Читать книгу Psychomanagement - Robert Spillane - Страница 6
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Egalitarianism: The belief that all subordinates should submit equally.
One of Australia’s glorious sisters, Miles Franklin, noted that one of its brilliant sons, Henry Lawson, called Australia the paradise of mediocrity and the grave of genius. She advised visitors who become perplexed by its contradictions and inverted emphases to soak themselves in its atmosphere before arriving at dogmatic conclusions.1
English novelist D.H. Lawrence did not live long enough to benefit from Franklin’s advice. He visited Sydney in 1922, stayed for three months, and wrote one of his worst novels – Kangaroo – which included wonderful descriptions of the Australian landscape and hilarious descriptions of Australian manners. Lawrence described Australia as ‘a weird, big country. It feels so empty and untrodden...This is the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it...You never knew anything so nothing...They are always vaguely and meaninglessly on the go. And it all seems so empty, so nothing, it almost makes you sick. They are healthy, and to my thinking almost imbecilic. That’s what life in a new country does to you: it makes you so material, so outward, that your real inner life and your inner self dies out, and you clatter round like so many mechanical animals...I feel if I lived in Australia for ever I should never open my mouth once to say one word that meant anything. Yet they are very trustful and kind and quite competent in their jobs. There’s no need to lock your doors, nobody will come and steal. All the outside life is so easy. But there it ends. There’s nothing else...Nobody is any better than anybody else, and it really is democratic. But it all feels so slovenly, slipshod, rootless and empty, it is like a dream...There is this for it, that here one doesn’t feel the depression and the tension of Europe. Everything is happy-go-lucky, and one couldn’t fret about anything if one tried. One just doesn’t care. And they are all like that. Au fond they don’t care a straw about anything: except just their little egos. Nothing really matters... 2
Australia is a land of paradoxes, inversions and sardonic humour. Its paradoxes are exasperating, its inversions frustrating and its humour invalidating: such is life for a people who value liberty and equality; egalitarianism and bureaucracy; achievement and failure; heroes and underdogs. Australians aggressively insist on the dignity and importance of the individual but do their utmost to eliminate ‘tall poppies’. Males are said to stick by their mates but will criticise them the moment their backs are turned. Females are said to be tough-minded but immerse themselves in the sentimental banality of women’s magazines. Friendly and tolerant, Australians are laconic. Or are they merely apathetic? After all, they repeatedly tell each other: ‘No worries’.
These paradoxes are combined with a notable inversion: historically Australians adopted a cynical attitude to so-called leaders – especially politicians, government bureaucrats and business managers – and made them the object of sardonic humour. The Australian way is that of the quiet achiever supported by a gospel of relaxation which emphasises getting on with, rather than dominating others; it is far more subtle than most observers and commentators care to discover, let alone acknowledge. Valuing their quality of life, Australians work quietly to secure it by defending a status quo that has given them advantages which are, they insist, second to none. Since they see their work as relatively unrelated to local luxuries – the weather, beaches and the vast open spaces – they are not obsessively concerned about economic performance. As for long-term planning, well, in the long-term we’re all dead. In Australia the quo truly has status.
The Australian character of the nineteenth century was a mixture of Protestant, Catholic and Enlightenment values. But coursing through the veins of white Australians was European Romanticism. The most popular books in the early days of the colony were romantic: the novels of Sir Walter Scott for instance. As the decades passed romanticism developed an Australian flavour. The bush and bushrangers, the people of the outback, and common soldiers at Gallipoli were romanticised and passed into folklore. No doubt this romanticism had strong links to Irish mythology, but it also had important connections with English and German Romanticism. And while Australians would seem unlikely candidates for the label ‘romantic,’ this influence, although overlaid with laconic self-mockery, runs deep in the Australian character.
Nowadays it is considered politically incorrect to search for or talk about an Australian character since this merely reveals a portrait of dead, white, Anglo-Celtic males. And now that Australia is a multicultural society, it is considered mischievous and morally repugnant to emphasise the virtues (if any) of such a privileged, once-powerful group which dominated the virtuous citizenry. The fact remains, however, that Australian management in the twenty-first century shows the powerful influence of men and women from Anglo-Celtic backgrounds.
The early rulers of this country had to deal with Anglo/ Celtic men and women who held sceptical, if not cynical, views about power, authority and political leadership (if such it can be called). This scepticism developed, in part, because Australians understood the negative consequences of allowing one’s freedom to be surrendered to leaders, governors, politicians or policemen. Australians appreciate the reply of the army officer who was asked to rate a junior officer’s ‘leadership potential’: ‘I believe this officer has leadership potential,’ the officer wrote, ‘I believe his men would follow him anywhere, but it would be out of a sense of curiosity’.
