The real Australia

by Alfred Buchanan

I

VIRTUES AND VICES

Over the ball of it,

Peering and prying,

How I see all of it,

Life there outlying!

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as national character. That is to say, there is no set of qualities peculiar to any one nation. In every known country extremes meet. They meet now, as they met in the days when history began. Greece has had its Zeno and its Epicurus, Rome its Octavian and its Vitellius, France its Barrère and its Chateaubriand, Germany its Heine and its Bismarck, England its Cromwell and its John Wilkes. Why multiply the list? Why assert of the contrasted characters that exist always side by side that one is typical of the people as a whole, and the other is not? Why imply that one class of individual ceases to exist at a particular parallel of latitude, and another begins there and then to take its rise?

But while there is no such thing as national character—except in the sense that historians find it convenient to use—it is yet a fact that certain people encourage each other in certain practices, and that these practices come in time to assume the proportions of public virtues and vices. One environment may permit an individual to wear a species of garment, or to indulge in a form of language that would be among other surroundings either legally forbidden, or frowned out of existence. The unwritten law in regard to externals insensibly modifies both the law of conduct and the habit of thought. In Australia there are opposing tendencies at work. There is, in the first place, the tendency to freedom and to license which the remoteness from an older civilisation fosters. Opposed to this, and rapidly overcoming it, is the tendency of a country, as it develops settled institutions, to mould itself on the ambitious models of fashionable society elsewhere. As a third factor, and an undoubtedly powerful one, there is the influence of climate. This is tending in Australia to produce a different race of beings, physically and morally, from that in the Northern Hemisphere. It is tending to do so—but up to the present it has produced a crop of half results, of insufficiently proven theories, and of partially established types.

There are certain qualities—virtues, they may be called—that come prominently under notice in Australia and appear, from their habit of repeating themselves, to form some integral part of the life of the community. The foremost of these good qualities is that of hospitality. And here a singular anomaly presents itself. Politically the Australians are the most exclusive and the most inhospitable race on earth. Their only rivals in this respect must be looked for among the bottled-up Confucians of China, or the mysterious Buddhists of Thibet. The “white-ocean” policy of the Federal Parliament, no less than the present Immigration Restriction Act, with its humorous travesty of an education test, is the most glaring instance of political bigotry that has come to light in modern times. The whole of this legislation has been described by an Australian Prime Minister as a “monstrous outrage” on every tolerant sentiment and every democratic ideal. Yet the law has been in force for three years and no Minister or Government has dared to repeal it. It is true that a certain concession has been made in favour of the Japanese. But it is only a partial concession. There the law stands on the statute-book; and there it seems likely to remain until the excluded victors of Tsu-shima show a desire to argue the question from the vantage ground of a battle-ship. In the latter event anything might come to pass.

The anomaly consists in the fact that the Australians, desiring to live politically like frogs in a well, are, as individuals, among the most open-hearted and hospitable in the world. The prevailing temper is shown in small things as in great. In England, if you are in doubt as to your locality, you feel some hesitation in asking a stranger to put you on the right road. The hesitancy may do the Englishman an injustice, but his manner explains it. In Australia you have only to enquire as to the whereabouts of a certain street or of a particular house, to be accompanied half the way there by a man who is manifestly and unmistakeably pleased to be in a position to give the information. The same hospitality is shown in the average householder’s desire to surround himself with as many people as possible, to entertain as many as possible, and to have as many as possible sampling his wines and his coffee and his cigars. If you are thirsty in Australia—and the thirst of the nation is proverbial—it is usual to look for some one who will drink with you. The hermit temper is not common, nor is the prevailing type that of the individual who wishes to be let alone, and to enjoy things alone. If there is a new lawn, or a new piano, or a new motor-car, the owner has a real anxiety that its merits should be tested, and its benefits shared by as large a circle as practicable. Vanity may have something to do with this desire, but however accounted for, it exists. The inconsistency between the temper of the unit and the policy of the Government—of each successive Government—runs from A to Z. The elector who will vote to have black men deprived of the means of earning a living, brown men deported, and blind or sick men refused the right to set foot on land, will, if he meets the alleged undesirable immigrant in the ordinary paths of life, come to his assistance with an alacrity that the good Samaritan of sacred history might equal, but could not surpass.

