What Was It All For?: The Reshaping of Australia

What Was It All For PAGES 30/8/05 4:48 PM Page i This is a remarkable book. By weaving the stories and reflections o...

Author: Don Aitkin

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What Was It All For PAGES

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This is a remarkable book. By weaving the stories and reflections of his high school classmates into his account of the social, cultural and economic development of Australia over the past 50 years, Don Aitkin brings fresh insight to the question, ‘What does it mean to be Australian?’ In a unique style that is both bold and scholarly, analytical and compassionate, he also invites us to face some searching questions about Australia’s future. Hugh Mackay Social researcher This is a creative, elegantly written and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be Australian. It reminds me that those of us who completed school in rural NSW in the 50s had it all. We believed we could and should change our world and make it a better place. Mutual obligation in the 50s was implicitly about education and community building and the Class of 53 were exemplars. To understand contemporary Australia this will be a mandatory read and one to be enjoyed. Wendy McCarthy, AO Chancellor, University of Canberra This book touches the heart and the head. It is both a celebration of the Australian people and a warning about Australia’s future. Don Aitkin has a passion for his country and a keen insight into its anxieties and its psychology. He has produced a special story about our last half century, persuasive because it is authentic and drawn with a fine balance that captures our successes and our disappointments. Paul Kelly Editor-at-large, The Australian


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DON AITKIN has published widely on Australian politics, culture and society. He is the author of seven books and a wide range of newspaper and journal articles.


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What was it all for? The reshaping of Australia

WHAT WAS IT ALL FOR? THE RESHAPING OF AUSTRALIA

DON AITKIN


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First published in Australia in 2005 Copyright © Don Aitkin 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater,to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Aitkin, Don, 1937– . What was it all for?: the reshaping of Australia. 1st ed. Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 667 4. 1. National characteristics, Australian. 2. Australia—Economic conditions—1945– . 3. Australia—Social conditions—1945– . 4. Australia—Politics and government—1945– . 5. Australia— Social life and customs—1945– . I. Title. 994.06 Typeset in 11/13 pt FairfieldLH Light by Midland Typesetters Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


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1 CHAPTER CONTENTS TITLE

Preface Introduction

vii 1

1 The halfway mark: 1951

10

2 The big picture

36

3 The engines of change

67

4 The world of work

100

5 Love, God and death

125

6 Creative diversity

153

7 From ‘we’ to ‘me’

188

8 Who are we, and what are we becoming?

213

9 Whatever happened to the dream?

235

Appendix: The Class of ’53

261

A note on sources

265

Index

271


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1 CHAPTER PREFACE TITLE

In February 2003 I attended a reunion of my 1953 Fifth Year class at Armidale High School. I had mixed feelings about going, since I had not really enjoyed my time at Armidale High. I had arrived there as a 12-year-old at the beginning of Second Year, a time when friendships and peer group relationships were already well established. Because my schoolteacher father had moved in his profession, I had left another school and a set of friends I had grown up with from Kindergarten, and felt their loss at once. Like it or not, Armidale became my home for the next eleven years, during which I went to the university there, married, started a family and undertook a second degree. In 1961 I left for Canberra and the Australian National University, and thereafter I visited Armidale only occasionally. When I walked out of the school building in December 1953, at the end of my last examination, I vowed that I would never return. That time in my life was over, and I longed for a fresh start. The passage of time made me realise, however, that I had been well taught and well prepared at Armidale High, and that some vii


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What was it all for?