Australians will follow pompous fools to watch them fall into error and then, with a wry smile, allow them to mend their ways. This is the local sport known as puncturing pomposity and pretentiousness, or ‘cutting through the crap’, and explains Australians’ dislike of role-playing. They like to cut through the surface layer of role performance to get to the natural person. And natural men and women are, or should be, ‘good blokes’. This approach to social relationships has earned them the vulgar tribute: they don’t bullshit. Good blokes combine a down-to-earth, unpretentious, self-effacing demeanour with an unapologetic self-confidence. Australian poet Les Murray calls this character ‘sprawl’: loose-limbed in its mind, it leans on things. Its roots are Irish and it is the image of the Australian character: laconic, democratic and ironic. However, this emphasis on under-stated achievement is often misunderstood or denied, especially if Australians are judged by the sporting people who have adopted American manners.
The stereotypical Anglo-Celtic Australian appears to the outsider as relaxed to the point of apathy. Yet it is a watchful apathy since Australians live according to the ‘silence of the law’. That beautiful phrase, coined by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, describes the strength of liberal democracies: the respect for and internalisation of the law and its universal application. If the law is neither respected nor applied universally the result is tyranny. When the law is noisy the result is totalitarianism, or the sort of communitarianism that is inimical to most Australians. So when Australians are referred to as ‘wallies’ – lazy, self-interested hedonists – one learns to recognise the sound of competing values. It has to be said that in many countries the law is decidedly noisy.
In Australia the silence of the law is accompanied by the noise of celebrities. To be a celebrity, even if only for a day, is an American dream. It can be an Australian nightmare. To survive celebrity status in Australia one must appear to be unaffected by one’s success. This means eschewing party politics, any form of formal authority, or support for any paranoid minority. In fact, it is wise to say very little and even wiser to control the temptation to put on a show for an audience, unless one is engaged in the activity (usually sport) for which one was originally recognised. Australians respect people who are artless, unsophisticated and unwilling to modify their behaviour for the social occasions that demand it. Their quiet confidence is supported by an almost wicked sense of humour, ironic, self-mocking, sentimental about family and close friends, and tough-mindedly realistic about the external world. And the external world in Australia is tough: the geography presents individuals with unbelievable challenges that usually end in heartbreak.
When free migrants arrived in the 1840s, many expected to work and master the land. It defeated them as it defeats everyone. But this defeat is the inspiration for much local poetry. Australians are not so callow as to be optimists about life in the bush. Not for them the view that life is, or ought to be, wonderful.
Beyond the cities and the coastal fringe, life is indescribably hard and gives rise to pessimism and even nihilism. But pessimism can be lamented and the lamentations are the very stuff of romantic poetry. And if nihilism is a dominant theme in the works of Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy, it can be inspirational for those individuals confronted with the abyss who are determined to survive and overcome the tragedies of life.
If this sounds like the eccentric German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that is because Australia has had its Nietzscheans and some of them have said so: Norman Lindsay for example. Australians have developed their own brand of Nietzscheism, a tragic vitalism that, unlike Crocodile Dundee, does not win out in the end. The optimistic ending to modern travails points to the commercial motives of Hollywood. Life for battling Australians was tragic, thus the last Shakespearean words of Joseph Furphy (writing as Tom Collins, a government official of the ninth class) in his masterpiece, Such is Life:
Now I had to enact the Cynic philosopher to Moriarty and Butler, and the aristocratic man with a ‘past’ to Mrs Beaudesart; with the satisfaction of knowing that each of these was acting a part to me. Such is life, my fellow mummers – just like a poor player, that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity. But let me not hear any small witticism to the further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang and blankly, signifying – nothing.3
According to Harry Heseltine, ‘nothing’ is a word which echoes throughout Australian literature. Presided over by Nietzsche, rather than Henry Lawson, Australian literature is based on a unique combination of glances into the pit and the erection of safety fences to prevent any falling in. If mateship dominates Lawson’s and Furphy’s writing, it is because behind it was an even more acute awareness of horror and emptiness. Mateship, egalitarian democracy, nationalism and realistic toughness can be seen as defences against the possibility of falling into the abyss. The main concern of early Australians was ‘to acknowledge the terror at the basis of being, to explore its uses, and to build defences against its dangers’.4
Joseph Furphy described his brilliant novel about mateship, the bush and local characters as: temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian. And so it is. Such is Life (and much Australian literature) is a study of role- playing and the absurdity of human endeavour. All the novel’s characters are playing roles for other role-players. Society is a confidence trick which makes bearable the loneliness of the authentic life. The choice is between the best confidence trick and a confrontation with the abyss. Society is mostly bluff and bullying and those who succeed compromise themselves. Insincere role-players become sick at heart: many of the characters of Australian fiction and poetry are nauseated because their tough-minded realism is unable to contain the nihilism of Australian life.