There are other qualities that must compel admiration. The Australians are receptive-minded, tolerant—except in the political sense just mentioned—and ready to learn. The intense conservatism of older countries is not theirs. Standards are not arbitrarily fixed as they are in Britain. The social groove is not artificially restricted. It is narrowing, but it is still fairly broad. The slavish adherence to a certain set of rules, designated collectively as “good form,” is not a characteristic of the people. In the unwritten code that finds most favour there is the principle that a person may be worth cultivating even though he does not pronounce his “a’s” as if they were “ai’s,” and even though certain monosyllables, by the aid of which the smart set avoids the trouble of conversation, form no part of his vocabulary. The Australian holds—in theory, at any rate—the revolutionary doctrine that every one should be given a chance. Now and again an individual is found who acts up to this unfashionable and somewhat crude precept.

There is something elastic in the people’s attitude to life. They have not become socially or mentally atrophied by centuries of convention, by centuries of custom, by centuries of meaningless and idiotic routine. The atrocious crime of being a young nation, with much of what the word youth implies, is still to be laid at their door.

A certain warmth, a certain generous instinct, a certain spontaneity of thought and action, a certain buoyancy of temper, must be placed to the credit side of the ledger. A certain fairness to opponents must also be conceded, despite the remarks of a noted English cricketer to the contrary. This fairness becomes all the more praiseworthy when it is remembered that the only topic on which the Australians, as a people, hold any definite opinions is that of sport. Such being the case, it is inevitable that some feeling should be shown when matters of sport—that is to say, matters of far more general interest than the fate of Governments or the choosing of Parliaments—are being decided. Invidious comparisons are sometimes drawn between the behaviour of crowds in Sydney or Melbourne, and the behaviour of crowds at Lords’ or at the Oval. The fact is usually overlooked that the London rough, who is the counterpart of the Australian larrikin, is not to be met with in any numbers at an athletic contest. For one thing he has not the money to go there, and for another thing he has not the desire. But the more boisterous and more objectionable type of Australian has a habit of finding his way to cricket matches in Sydney or in Melbourne. Broadly speaking, it is a select crowd that watches the game in England—a crowd made select by the price of admission. It is a crowd less select in Australia, for the reason that the price of admission is more easily obtainable. Allowing for all the circumstances, and measuring unit for unit, it is a fact that the virtue of fairness to opponents is one that the new nation can confidently claim.

Much might be said—in fact much has already been said, and much more will be said—of the vices of the people. This is a topic on which it would be foolish to dogmatise, seeing that so much depends on the individual point of view. Vice itself has become a term of obscure meaning. What with our logicians and metaphysicians, our up-to-date moralists, and our new hedonists—what with our emancipated lady novelists, our reforming social philosophers, and our revolting sisters and brethren—what with all these, we have no arbitrary rules of conduct, and no definitions that can for a moment be relied upon. Even so correct and comparatively orthodox a writer as Edmund Burke has made a statement implying that vice practically ceases to exist when it is sufficiently embroidered and set among sufficiently magnificent surroundings. To be vicious to the accompaniment of fine phrases and minuet-like movements—to be vicious while the rich embroideries are sweeping the floor, and the lights are falling on velvet curtains, and “the stately silver shoulder stoops”—that is not really to be vicious at all. Such at least would appear to be the general opinion. And if the general opinion is not to be taken as a guide in these matters it is difficult to say what is.

So far as national vices come under the heading of national crimes—and the terms are more or less related, though they are not identical—it can be easily shown that Australia is neither very much better nor very much worse than other countries. The number of people who are punished each year for crimes of various kinds is, relative to population, much the same as the number similarly punished in the United Kingdom. Statistics of drunkenness are incomplete and unreliable, but there is the authority of Mulhall for the statement that while the United Kingdom consumes 3.57 proof gallons of intoxicants per inhabitant, Australasia consumes no more than 2.50 gallons. Illegitimacy is somewhat more prevalent in the Southern Hemisphere than in Great Britain, but the difference is not considerable. The proportion of illegitimate births is 6 per cent. in Australasia and only 4.15 per cent. in England and Wales, but in Scotland, where morals are understood to be rather austere, the proportion of illegitimate births is 7 per cent. And so it is in regard to most other offences—in regard to burglaries, assaults, thefts, murders and the rest. The lot of the average policeman is neither more nor less unhappy, neither more nor less strenuous, in Australia than in England. The chances of being murdered in one’s sleep—though the middle-class English household may disbelieve the statement—are not appreciably greater in Australia than they are in Great Britain.

