Maybe Love's Not All You Need, But There's Nothing You Need More

The Age

Tuesday December 26, 2006

PETER CRAVEN

YOU can only shake your head in admiration when the Prime Minister dons his cultural warrior armour. Just recently we had the kerfuffle about testing immigrants seeking citizenship on their understanding of Australian values.

Why does he do it? Is it because this notably shrewd politician is naive enough to think that the values that might underlie one of the world's older democracies cannot be testified to by some recent arrival from, say, Turkey, but can be tested coherently without producing platitudes?

What's not in doubt is that it seems more emotively persuasive to talk the values talk in the case of Middle Eastern or Islamic immigrants than it would in the case of someone from the British Isles or the US.

And yet how dubious even the assumption of Anglo (non- Asian) kinship is. Years ago I spent some time with an eminent Indian novelist who knew the mountain and river systems of Australia better than I did because the Commonwealth had been integral to his education at school. Another novelist, a Muslim, spoke an English closer to standard than that which we hear around us.

Supporters of the value test would say it was not aimed at this kind of Oxford-educated person from elsewhere, though that raises any number of questions.

There are probably plenty of turbaned people we may less automatically recognise as human in the same way as us, who might have been pleased to see England go down in the Ashes this week.

None of this is to deny that we perceive ourselves as Australian and that we carry what values we have in an Australian way. It's hard to hear the opening sentence of Furphy's classic Australian novel Such is Life, "Unemployed at last", without thinking it captures something essential about the Australian character. And there are no prizes for guessing where that title comes from.

Most Australians would probably be inclined to agree with John Howard about the characteristic Australian qualities: easy-going, antiauthoritarian, with a strong belief in the fair go. It's the spirit that runs though a Lawson story like The Union Buries Its Dead or a film like Sunday Too Far Away.

It's not hard to sympathise with someone like the historian John Hirst who would like to see the Lawson/Patterson heritage much more intimately familiar to children, together with the whole Burke and Wills, Cobb & Co. heritage aspect of Australian history.

Everyone from John Howard to Inga Clendinnen wants this and they are right to want it, even though there is a sharpish division among the Australian historians between the labourand- struggle people and the sheep-and-money people (of whom Geoffrey Blainey is the most eminent and original).

Of course, Australian values start to shift when you look at them. No writer was greater at capturing both the gum scentladen sensuality of Australia nor the archetypal ruggedness of its capacity for drama than Patrick White, whether in a drama of tragic exaltation (as in Voss), or of ordinary people striving for decency and truth (as in The Tree of Man).

Yet the same Patrick White could paint a picture of Australians as the hideous suburbanites of Sarsaparilla who would crucify any Jewish prophet in sight. When it comes to Australian values Patrick White is a bit like Barry Humphries without the laughter: the monstrousness of Edna, the pathos of Sandy Stone, the horrifying crassness of Les Patterson.

Of course they are all us and one of the better things about us is this way we have taken them to our hearts.

Manning Clark, who was in his day as honoured for writing history as White was for his fiction and Humphries for his comedy, said that the Australian character came out of the tension between the Englishman's idea of the upright person and the Irish idea of the human being as part larrikin and part saint.

It's not hard to see the beauty in that as well as the unprovability and to see it as being at some distance from anything any future citizen could be tested on.

The trouble with national values is they are all true and they all contradict each other.

Anyone who has the English language as a birthright will thrill - imaginatively - to John of Gaunt's "This England" speech, even though that paean ends with the denunciation of England for its "shameful conquest of itself".

And that's something every nation will always do, betray its own best self. James Joyce had a highly developed sense of the horrors of 20th century Ireland and also a strong sense of what Dr Johnson meant when he said patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel.

In Ulysses he presents, both comically and powerfully, the confrontation between the oneeyed Citizen and Leopold Bloom, Jew and Irishman. The nationalist Cyclops says he'll "brain the bloody jewman" but it's Bloom who comes up with the best definition of a nation."

A nation is the same people living in the same place," Bloom says. And adds, a moment later, "Or also living in different places." A moment later, after the Citizen has reviled him, it's Bloom who - passionately, for all his timidity - comes out with his definition of something even bigger than a nation. "Love ... I mean the opposite of hatred."

The same people living in one place and in different places, that's what a nation is.

And if you want values then something like the opposite of hatred might get this country a very long way.

There's a thought for Christmas.

Peter Craven is a Melbourne critic.

© 2006 The Age

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