of the credit for whatever success had come to me was due to my teachers and my classmates. That sentiment made me feel I owed them and the school some acknowledgment. In addition, I had encountered few of my former schoolmates in the 50 years that had passed since we finished our exams, and I was curious about what had happened to them. I had enjoyed a satisfying working life within a large and happy family context, and possessed good health. What about the rest of my classmates? Curiosity grew stronger, and I set off with my wife, not herself an Armidale girl, or indeed someone who knew much about the town at all. It was a fascinating weekend. The core consisted of some 22 of the original class of 40, plus four others who had a straightforward connection to the group because they had been part of the cohort at some time during their own education at Armidale High. Add to them husbands and wives. We gathered in the town, wondered initially about the identity of one or two (and finally had to ask), revisited the school, ate and drank, and swapped experiences. In the rapid recounting of half-centuries of individual lives I heard, again and again, the story of my country over the same period. This book was born from the sudden recognition that these experiences were part of the change which had occurred in our society—a change that, as a historian and political scientist, I felt both interested and able to write about. The initial concept was a longish magazine article; before long, however, it had become a book. After the weekend I wrote to all those at the reunion and to several more who could not attend asking them to write to me about what they thought had been the transforming moments of their lives. More than a dozen responded. But this was not enough, for I realised that I had many questions I wanted answered. Where did their families come from? When did they get married? When had they first travelled overseas? What had been their patterns of further education and employment? How many children had they had? What had been their religious progression, if any? And so on. The outcome was a series of interview journeys, by the end of which I had interviewed 36 of the cohort in person, and interviewed two more by phone. Material from the interviews and from correspondence is viii


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used throughout the book to illuminate the story of our country. In this book I refer to my classmates collectively as ‘the Class of ’53’, an American usage that we would not have understood in the 1950s but which seems familiar enough now. I refer to them also in the third person, not to distance myself from them (because some of my own story is here too), but to avoid any suggestion that we were somehow typical of the Australia of the 1950s. We were not, and it is important to understand why. Most children in our day left school at the age of 15. Only a few went on to senior school, let alone sought matriculation to university. We belonged to that small group not because we were the most intelligent children in the school (we were not, and that is an important part of the argument that is to follow), but because our parents valued education and in very many cases made considerable sacrifices to ensure that we continued with it. In contemporary Australia, completing secondary education is almost taken for granted. It was not so in 1950, and for that reason alone we were not at all typical. To cover 50 years of a country’s history in a short book is to take up a broad brush. I am conscious that whole books could be written not simply around each chapter, but around sections of some of the chapters. No doubt some of them will be written. In writing this one, I have in part been pushed by a feeling that the tone of ‘doom and gloom’ in early twenty-first century Australia is misplaced. Too few people appreciate the extraordinary developments in the texture and maturity of Australian society that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Yes, there are many areas in which Australian society could improve. The need to improve society, to build the nation, never ends—in part because people continue to disagree about what improvement is, and in part because each improvement seems to lead to a new problem. This book has many examples of both causes. But to compare the present with the Australia of 1950, I argue, should give us a great sense of confidence in our capacity to shape our future, because we have been able to do that well for half a century. I would like to thank all those who took part in this project, especially the staff of the Castles Library at the Australian Bureau ix


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of Statistics, the staff of the National Library of Australia, the staff of the Libraries of the University of Canberra and of the Australian National University, and the staff of the Library of the Australian Institute of Criminology. Many people provided help in tracking down information that would be useful to me, or applied their expertise in reading sections I had written, or provided hospitality and discussion. In particular I would like to thank Ingrid and John Moses, Peter Veenker, Jim Cotter, Noela Skillman, Tony Blunn, Rex and Robyn Chidley, and Neil Conn. Every surviving member of the class helped with the interviews, with permission to use their stories, and often with hospitality, correspondence and memorabilia. The book could not have been written without their assistance. Alex and Susan Aitkin helped with turning me into a twenty-first century word-processor practitioner. Bev Aitkin was there at the beginning, heard it all, read it all several times, contributed her wisdom and commonsense, and greatly improved the outcome. To her, as ever, my grateful thanks. At Allen & Unwin Patrick Gallagher was enthusiastic from the beginning, and Jeanmarie Morosin, no less so, kept me at the task of improvement. For their support I am also most grateful. It had been a shock for those of us attending the reunion to learn that five of our classmates had died. Somehow that sense of invulnerability, which is so strong when one is 18 or so, was still present in us. Isobel Corin, who did make it to the reunion, and wrote to me afterwards, succumbed to cancer before her interview could be undertaken. This book is dedicated to her, and to our other classmates from 1953 who died before this book would appear, and whose stories are thus unavoidably and sadly missing: Isobel Corin Ailsa Hadley Peter Jackes John McKillop Ian Smith Dorothy Wotten x