Norman Lindsay countered the appalling emptiness of Australian life with a philosophy of ‘creative effort’ which combined the philosophies of Plato and Nietzsche (who do not mix easily). Nietzsche sought to transcend the Christian ethic of humility and compassion by affirming life itself which, in its natural form, is red in tooth and claw. The challenge for human beings is to sublimate their barbaric impulses, and create themselves as works of art.
In Creative Effort, written in 1920 after the senseless slaughter of the world war, Lindsay despaired of mankind. He believed that the only way some control might be exercised over man’s destructive impulses was by restoring the great classical-romantic values in life and art that had been jettisoned in the early years of the twentieth century. Diagnosing modernist art as a symptom of a disease which was infecting Western civilisation, Lindsay refused to praise and admitted no merit in any modernist. They were ‘mere savages’ who, through their brutal representations, revealed their personal despair. Modernists are products of Europe’s moral exhaustion and the neuroses engendered by the slaughter of the war: they have debased every classical value in art. He refused to believe that these ‘fooleries’ would last: people might be gullible but once the novelty wears off they will see through this monumental confidence trick. He was right about the gullibility but wrong about the demise of modernist art and literature. The rise of jazz infuriated him and he threatened to drive gramophone needles into the fingernails of every jazz producer in the land. He firmly believed that the nihilistic nature of modernism would ensure its early demise. But modernism triumphed and gave way to postmodernism and the decline of all aesthetic standards. Junk became art and the few remaining standards by which excellence was judged collapsed.
Lindsay’s solution to the sickness of modernism rested with the artists who delved into unconscious life-forces to gain creative inspiration. Creative vision is the ability to discover one’s own universality. But those who attempt this are doomed to failure. All we can do is engage in ‘creative effort’ and hope that there will be moments of aesthetic consciousness. Agreeing with the Romantics that although we can reject society we cannot ignore nature, Lindsay followed them in the belief that it is up to us to make nature sublime.
After acknowledging his profound debt to Nietzsche, Lindsay criticised him for attempting to create an earthly paradise built on the will of conquerors. Lindsay had no time for Nietzsche’s idea that if the resentful mob cannot find a direction they must be given one. True, Nietzsche cleared away the rubbish that man had accumulated in building Western society. But having destroyed conventional Western values, Nietzsche fell into the trap of allowing himself to offer yet another version of the great Human State, lorded over by men of indomitable will who, believing that might is right, assume the right to impose themselves upon others in the name of creative leadership. Lindsay wanted nothing to do with that dangerous form of utopianism because it presupposed that power over others is given to those worthy of power. It never was, for those truly worthy of power disdained to use it.
In 1932 Fortune magazine in New York published Lindsay’s opinions of Australians:
The pose of the average Australian is that of a sardonic cocksureness. He is foolproof: aware of the rottenness of human motives and not to be taken in by them. He derides everything – except himself. His weekly papers reflect this uneasy vacillation of national self-esteem by their incessant jokes at the expense of Englishmen, who are exhibited as semiimbeciles…In return, the Englishman dislikes the Australian as a colonial and a convict-bred upstart without any social status…
Nevertheless, this annoying cocksureness of the Australian springs from two of his best virtues: his physical courage and his ability to think for himself in action. For a century he has been forcing a place for himself in a crude and difficult land afflicted by drought and an uncertain rainfall, and the War of 1914 demonstrated his tradition of toughness and endurance. His sporting impulse is one outcome of his passion for taking a risk, whether on a bad horse or by dying of thirst, or casually swimming in the company of sharks…
Australian churches are almost empty; the Australian spends his Sunday rationally in the open air, and the Australian parsons have the hunted and harassed air of the uncertain wage-earner...
States of mind do not alter; they merely change their habitat. What was the parson and the convict official is now the bureaucrat. For its size, Australia has the largest bureaucracy with the lowest mentality in the world. The cost of maintaining the public service in Australia is such a joke that one can’t laugh at it . . .
No one outside of Australia can have any notion of the degradation Australian intelligence has been subjected to by the antics of its official morons…5
Lindsay’s philosophy is a form of cynical romanticism: it is libertarian, pessimistic, elitist, anti-authoritarian and it emphasises the individual’s detachment from society and politics. His considerable influence on poets, novelists and playwrights, too many to list here, cannot be doubted. In our postmodern artistic world of junk, Lindsay is an anachronism and thus unjustly ignored.
By way of contrast, the Melbourne intellectual scene has been one of social, or even utopian, romanticism based on the view that art is central to society and a force for progressive social change. This view is anti-individualistic, egalitarian and socially democratic. In Australian Cultural Elites, John Docker argues that Melbourne intellectuals characteristically think that an Australian, nationalist-derived, social democratic ethos is compatible with what are viewed as the central values of European civilisation. Melbourne intellectuals feel at the centre of their society because they are modest social activists who strive to introduce Australia to European standards of sophistication.