Yet a nation that is outwardly law-abiding may be inherently vicious. The habit that saps vitality may not be the habit that advertises itself in the police-court. As a matter of fact, a heavy crop of burglaries, and assaults with violence, may be quite a healthy sign, tending to show that national vigour is unimpaired. Every philosopher knows that the abounding energy which, in the one case, drives the possessor to break open doors and to hit other people on the head will, in ninety-nine other cases, impel him to daring feats in exploration, or in athletics, or in war. It is the drug-taking habit, the cigarette-smoking habit, the card-playing habit, the gambling habit, the loafing, swearing, work-shirking habit that produces the most insidious results, and tells the most disastrous tale. None of these practices are liable, in the ordinary course, to land the perpetrator in a Court of Law. There is no statistician who can say anything definite about them. But that they are all unduly and dangerously prevalent in Australia is a fact admitting of no reasonable doubt.

The most pervading phase of Australian character is its irresponsibility. If this is not a vice in itself, it is the parent of a great many vices. The term by which it is usually designated is lack of principle, or of moral sense. The average Englishman may be innocent of much outward profession of virtue, or, for that matter, of any definite, cut-and-dried standard of beliefs. He may be a very long way from the ideal of the just man made perfect. But very often he is discovered to possess something that may be neither creed nor conscience, but that is more potent than either. It is more than a fear of the law. It is more than regard for the opinion of others. It is more, even, than sense of shame. It is the inner something—accumulated instinct, if you will—that makes a man prefer, when the pinch comes, to do the honourable thing. At the very least, and at the very worst, it makes him silent as to his vices, and conscious of the fact that they are not virtues. But the Australian is beginning to run into a different mould. It is the commonest occurrence in the world to find him talking and boasting, jesting and laughing, over that about which he should be most inexorably dumb. Of his successes with women, of his breakages of the seventh commandment, of his nights at bridge or in a public-house, of his supposed power of cajoling man, woman, or child—and more especially woman—he will talk as long and as often as he can get an audience to listen to him. The larger the audience the better he is pleased. It is an unfortunate tendency of the people, and the fact that there are conspicuous exceptions to the rule just laid down does not make the tendency any less noticeable or less unfortunate.

When this irresponsibility reaches its zenith, its nadir, its crown and summit of perfection or imperfection, it produces the Australian larrikin. Every one knows this product of the hour. His fame has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere, and from pole to pole. All the hooligans of London, all the gamins of Paris, all the lazzaroni of Naples, all the miscellaneous ruffians of Cairo and Port Said, have not eclipsed, or even approached, the reputation acquired in the space of a very few decades by this child of beneficent skies and benign, smiling weather. It is impossible to say anything new about the Australian larrikin, just as it is impossible to exaggerate the heights of his lawlessness, or to plumb the depths of his depravity. But from the scientific and psychological points of view he is both interesting and valuable. There are a number of well-informed and earnest people who are distressed and disgusted by the all-pervading hypocrisy of our social laws and conventions. Mirabeau, who was exceedingly well informed, and very much in earnest, made it a boast that he had mastered all formulas. He had in fact reached the summit of irresponsibility. The Australian larrikin is in precisely the same position. But when you take weight off one man you enable him to redeem a nation; when you take weight off another you make him what he is—a living monument of hopeless vulgarity and inexpressible vice. In view of the fact that the temper of the average man is more disposed to make of him a larrikin than a Mirabeau, it becomes evident that artificial restraints are, in the aggregate, the salvation of the race. From the member of the “Rock’s Push” and of the “Flying Angels” we learn valuable lessons—lessons which such enthusiasts as Godwin and Condorcet would have us ignore. We learn that conventional laws are necessary, that artificial restraint is admirable, that people must be prevented by force from being what most of them left to themselves would become.

Of a somewhat similar type to the larrikin, though not occupying such a dizzy pre-eminence, is the cad of common or everyday life. This individual is not quite hopeless. If he were taken in hand and disciplined, drilled, and tutored, made to shoulder a rifle and practise a compulsory goose-step, fined every day for using bad language, forbidden to stand at street corners, imprisoned for the habit of expectoration, and under no circumstances allowed the use of a bicycle, he might come in time to be a valuable citizen. At present he is left too much to his own devices. Lord Roberts had his English counterpart in view when he announced that the future of the Empire depended on the adoption of a scheme of conscription. A warlike race is not to be discovered at street corners. It does not grow there. Neither is it over-much given to frequenting unregistered race meetings, and “two-up” schools. It swears occasionally, but only when circumstances appear to call for emphasis. Something will require to be done with the youth who perambulates its main streets before Australia will be able to supply the world with a new Thermopylæ, or even another Yalu.