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Front row: K. McIntyre, J. Hamel, N. Conn, J. Gilmour, R. Rich, J. Mills, P. Comino. Second row: I. Pople, D. Carroll, J. Perrott, W. Holmes, D. McGuffog, M. Mitchell, S. Stanley. Third row: P. Munro. M. Hunter, D. Wotton, R. McRae, A. Hadley, J. Burtenshaw. Fourth row: J. Vickery, B. Chappell, I. Smith, R. Faulkner, J. Smith, R. Hawke, R. White, P. Jackes, K. Hoy. Fifth row: I. Hall, R. Chidley, D. Davidson, J. McKillop, H. Higgins, J. Knoff, C. Campbell, R. Dollin, J. Sinclair. Absent: D. Aitkin.

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INTRODUCTION

You can tell something about a country by the way it celebrates its people. In 1951 the New Year’s Imperial Honours list for Australia had the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, at the top of the list, created a Companion of Honour. The King had honoured 113 Australians, 40 of them from the armed forces. Only a handful were women. Fifty years later, the Governor-General announced 686 New Year’s Day awards, and there would be a comparable number added in the Queen’s Birthday awards announced in June. About 30 per cent of those honoured were women, and the recipients came from across Australian society. They included Aboriginal people, immigrants of all kinds, disabled people, community workers, sportspeople, artists, musicians and writers. It is still true that men dominate the honours, and that your path to honour is easier if you are a doctor. No doubt there will always be complaints. But the Australia of the early twenty-first century is a much more diverse place than the Australia of just after the Second World War, and the distribution of social honour 1


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is much more diverse—as it should be. How these changes came to occur is the central interest of this book, which is the story of a kind of journey, from the mid-point of the twentieth century to the early years of the twenty-first. These end-points vary in precision, mostly because the available data did not always come from 2001 or 1951. The national story is made more personal by dipping into the life-histories of the members of the Fifth Year of Armidale High School in 1953, whose working lives filled that half-century. Unless the context indicates otherwise they are not to be held responsible for the views and opinions expressed, which are those of the author, however widely they may be shared. It should be said again that the members of the Class of ’53 are in no sense a random sample of Australians of the early 1950s or even of the 16- and 17-year-olds of that time. The members of the class were all born in 1935, 1936 or 1937. All but two of them were country kids. They were almost all, as we will see, of English and/or Scottish descent. They were all still at secondary school in 1953 when most of their age group were already in the paid workforce. And they were all, to varying degrees, academically proficient. Yet their journeys after school are of more than individual interest. Their working lives coincided with the second part of the twentieth century, and reveal something of the change that occurred to Australia in the collective journey that the nation undertook. That larger journey is from a socially constricted former British colony, conformist, suspicious and conservative, to a much more liberated nation, in which creativity and curiosity have had much greater opportunity to flourish. Not everything in the Australian garden of the early twenty-first century is rosy, however. No social change is universally positive, let alone universally enjoyed, and the gains of the second half of the twentieth century have been accompanied by some worrying costs. A sense of the balance between costs and benefits over time will be appreciated readily enough by those who have experienced both ends of the period, so what happened to the members of the Class of ’53 has an important validity for this kind of social history. Their stories, let it be said again, are very much a part of the story of the nation. 2