Sydney intellectuals look to Europe as defining that which is important in life. But, Docker argues, they do not live in Europe, and if they did, would not feel part of Europe’s social texture. Rejecting Australia and rejected by Europe, they are threatened by a personal nihilism. They opt for a third realm where universal romantic European ideals prevail. Since they reject society they cling to the romantic idea of the natural as real in life and the social as contingent. Melbourne romanticism embraces society; Sydney romanticism rejects it.
Lindsay’s cynical romanticism was an aesthetic way of wrestling with existential dilemmas. Henry Lawson’s was quite different. He recognised the need of man for man in a rough and brutalising country which produces profound feelings of emptiness. Faced with such absurd challenges to personal existence, it is tempting to withdraw into comfortable conformity. One can understand the need to invent the idea of mateship to counteract the consequences of widespread nihilism associated with life in the outback. Lawson obliged and so provided nineteenth-century frontier society with a survival technique and twentieth-century urban dwellers with one of their most cherished myths: mateship.
The loyalty of man to man is interwoven with an obsessive assertion of rights. But the passion for equal justice can easily sour into a grudge against gifted people and the desire for mateship can easily express itself by pulling down those who do not mix with the crowd. The ideal of mateship which appeals to ordinary Australians springs, not only from their eagerness to embrace fraternity, but from their determination to pull down high achievers.
In Lawson’s life and work, however, mateship is fragile and conditional. It didn’t (and still doesn’t) apply to women, children, Aborigines and recent immigrants, although it did apply to dogs and horses. More importantly, Lawson realised that mateship was a protection against living with oneself. Those who deviate from the path of sociability and choose the lonely road of the reclusive individual invariably go mad. Did they need society? But it was the need to escape from the hypocrisy of society that made the journey to individuality necessary. And the result was, in Lawson’s words, nothing.
Confronted by the terminal claustrophobia of hypocritical social relationships the inhabitants of this wide brown land had a unique opportunity to ‘go bush’. Most didn’t. And those who did – explorers, farmers, bushrangers – were generally broken by the bush. Their belief that coming to terms with the bush was an index of one’s character reminds one again of Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill one makes one stronger. To this day there is a silent and deep respect for those who battled with the bush and failed. Compassion for the underdog was not solely a reflection of identification with convicts and hostility towards their rulers. It had as much to do with the compassion and respect felt for those who struggled bravely but pointlessly with the harsh conditions of the Australian outback. Compassion for the underdog was combined with a romantic view of the people in the bush, even if our romantic writers were mostly disaffected urban intellectuals for whom the outback represented, as it does today, vicarious thrills and a relief from the claustrophobia and conformity of city and suburbs.
The vast open spaces of Australia influence people in different ways: they can be intoxicating for some, frightening for others. While ‘Banjo’ Paterson glorified life in the outback and wrote heroically optimistic tales, the poetry that plumbed the depths of the Australian character was cynically romantic. For many people the Australian landscape produces profound disquiet in which the individual is truly at one with a harsh, raw environment which so reduces him to insignificance that he feels swallowed up by nature. It is easy to understand why this experience was often portrayed by local writers as a form of madness and why Australians share a deep ambivalence towards the bush. Australians who know the bush acknowledge an intimate connection with each other: their empathy is based on a profound understanding of the precariousness of existence and the need of forbearance in the face of absurdity.
Australians, at least those in the outback, have faced a fundamental choice. One can act as if nothing matters or, while accepting the ultimate futility of life, one can act as if it is not futile. The Australian character has been moulded by this choice. And the result is a curious mixture of the two where today the most common expressions are ‘no worries’, ‘she’ll be right’: cryptic and easy-going versions of Lawson’s ‘it doesn’t matter much, nothing does’.
A darkly heroic realism developed among pioneers because of the harshness of the bush, which broke nearly all of the hard men and women who tried to master it. Thus there developed among the early Australians a creed of integrity – of being true to life – which reminds one of the cynical romanticism of Nietzsche and Albert Camus. Australian history is filled with tragic stories of lost children, drought, bushfire, floods, loneliness and tragic death in the outback. Australia boasts eleven of the fifteen most poisonous snakes in the world (including the top three); the most poisonous spider (and in Sydney too); the deadly box jelly-fish and blue-ringed octopus; scorpions; sting-rays, sharks; and crocodiles that have developed a taste for American tourists. And how does the man in the bush react to these nuisances?
