kath Wilson raises questions about the new ‘anti-terror’ laws used to arrest and convict Abdullah Merhi and other Muslims. Steven Lang reviews important fictional treatments of the Australian ‘age of terror’ by Richard Flanagan and Andrew McGahan. Michael Head asks what lessons are to be drawn from Australia’s last sedition case, in 1960–61. John McLaren examines debates about the “dark side” of Australian history, and the fears these debates induce. Keith McKenry touches on the cultural damage done by the frightened atmosphere of the Cold War, in a story about the Catholic priest and folklorist Percy Jones. Anthony Ashbolt reveals the scare campaigns used to discredit public education, and the political implications of these attacks. Raewyn Connell and Greg Fealy, on the other hand, combat persistently strong fears in our society – of progressive social transformation and the Asian Other, respectively – in their profiles of Lynne Segal and Nurcholish Madjid.

WITH THIS ISSUE I am bowing out as Overland editor, though I’ll remain fiction editor. From the end of March 2007 I’ll be working as research and publications co-ordinator of the Australia Research Institute of Curtin University, Perth. I’m very pleased that Jeff Sparrow has (finally!) agreed to take over and am looking forward to seeing what he does with the magazine.
    Thanks to all those who have offered encouragement to me or said kind things about the magazine. Although it is obligatory nowadays for people in business or public life who are moving to a new position to assert that the role they’ve just moved on from was, looking back on it, simply a sustained, wonderful triumph, the truth is that while I greatly enjoyed editing Overland, I also often found it stressful and felt myself to be quite isolated within the Australian literary and intellectual public sphere, and so really appreciated those who made the effort to offer support. Special thanks here to Rowan Cahill, Raewyn Connell, Lou Swinn, Clinton Fernandes, Vera Deacon and Terry Irving.
    For much of the time while editing Overland I was also writing a PhD and I couldn’t have completed this without the willingness of our editorial co-ordinator, Alex Skutenko, to do much more than her fair share of work over several years. For this and for her enduring friendship I owe her great thanks. She remains the backbone of the magazine.
    Particular thanks also to the rest of the Overland inner circle, which in my time as editor or co-editor included Kath Wilson, Ian Syson, John McLaren, Jeff Sparrow, Sean Scalmer, John Leonard, Les Thomas, Louise Craig and Vane Lindesay.
    Thankyou to my friends from the O.L. Society board, especially Rob Pascoe, Jenny Lee, Jeannie Rea, David Murray-Smith, Richard Llewellyn, Andrew Leggatt and the late Michael Dugan.
    And finally, thanks to the many people who have provided editorial assistance and social drinking companionship, including Elyse Moffat, Neil Boyack, Taliessin Raeburn, Blair Gatehouse, Antony Giummarra, Kalinda Ashton, Clint Greagen, Maria Matina, Gus Goswell, Dan Leach, Natalia Ibanez, Ronald Chung, Joy Braddish, Sarah Day, Louise Pine, Danielle Whelan, Karen Pickering, Kristy Yeats, Georgie Arnott, Ben Convey, Steve Brock, Desireé Sutton, Jessica Raschke and David Wolstencroft.

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