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Introduction

Australia—a young society in world terms—has always had an understandable commitment to the concept of progress. One of the significant politicians of the twentieth century, John McEwen, kept referring to Australia as a ‘developing country’ and stressing the importance of ‘growth’ because, at least in part, he saw Australia as having a destiny that had yet to be realised. That is an old theme in the story of European Australia, in which the immigrant origins and hardships of its non-Aboriginal population gain added purpose if the outcome of their struggles is a ‘good’ nation. Certainly, one explicit theme in Australian history has been the attempt of settlers to create, under the stars of the Southern Cross, a ‘good’ society, free of the injustices and inequalities of the Old World—or, in more recent times, of wherever they had emigrated from. This theme was most powerfully enunciated in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the early 1850s to the late 1880s, the Australian colonies experienced rapid growth fuelled by gold, closer settlement, public expenditure on infrastructure in railways, ports and buildings, and a steady rise to an accepted role as an important world trading region. Wool, wheat, meat and dairy products now found markets all over the world, especially in Great Britain and Europe. By 1888 the three million people who lived in the Australian colonies were, on average, the world’s richest people. Half of them lived in cities, and the biggest of these cities—Melbourne and Sydney—were large and prosperous by world standards. The confidence engendered by 40 years of prosperity gave impetus to the federation movement and, quite understandably, to talk about what sort of country a federated ‘Australia’ might be. The general tone of that talk was strongly material and optimistic. The sheer speed of economic growth after the gold rushes meant that any future wealth would obviously be shared by all. Workers would be well paid and well respected, they would work only eight hours a day, and they would own their own homes. A network of railways would connect the states and the towns and cities within them. All children would go to school, and there 3


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would be schools in every town and suburb. The Australian colonies had no established church, no aristocracy and no classes, at least as they were understood in industrial Europe. Australia was already a better land than those the immigrants had left, and it would become better still. Of course, the colonies did federate, and the Commonwealth of Australia came into existence in 1901. But by then the heady confidence of 1888 had gone. Industrial trouble and a great depression descended on the colonies just after the centenary year, and there was no return to rapid economic growth. Indeed, each attempt to return to steady economic expansion was turned aside by another major external event: the Great War in 1914, the Great Depression in 1929 and the Second World War in 1939. On the ladder of the world’s richest nations, the Australians—who had been first—were to be passed in turn by the Americans, the Canadians, the New Zealanders and the Swiss, to be only number five by the middle of the twentieth century. To understand the journey of Australia in the second half of that century it is important to remember that there had been a dream—an Australian project, if you like—which had been put on hold for 60 years. The dream was part of the stock of ideas and stories that Australians possessed in 1950, when rationing and scarcity were coming to an end. It was part of the rhetoric of politicians, who interpreted it differently across the party divide. It was summoned up for speeches on important occasions; it was something that schoolboys and girls knew. Australia was important. It was different. Here we had sunshine and equality and freedom and a good way of life. We knew how to govern ourselves. And we had a future—not just the boys and girls who were leaving Armidale High School, but Australia itself. And we would be part of it. What we could not know was how quickly that future would arrive, and how substantially and how rapidly our country would be transformed. There are so many contrasts. We of the Class of ’53 were part of a population of English/Scottish/Irish descent, almost all of whom had been born in Australia. Yet we would become elder citizens of an ethnically diverse society, around half of whose 4


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Introduction

members would either be born elsewhere or be the children of at least one parent born elsewhere. We entered an adult society in which a Protestant versus Catholic division permeated all social life; we would become a society where that division was only a memory, and where most people would not attend church at all. We became adults at a time when men and women married and stayed married; we would become part of a society where marriages would not last, divorce would be common, many children would grow up in one-parent or blended families, and gay and lesbian couples would live openly together. In mid-century Aboriginal people were social outcasts in our society; by the end of the century Aboriginal people would have won much greater acceptance, some important legal battles and a growing place in art, sport, film, theatre and indeed in urban society generally. We entered a society in which what we could read in books or see in cinemas was highly controlled and censored; we would live to see censorship erode to the point where many would be concerned about the consequences—while remaining sure that they themselves needed no censorship. We entered a workforce where well-defined careers culminated on retirement with a gold watch and much accumulated long-service leave. We would retire in an economy where tenure would be gone, a great deal of work would be carried out on a part-time basis, and the shelf-life of technical knowledge would be quite short. When we entered the workforce most women either lost their jobs on marriage or moved to a ‘temporary’ status; most married women were unpaid housewives or ‘homemakers’, and described their occupation in the census as ‘home duties’. By the time of our retirement, most adult women would be in the paid workforce, and the place of women in Australian life would have changed dramatically. When we left school Australia had already commenced a ‘baby boom’, the consequences of which quickly produced acute pressure on kindergartens and primary schools. By the time we retired the acute pressure would be felt in nursing homes and the provision of homes for the aged. During our working lives our society became healthier in some respects and unhealthier in 5