The first march of the young pioneers was over; the sixteen miles of rough uptrack had been traversed in a day; the average load had been over a hundred pounds per man . . . Between the wall of timber and the cliff rim ran an open strip a few yards wide, a breathing space which was chosen for a camp site. Before blankets were rolled out, six tiger snakes had to be killed and two bull-dog ants’ nests burned out. Herb had been sitting on the brink of a cliff watching the opalescent spray of the falls leaping out into the twilight. On getting up to go back to the camp site, he found two hissing flattened reptiles blocking his path; there was no stick handy and no retreat. “Bring a stick!” he yelled to the others, “Two snakes here!” “You can have my stick,” Norb called out, a bit out of breath, “as soon as I’ve finished killing these beggars over here.” Two carpet snakes and a twelve foot rock python were spared – they proved useful about the camp later by eradicating bush rats. It would have been a bad camp for a sleep-walker; three yards from the foot of their leafy beds was certain death over the three hundred feet cliffs; behind their heads was a tangled mass of thorn, stinging tree and burning vine, which the jungle always uses as a first line of defence; over in the coarse tussocks beyond the camp fire lived a large community of tiger snakes and death adders, which for centuries had been lords of this one, sun-baked ledge on the vast, gloomy plateau. Such trifles do not trouble men who carry a horse’s pack all day, and so, undisturbed by the howling of dingoes and the scream of Powerful Owls, the first night passed in heavy sleep.6
Australia is a hard country and the people have had to adopt a starkly realistic view of life, or go under. In the bush, they usually go under anyway. One way to cope with a hard country and a tough life is through humour. Australian humour – realistic and sardonic – is used as a self-protective device to keep one’s courage up in the face of inevitable disaster. This black humour involves an ironic acceptance of the fact that in the end, we all lose. Confronted by tanks, a digger said to his mate: ‘You go that way and I’ll go this way, and we’ll surround ‘em’. Deeply rooted in disjunctions – English versus Irish, male versus female, bush versus city, optimism versus pessimism – irony dominates Australian humour. Casual, shoulder-shrugging resignation leads to the stark conclusion that ‘we can’t win, no matter what’ – the swagman in Waltzing Matilda died, the bushrangers Ned Kelly and Ben Hall perished, and many soldiers died pointlessly in the disaster at Gallipoli. Despite this, Australians continue to protest vigorously, and their vehicle for protest is swearing. Ned Kelly’s description of the Victorian police is legendary:
The brutal and cowardly conduct of big ugly fat-necked wombat-headed big-bellied magpie-legged narrow-hipped splay-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or English landlords which is better known as officers of Justice or Victorian police.7
Laconic and stoical, Australians combine a calm acceptance of the fates with a grim humour. There is an old story about Percy Lindsay, having a drink with a few professional friends. The barmaid approached, apologised and asked the ‘boys’ if they would mind making less noise because her father had hanged himself in the back shed. After considering this for the time it took to finish their beer, they trooped out to the shed where Percy said: ‘And sure enough there was the poor bastard hanging from a rafter dead as a doornail. He had his mouth half open in a funny way and looked a bit grim. We had quite a job getting him down’.
Such is life. The contrast with European angst, English class consciousness and American histrionics is obvious and makes this a very Australian story, even down to the words used in its telling. The barmaid says ‘sorry’ – a favourite Australian word used to inform unfortunate commuters that buses are out of service. Visitors note with amusement that Australians apologise for things that aren’t their fault. ‘Would you mind’ is used obsessively to avoid the appearance of authoritarian behaviour, while ‘a bit’ is a popular expression used to qualify, if not further apologise for, the request. Visitors have also noted the irritating tendency of Australians, especially females, to end their sentences with rising intonation as if asking a question. ‘We had a lovely holiday?’ means ‘We had a lovely holiday. Is that all right with you?’ In Australia one must never place oneself above others.
Although European romanticism was an important influence on nineteenth-century writers, Irish romanticism was even more influential. In The Irish in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell argued that it is not the conflict between individual and the bush, but culture conflict (notably between the English and Irish) which explains the development of Australian society. The refusal of the Irish to act out a deferential role discomforted the English elite, eroded their feelings of superiority and announced that the old-world social order could not be reproduced in Australia. This produced a general atmosphere in which rigid hierarchies became increasingly difficult to sustain. It was the Irish and their friends who freed the atmosphere of authoritarianism, pretence and pomposity. The main unifying theme of Australian history is, for O’Farrell, the clash between the English majority (moderate, respectable, conformist), the Irish minority (melancholic, humorous, romantic, contradictory, volatile), and a local Australian minority (masculine, hedonist, non-intellectual).
The English thought that Australia should be a little England of the South Seas but the Irish minority promoted an Australian nationalism which repudiated the class-consciousness and conservatism of British society. The Irish were enemies of pretentiousness, pomposity and repression, indifferent to worldly progress, and friends of innocent merriment, mischief and passionate tragedy. O’Farrell notes that while the non-Irish rich and powerful built commercial and industrial empires, the Irish preferred anonymity, equality, and the security of their own kind as their vision of a good life. It was a vote for the underdog, but its danger lay in glorifying the role of underdog with his fatalism, his suspicion of excellence, and his sense of grievance.