The form of vice that is more or less prevalent in all countries—a form that is continually being warned against by the social brigade of the Salvation Army, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and a worthy Colonial Secretary, and some less worthy members of the police—is a form much in evidence in Australia. The warfare, it need hardly be said, is scarcely as profitable, while it is as unending as the warfare of the Pigmies against the Cranes. There is scarcely a main street in which, after dark, the evidences are not visible of that which the hypocrite censures, and which the wise man merely deplores. In this continent all social currents follow their own bent. There is no attempt to make people moral by Act of Parliament. There is not even an attempt to save them by Act of Parliament from certain possibilities arising from their own actions. So the woman goes her way. Her unending sacrifice—for there is no doubt that it is a sacrifice, chosen as the less of two sacrifices—brings in the usual rewards, social outlawry, criminal associates, a fiery, unquenchable thirst, and a slum in which to draw the curtain. It is a very ancient story. In matters of this kind one does not look for novel and revolutionary features. The life of pleasure here is as pleasurable as it is elsewhere. As much, and no more. The pleasure, facetiously so called, is the outcome of an industrial system under which the working womanhood of the country is expected to feed and clothe and house itself on ten shillings a week, or less. By the toil of feminine hands—so long as they choose to toil—factories abound, industries keep themselves going, manufacturers grow rich. By the sacrifice of feminine respectability the carrion kites of society are fed. It is an obvious truth that Australia is always in danger of being injured, politically, by its statesmen, while it is always being rescued, socially, by its nymphs of the street.

There are certain acts, certain qualities, which it is impossible to forgive. On the other hand, there is a certain species of wrong-doing that is readily pardoned. Vice, as already pointed out, is to some extent a relative term; and if the motive is not petty or sordid, if the actor can rise to great occasions, if the man or woman is superior to the occasional outbreaks of his or her worse nature, it is safe to say that the nation is still capable of great things, and is by no means inherently bad. The most noteworthy characteristic of the Australian is his mental attitude to life. It is an attitude that is in danger of becoming crudely materialistic. It is impossible to build on this anything lasting. The pursuit of pleasure may be pardonable enough; but it is distinctly disquieting, from the point of view of one who wishes his country to be anything or to accomplish anything, to discover that the word pleasure is being given only one meaning. “Patient, deep-thinking Germany” was at one time laughed at by the wits of Vienna and Paris. But Germany has had its Koniggratz and its Sedan, and is laughed at no longer. The moral is that it is better, in the national sense, to be patient and deep-thinking than to be shallow and pleasure-loving. The charge that is being brought against the typical Australian is that he is not self-contained enough, not deep enough, not patient enough, not idealistic enough. The pleasure that he understands, that he works for, that he gives himself over to, that he is limited by, is the obvious pleasure that is dependent on sense, and the things of sense; and that must inevitably, sooner or later, become pallid and dead. He seems to be learning—in very many cases he has already learned—

To say of shame, what is it?

Of virtue, we can miss it;

Of sin, we can but kiss it,

And it’s no longer sin.

And he threatens—it may be only a threat—to flutter down from the stage of spasmodic enterprise to that of foolish indifference, from that of energy to that of ineptitude, from that which commands the respect, to that which invites the contempt of nations physically stronger and more enduring than his own.

Australia has so far achieved nothing great from the national standpoint. It cannot be said to have failed, because it has not yet been called upon. There are people who declare that they have the utmost confidence in its future. And if certain present-day tendencies could be overlooked, or if they could be obviated, as they might be, this confidence would be abundantly justified. The country has still indefinite room for expansion. It is not over-populated, and for at least another century is not likely to be. The wild-eyed enthusiast who imagines, with Milton, that he can see a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man from sleep, and shaking her invincible locks, must, if he forsake the rôle of prophet for that of the sober speculator, find some habitation and dumping-ground for the people that are to be born hereafter. And there are not many regions remaining where new growths can be attempted without decided inconvenience to the old. Apart from South America, Australia is practically the only country offering—the only country, that is to say, where there are millions of acres of unoccupied land, and a soil and climate that do not actually forbid approach. But the people, if they are to do great things, if they are not to become a tributary of some foreign power, or an appendage of Eastern Asia, must be prepared sooner or later to make a few changes, and even a few sacrifices. They must be prepared to give up the habit of looking to their big brothers for ideas on art and literature, and dress, and dining, and ball-room dancing, and methods of pronunciation, and national defence. They must be prepared to get a belief of some kind, a religion of some kind. They must be fanatical on some point—whether a religious point or a point of national honour, it does not matter—or they will go down before the Oriental fanatic as surely as the grass goes down before the scythe. No one imagines that a dilettante preference can stand against a consuming fire.

Be it a mad dream or God’s very breath,

The fact’s the same,—belief is fire.

The Australian must be prepared, in the event of great emergency, to die for something or for somebody. When he is thus prepared, his virtues and vices will not greatly matter; they will learn as a matter of course to adjust themselves.