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others, but our own life expectancy rose a good deal while that of our grandchildren was astonishingly higher. We were among the small proportion of our age group who had completed high school, and those of us who went on to university were an even smaller group. By the time we retired, around eight in ten children would have completed Year 12 and about half of the 19-year-olds were or would be at university. And of course we were very lucky, not in Donald Horne’s much misquoted sense of living in a country whose good luck offset its poor management, but in being able to live our lives more or less free of war and depression, unlike our parents. The boys of our generation, though they did serve in the Citizen Military Forces (CMF), were too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam. The girls entered the workforce at a time when the ancient barriers to women’s careers were about to be dismantled, one by one, and they entered marriage at the time the contraceptive pill became widely available. Jobs and opportunities and foreign travel opened for them in a fashion simply unknown in the past. No less astonishingly, Australia has become a creative society of great moment. It had always been good at sporting activities. Now its orchestras are of world class, its leading painters and writers are known as well outside their country as in it, its film actors frequently win Academy Awards, its television shows are stock fare in other countries, and the diversity and quality of its cultural activities are at least on a par with those of any other country, always allowing for scale. More Australians attend theatres and art galleries in a week than attend sporting matches, even if the television audience for sport is huge. None of that had been true, or even imaginable, in the early 1950s. Just as remarkable was the improvement in the quality of Australian food and wine, to the point where an overseas savant might laud Australia as the source of excitement in world gastronomy. Australian wine has become a world choice; the product comes from nearly 2000 wineries, and the value of wine exports approaches $2 billion. These changes have accompanied a major change in the propensity of Australians to dine out, to drink wine 6


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Introduction

rather than beer, and to regard such skills as cooking and waiting on table as respectable, even valuable. Increased personal wealth and the availability of cheap air travel from the 1960s allowed Australians to travel, to see other ways of doing things and to join the world. By the end of the century Australia’s major cities ranked among the best places to live on the globe and the country itself had become a world tourist destination. So ‘Australia’ has changed dramatically. Its general culture has become tolerant, curious and ‘progressive’, meaning that ideas with some plausibility are given a hearing and might be tried out, not simply dismissed as ‘not what we do here’. In 1951 Australians knew who they were not: they were not Brits and they were not Yanks. Fifty years later they may not be much more sure about who they are, but self-definition through negation is no longer much practised. Successes in sport and participation in the world have given us some self-confidence. We did not, at the end of the century, vote to establish a republic—in part because the question we were given was disingenuously framed. But it was partly, too, because in practical terms Australia has been a ‘republic’ for a couple of generations, and a symbolic change of status is not seen by most people as being of great importance. Finally, the culture has changed in other more intangible ways. Once collectivist and conformist, a society in which departures from familiar ways were frowned on, Australia has become diverse and individualist. It is perhaps a more selfish society, too—more materialist, less compassionate and caring about those less fortunate. The rich are much richer and the poor only a little richer: the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened. Yet the much wider participation in education has had many effects, one of them being a level of debate about issues and about the future for our country that could have had no counterpart 50 years earlier. None of this has happened in Antipodean isolation. Britain, too, was very different in 2001, as were Canada and New Zealand— indeed, all the developed countries have undergone somewhat similar metamorphoses in the second half of the twentieth century. In 2004 a federated Europe bears few scars of the Second World 7