Yet it would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that early Australians did not value skill and effectiveness. Nor is it true that they were opposed to authority in all its forms. While Australians oppose authoritarians on principle, they are relatively accepting of authoritative individuals or experts. This is well demonstrated in the case of the Australian fighting soldiers in the First World War.
Known collectively as the Australian Imperial Force, it was created from nothing: no history, no elite regiments and no martial tradition. But the diggers created a tradition of their own: unsurpassed courage in fighting; indiscipline on the parade ground; riotous behaviour on rest and recreation leave; constant swearing; heavy drinking; fiercely independent and opportunistic behaviour; and masterful use of irony and sardonic humour. Away from the battlefield their discipline was lax to the point of anarchic.
General William Birdwood dined out many times on the following story of his inspection of an Australian camp. Leaning against a gate was a sentry, gun yards away, who showed no interest in the general with a plumed hat. He neither moved nor saluted. The general was furious. Briskly he marched up to the sentry.
‘Soldier’, he said, ‘You didn’t salute me’.
‘That’s right’, agreed the sentry.
‘Why not?’ demanded the general. The soldier shrugged away the absurdity of such a question.
‘Do you know who I am?’ asked an increasingly furious British general.
The soldier surveyed him from his shining boots to the feathered plume in his hat.
‘No idea,’ he answered.
‘I’m General Birdwood, your commander-in-chief’, the furious officer told him.
‘Well, in that case,’ replied the soldier flatly, ‘why don’t you shove your feathers up your arse and fly away, like any other bird would’. 8
In The Myth of the Digger, Jane Ross argues that the diggers recognised the general legitimacy of the army system (as they did bureaucracies generally). But in granting legitimacy to each officer his formal role was of relatively little importance. Legitimacy was granted on a limited and revocable basis. If an officer proved incompetent or did not care for his men, his influence was severely circumscribed. This didn’t matter much to the diggers, since they had no need of leaders anyway. Ross argued that these restrictions on the granting of legitimacy should not be construed to mean that the diggers were ‘anti- authority’. The diggers believed they were entitled to receive reasons to support the orders they were expected to carry out. And it was reasons they demanded and received. For the diggers, the legitimacy of a power relationship depended on the personal qualities of the officer rather than on his formal claims to power as a holder of a commission. While the diggers were not generally hostile to officers, they were irritated by those who claimed more than their due in respect of privileges, or who gained commissions for the wrong reasons. They reserved the right to rely on their judgement, expected officers to be fair and to issue orders in a particular way. Australian officers had high standards set for them by subordinates who were more critical of those who wielded power than were their colleagues in more deferential armies. But what did the diggers require of their officers?
Australians expected not only military skills from their officers, but also courage and common sense. If the officers didn’t measure up, they should be sent back to base. Believing that fighting was a straightforward task which most Australians could undertake with little effort, the diggers resisted training. If almost anyone can fight, there was no need to defer to officers since any fighting man could be an officer. An officer was obeyed if he explained why his orders should be followed. If diggers were satisfied that the orders given by the officer were necessary and accorded with common sense, they carried them out with vigour and courage. If the orders made no sense to them, the officer had a problem. If the digger was given an order he wanted to know what it was all about. If he was satisfied that it was necessary and that it was common sense he would carry out that order through all the fires of hell.
While the battlefield abounded with good officers, the base camps had the worst bureaucratic characteristics. Camp officers were obese, lazy, incompetent soldiers who were obsessed with army rituals and regulations. The diggers called them captains of flatulence and treated them with disdain. According to Jane Ross, they were ‘broken dolls’ and ‘staff drones’ who lacked courage, initiative, decisiveness, independence, irreverence and common sense. In short, fighting was valued far more highly than administrative skills. Bureaucrats have never had an easy time of it in Australia.
Australians have long understood the inadequacies of action, even though they enjoy action. They know how to be heroes without a cause and strive to suffer ordeals sardonically. Dogmatic pronouncements about Australians being anti-authority are, therefore, unwarranted and probably derive from confusing power with authority. Australians recognise the value of authority when they want to know why they should do what is asked of them. Their language might have been mutinous but they dismissed mutineers contemptuously as ‘fucking no-hopers’, ‘fellers who ought to have their heads read’, ‘bloody fools who had gone completely off their rockers’. As Jane Ross noted, they were rebels against hierarchy but obeyed orders if it was reasonable to do so.
According to historian W.K. Hancock in his 1930 book, Australia, the locals are not content merely to attack privilege or social status. Rather, they are inclined to ignore capacities in their preoccupation with needs. Australian democracy favours equality of enjoyment over equality of opportunity. Hancock argues that Australian democracy has done much to equalise opportunities, but it has also done something to narrow them. Australians are anxious that everybody should run a fair race. But they are resentful if anybody runs a fast race. Indeed, they dislike altogether the idea of a race, because in a race, victory is to the strong. Their sympathy is for the underdog, and their will is to make merit take a place in the queue.
While they are supposed to be matter-of-fact folk who distrust politicians and their rhetoric, Australians have been incurably romantic in their faith in the power of government to fulfil their needs. They have been too prepared to water good wine so that there may be enough for everybody, even though many males prefer beer.
Hancock saw in this volatile mixture of romantic sentiments a challenge for Australians to create their own values and sweep away the old quarrels of the day before yesterday. If the values of the old world were to be rejected, new values would be needed. It is unsurprising, therefore, that several artists of a century ago were attracted to the philosophy of Nietzsche, who called for a revaluation of all values. But by the 1930s, Australians had compromised their romantic idealism and settled for everything that Nietzsche loathed – a ‘middling standard’. Nietzsche proved too demanding, too aristocratic and too contemptuous of the average Australian.
The fierce nationalism promoted by the ‘bohemians of the Bulletin’ in Sydney expressed itself as a vindication of equality and democracy and an assertion of the supreme worth of the common man. Such a philosophy is hardly Nietzschean. Democratic nationalism reinforced with Henry Lawson’s gospel of mateship and the romanticising of the bushman by the Bulletin school of writers, produced the legendary Australian ambivalence to authority.
Australian attitudes to authority are paradoxical: the quest for equality has been satisfied to a large extent by the establishment of bureaucratic institutions. During the colonial era, each of the six colonies developed a complex system for dealing with domestic problems, while the British government retained responsibility for defence, external relations and other central government functions. These were transferred to the Commonwealth government at federation, but the states retained many of the most important powers, including taxation, until the Second World War. These peculiar historical circumstances have resulted in the complaint that Australia is one of the most over-governed countries in the world, with many functions duplicated at state, federal and local government levels. Australians believe that government exists to service individual rights so that the state should be a vast public utility devoted to providing happiness for the greatest possible number of citizens. Accordingly, Australians have developed a talent for bureaucracy. In the city and the country, where individualism is strong, bureaucratic behaviour is deeply ingrained. Understandably, Australians take a dubious pride in this since it appears to contradict the cherished image of antiauthoritarian, ungovernable individualists. Where is the rugged individualist who scorns authority? With many public servants to take care of their needs, Australians sacrificed rugged individualism for a gospel of relaxation.
In his aptly named book, Land of the Long Weekend, Ronald Conway describes Australia in the 1970s as the country where weekdays are days of R&R which help the locals recover from the last weekend and prepare for the next weekend. Symptomatic of the late twentieth-century Australian lifestyle was an obsessive dedication to immature consumerism, mortgaged luxury, brick-veneered suburbia and unearned leisure. As a result of the breakdown of family relationships, Australians turned to a peer-group lifestyle based on superficial and unconvincing mateship. Australia is one of the highest-ranking Western countries in terms of the number of holidays and its administrators have cunningly contrived to have most of them occur on a Monday. The long weekend has thus become a national symbol in a country where pleasure is linked with novelty and ‘getting away from it all’. But what are they getting away from? Surely not a life of hard work since, as every Australian knows, the innumerable underperformers are not confined to blue-collar workers involved in heavy manual labour, but include employees at all levels of work organisations. Australians have always been plagued by vagueness, tardiness, incompetence and vacuous unconcern from public servants and members of the (misnamed) service industry. While it is easy and tempting to attribute this widespread apathy and incompetence to the values of Australian workers, it is positively impious to blame workers for their shortcomings. And the same applies to managers who one might have thought play an important role in ensuring that their colleagues perform effectively. Yet managers have indirectly encouraged incompetence in their colleagues for fear that direct confrontation will not be worth the effort. The workplace is not a place for work: it is a place to prepare for and recover from the far more stimulating activities of the weekend, especially those concerned with sport.
The national obsession with sport carries with it an affirmation of human courage and endurance where physical achievement is the standard by which individuals are assessed. The obsession with sport, however, seems to contradict Australia’s notorious ‘levelling tendency’: a mistrust of excellence and suspicion of celebrities. As everybody knows, Australians have a decidedly ambivalent, if not negative, attitude toward individual eminence and distinction, with the exception of sport. Australians often qualify their comments about leadership with, ‘except in sport’, although that expression is generally further qualified with ‘so long as they are good blokes’: unpretentious, modest, laconic in victory. They should not appear ‘uppity’, arrogant or self-assertive and they should not indulge in American-style self-glorification.
A major weakness of folk history is that commentators abstract popular values from the local literature and apply them to the general population. Are our profound and lovable values – egalitarianism, mateship, tolerance, friendliness, stoicism and sardonic humour – characteristic of suburban Australians?