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War, English has become a widely used language—even in France—and the productive capacity of the European economy rivals that of the United States. Yet the creative explosion in Australia and its development of a relatively peaceful multiculturalism have been matched only in Canada. Both countries offer a model to the world of what twenty-first century global society may be like, if only we are permitted to create it. Introducing Canada as a country for comparison at once points to some subtleties in the kind of social analysis practised in this book. All the evaluations we make are either explicitly or implicitly comparative, for we can only judge one thing by comparing it with others. Three broad kinds of comparison, which can be combined, encompass them all: comparisons of the same thing over time; comparisons of a thing at the same time but in different places; and comparison of a thing with its ideal, or with a technical standard of some kind. To say that a given decision is unjust, or that a given country is democratic, involves some kind of comparison with other actions or countries now, or in the past, or in an ideal form. This book is very much concerned with comparisons over time, but the other two kinds push their way forward occasionally. Being clear about the reasons for one’s judgments is important at any time, and particularly important in a book like this one. A comparison with Canada has been introduced because a rather similar book could be written about Australia’s larger sister dominion. The two countries have had similar experiences and a similar transformation in the second half of the twentieth century, and for much the same reasons. First, neither Australia nor Canada was weighed down by existing traditions of great longevity and power; they were both new nations, finding themselves in the world. Second, both countries increased their populations through immigration as well as through natural increase, and the immigrants were made welcome. The population of both Australia and Canada grew to a little less than two and a half times their size in the second half of the century; other developed countries grew much less dramatically. Third, an egalitarian bent in both countries ensured that opportunity would be there for all, not only for those 8


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Introduction

whose parents had already achieved social and economic security. Finally, unlike the United Sates, neither was preoccupied with the trials of being a superpower. Each was thus able to devote much of its energy and its resources to the business of building a better society. Both have been at least decently successful in doing so. Australia, the concern of this book, has become in world terms a most interesting country. In what follows, we examine how that occurred and what happened to make it so. C.P. Snow, the English novelist, writing of the Industrial Revolution and its effects, said: ‘There had never been such a change so quickly as between the England of 1770 and the England of 1850 . . .’ There is no doubting that a fundamental change did occur in Britain over that 80-year period. The 50-year period from 1951 to 2001 in Australia bears comparison with Snow’s period in England, both for the quality of the change and for its speed. Readers can decide for themselves.

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1 THE1 HALFWAY CHAPTERMARK: TITLE 1951

Life was so simple. School was fun and pretty stress-free; we liked our classmates. Generally, we could have the job we wanted. Our family was in the main intact, with the extended family there for support and good times. The almighty dollar was not, for the most part, the most important thing in life. (Jill Martin)

It is just as easy to romanticise the time of one’s youth as it is to denigrate it, and the 1950s have been served both ways. Some now well-known expatriates like Barry Humphries and Jill Ker Conway left Australia during that time because, among other reasons, they found its society conservative, stifling and narrow-minded. John Howard, Prime Minister since 1996, remembers the 1950s as a time of stability, family values and decency. They may all have been right. We need to summon up first what it was like to be alive in Australia in the middle of the century in general terms, and in particular what it was like to live in Armidale, New South Wales and attend its high school. We look backwards briefly as well, to see where Australia had come from in the previous half-century. Australian life was very different in material terms, because the abundance we take for granted today is actually quite a recent phenomenon. 10


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The halfway mark: 1951

The way it was in the land of Oz Some eight million people inhabited the continent of Australia in 1950, compared with a little fewer than four million in 1901. In 1950 nearly six in ten of them lived in metropolitan areas, and another one in four lived in other urban areas. Australia’s largest city was Sydney, home to nearly 2.5 million people; the second city, Melbourne, which had been the larger of the two in the late nineteenth century, held a little over two million. Only one Australian in six (a proportion that had been declining since the 1880s, and would continue to decline) lived in the ‘rural’ areas, though they were largely responsible for the 70 per cent of Australia’s substantial export income that came from farms, fisheries and forests. The rationing of food and fuel that had persisted after the end of the Second World War (in order to assist Great Britain and reduce the need for American dollars) finally came to an end in 1950, but there were shortages of everything, especially building materials, motor vehicles and manufactures. Much of the infrastructure, especially the railway and road systems and manufacturing establishments, was badly run down. Government controls of all kinds regulated finance, employment, hours of work, wages, exports, imports, transport and travel, what could be read in books and magazines or seen in cinemas, and the distribution of electricity and water. Australia was still one of the world’s richest countries in terms of gross domestic product per head, but it was seen from afar as characterised by the possession of a very large public sector. Australia could seem to foreigners the most socialist country outside the Soviet Union because of that public sector—at least to those with a right-wing perspective. Such a description would not have been understood either by the Liberal–Country Party Coalition which had been in office in Canberra since the very end of 1949 or by the Labor Party, now in opposition, which had been the government from 1941 to 1949. From both sides of politics, and in the country as a whole, the perception of Australia was of a country whose basic structure was pretty right and not surpassed elsewhere. 11


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What Paul Kelly has described as ‘the Australian Settlement’ was largely accepted not just across party lines, but throughout the land. Its elements were ‘White Australia, Industry Protection, Wage Arbitration, State Paternalism and Imperial Benevolence’, and they are now largely gone. Bi-partisan agreement on the ruling values of the Australian political economy had been reached in the first decade of the twentieth century, and had remained in force thereafter. Of course, each of the elements of the settlement was undergoing challenge and change. Imperial benevolence, the notion that Australia could get on with its own life under the benign protection of the British Navy, had lost most of its relevance after the sinking of that Navy’s Prince of Wales and Repulse at the start of the Pacific War, the loss of Singapore, and John Curtin’s foreshadowing of a more important alliance with the United States. In practical terms the shift of the role of protector to the United States did not matter to most Australians: they could get on with their own lives even more securely under the benign protection of the US Pacific Fleet. In return, their country was demonstrating its value as a reliable ally with the involvement of all the Australian armed services in the Korean War, an involvement generally supported. The meaning of ‘White Australia’, too, was coming under challenge. From the beginnings of European settlement the task of occupying a vast terrain made the encouragement of immigration an imperative. The first assisted immigration scheme was not something launched by Arthur Calwell, Labor’s properly celebrated postwar Minister for Immigration, but by a colonial government more than a century earlier in 1828. Through concepts of a ‘White Australia’ ran the added notion of a ‘British’ Australia, all of whose citizens would be able to trace their ancestry to someone and somewhere in Britain or Ireland. Indeed, the most celebrated use of the Commonwealth’s control over immigration involved the use of a language test in Gaelic in an attempt to exclude an English-speaking Czech journalist and stirrer, Egon Kisch, in 1934. With a certain amount of reluctance Australia had admitted European Jewish refugees before the Second World War—and 12


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then promptly interned many of them as enemy aliens when the war broke out. After the war, in consequence of the large numbers of ‘displaced persons’ in camps around Europe, Australia began to accept Polish, ‘Baltic’, Russian and German refugees, some years later Italians and Maltese, then Europeans generally. All could be regarded as ‘white’, even if not as ‘British’. Then Lebanese Christians were welcomed, and after them Turks who, if not as white as the Brits and not Christians at all, were certainly good fighters at Gallipoli, which gave them enhanced acceptability. Immigration had continued in the first half of the twentieth century, though not by any means at the rate it had in the nineteenth century. The natural increase of the Australian population from 1901 to 1939 was several times greater than the increase due to immigration. During the Second World War, of course, immigration practically ceased. The war over, immigration once again became a significant component of the increase in the Australian population. Notwithstanding the rapid increase in the size of Australian families as a baby boom took place, from 1947 to 1952 migrants provided almost as many new settlers as did natural increase, and about half the rate of natural increase from 1953 to 1961. While the largest single source of immigrants remained Britain, the proportion of the Australian population with British or Irish origins began to diminish. What to do about Australia’s indigenous population was another and much less commonly talked about aspect of ‘White Australia’. Early twentieth century Australians would have said (had anyone asked them) that the Aborigines were remnants of a dying race that would disappear or be assimilated in due course. Indifference and neglect characterised public policy in the area. But the Second World War produced a major change. Aboriginal men served in the armed forces and were decorated for bravery; afterwards they were entitled to the same kinds of assistance that went to other returned servicemen. Before long, Aboriginal people were caught up in the social changes that came in the 1950s and 1960s. We will return to this subject later, but note here that in 1965 there was 95 per cent support in a referendum on 13