In Intruders in the Bush, John Carroll argues that there have been three main influences on Australian culture: upper-middle class Victorian values and institutions; working class (especially Irish) egalitarianism; and twentieth-century consumerism. Middle-class Australians settled themselves into British-style suburbs dominated by British-style houses and sent their children to British-style schools where they played cricket and rugby. However, in the late nineteenth century, working-class Irish-Australians staged a cultural take-over of English values. At its heart was an egalitarian ethos with an accompanying intolerance of respectability and manners, hostility to formal authority, a talent for improvisation but also for bureaucracy, and a romantic attitude toward male comradeship.
Carroll argued that the only thing that is typically Australian about the egalitarian-mateship phenomenon is that it is more widespread than in other Western countries. This ethic has been prominent in Australia because of the peculiar nature and strength of the working-class experience, and the fact that the upper-middle class, including senior managers as a class, has not been able to enshrine its values. This failure was due not to lack of strength but to lack of confidence. The values and manners of this class have remained the preserve of a small minority.
Why did the middle class fail to consolidate its culture? Carroll’s thesis is that the formation of Australian society coincided with a general development in the West whereby the middle class came progressively under the influence of an egalitarian bad conscience. He argued that democracies suppress excellence and individuality and encourage disdain for hierarchy, which makes it inevitable that central governments increase their power. But above all, the egalitarian spirit of democracies legitimates the envy of difference and of superiority. So the targets of envy establish disarming strategies by disguising whatever is likely to be coveted. This fear of envy is a contributing factor to the bad conscience of the modern middle class. The pressure to maintain disarming strategies may result in a questioning of the very values once so vigorously defended. The Puritan virtues of hard work, frugal living and responsibility for community require committed belief and action. Living in a country lacking in tradition and born of cultural conflict, Australians do not believe deeply enough, or in sufficient numbers, in these values. Where the authority of an old culture collapses there is a strong tendency for people to identify with the victims. This is what happened in Australia and accounts for its citizens’ empathy with underdogs, the lower classes, the stressed, the deviant and criminal. Carroll noted that this middle-class bad conscience is not new to post-1950 Australia since it was well established in the myth-makers of the 1890s who were significantly urban middle class.
Over the past thirty-five years, Australian characteristics have been changed by feminism, multiculturalism and postmodernism. The traditional ‘true blue’ stereotype is acknowledged by a small minority and less than fifteen percent of Australians identify with the man on the land. The majority do not identify with this easy-going, down-toearth, masculine, anti-intellectual Australian. By contrast, many see themselves as sophisticated, ambitious, hardworking, generous, creative, egalitarian, loyal and tolerant. As a consequence of the increasing feminisation of life in Australia, males have become more willing to express their feelings. One has only to watch popular television programs to see men crying when confronted with a newly improved backyard. However, Australians have also become passive, soft, simplistic, materialistic and obese. They demand that their politicians and bureaucrats work for them, but are cynical about their ability to do so.
If Australians rely so heavily on bureaucracy one might expect them to value leadership. However, their cynical attitude to politicians, bureaucrats and managers militates against leadership, at least from them. So Australians live an exasperating paradox: paradoxical because they depend on politicians, bureaucrats and managers but don’t trust them; exasperating because they pursue a goal that is doomed to failure. Believing that Australian democracy could, as Henry Lawson said, ‘democratise the world’, they are exasperated by the failure of government and business to eliminate hierarchies of power, corruption and inefficiencies. Their exasperation is expressed through strident demands for politicians and managers to work more effectively for the people, even though they know they will not. The result is a constant discrediting of politicians, public servants and managers.
There have been no leaders in the country’s history who have been able to seduce the Australian people for long, or at all. Australians have managed to combine a conditional egalitarianism with a strong sense of their independence and this has been achieved by a strong belief in universalism in law and an associated sense of fair play and support for the underdog. These assertions need to be qualified somewhat, but for now the point can be made that Australians are wary of those in positions of power. This is the most positive aspect of the Australian Tall-Poppy Syndrome, since it has prevented the emergence of leaders, or at least ensured that their status is temporary.
The Tall-Poppy phenomenon is alive and well in Australia in the twenty-first century. For her book Local Heroes, Ann-Maree Moodie interviewed thirty-seven influential men and women – entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, artists, architects, writers, business executives, journalists and athletes. All but three agreed that the Tall-Poppy Syndrome exists in Australia.
No one has captured the Australian character better than Les Murray.9 Combining a reference to the vast open spaces and the local laconic style, Murray sees sprawl as the quality of the farmer who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it tried to retrieve the car to repair its image. Sprawl cannot be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn with mink and a nose ring. That’s Society or Style. Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen. Sprawl is an image of Australia and would that it were more so. Reprimanded and dismissed, it listens with a grin and a boot up on the rail of possibility. It may have to leave the earth. But it scratches the other cheek and thinks it unlikely.