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whether Aboriginal people should be counted in the censuses of the Australian population. The other elements of the Australian Settlement—protection, arbitration and paternalism—remained dominant in 1950. Although the Liberal and Country Parties had criticised the controls exercised by the Labor government in the 1940s, they were slow to remove them when in office. Liberal and Country Party speakers had pictured Australia as being run by a sinister set of senior public servants who were hampering a return to freedom. The great majority of those public servants were retained by the new government, and were to prosper in its service—several of them in time receiving knighthoods. Many returned soldiers had seen the Coalition parties as the parties of a return to normality, a peacetime economy and an opportunity to live normal lives; they were not to notice much difference in these domains with a change in government. From the vantage point of 2005, we know that R.G. Menzies was to remain as Prime Minister until 1966 and his Coalition would remain in office until the end of 1972. That was not at all obvious in 1950. The Coalition parties did not win comfortably in the election of 1951, and were well behind the Labor Party in the popular vote at the election of 1954, though they retained office. It was only the decisive split in the Labor Party in 1955, leading to the formation of an angry, Coalition-supporting Democratic Labor Party, that gave the Coalition a smooth ride thereafter. Even then, it was very lucky to win in 1961, after which election it had a majority on the floor of the House of Representatives of just two. Three of the four major figures in Australian politics at the beginning of the 1950s had been born in 1894, and were thus 57-years old. Few of today’s Australians will be able to remember them, though they have become famous ‘names’. Robert Gordon Menzies stares out from the Commonwealth Parliamentary Handbook of the day in half-profile, a faint smile on his lips. His hair is silver and his eyebrows are black. Standard stock in every newspaper’s photo library and a favourite of the Liberal Party itself, this is a photograph that almost everybody in Australia in the 1950s 14


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will have seen many times. Menzies had been Prime Minister before the war and in the war’s early phases, after which he was seen—especially in Labor’s heyday—as a failed figure from the past. He did, nonetheless, reconstruct both himself and the antiLabor parties in the second half of the 1940s, winning power and the first office at elections in December 1949. His Coalition partner, also briefly a wartime Prime Minister and also 57, was Arthur Fadden, the Leader of the Country Party, a friendly and astute man whose skills complemented those of the Prime Minister. His hair, too, was black and neither he nor his Coalition partner, though well fleshed, was yet as portly as each would be before the decade’s end. Fadden’s party had become used to office, though it had begun as a party of protest against governments of all persuasions. It particularly wanted office to safeguard rural industries and promote rural benefits such as subsidised postage, telephone and road systems—again, a generally accepted element of the existing arrangement of things. Facing them across the floor of Parliament House in Canberra were the Leader of the Opposition, Joseph Benedict Chifley, 66, and his deputy, Herbert Vere Evatt, 57. Ben Chifley was ill with heart disease, and would die in June 1951. A well-liked Prime Minister (1945–50), at least in the early years of his Prime Ministership, he was not a conspicuous success in his oppositional role, perhaps because he was more interested in the success of his country than in the destruction of his opponents. His photo shows him, pipe in hand, in the middle of laughing at something said by someone (not the photographer). His deputy, Bert Evatt, would be elected leader after Chifley’s death. He was perhaps Australia’s best-known politician internationally, having played a significant role in the design of the United Nations and serving as President of the General Assembly in 1948. At home he was to some an almost romantic figure, having been (at 36) a young appointee to the High Court from which he resigned to enter federal Parliament. (He had also served in the New South Wales Parliament in the 1920s, when even younger.) He was admired and disliked in about equal 15


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proportions. Evatt’s style was energetic, turbulent and combative, and in these respects he provided a marked contrast to the Prime Minister, also the possessor of a supremely successful legal mind, and to Chifley himself, who was quiet, considered and thoughtful. Evatt, well fleshed like his rivals, looks calmly out of his photograph, his eyes elsewhere. Australian politics at the federal level centred in the early 1950s on ‘communism’, external and internal—a theme which would persist in one form or another until the late 1980s. The possibility of a Third World War of nuclear dimensions was a worrying background to everything. Most of the boys of the Class of ’53 would undertake National Service in 1955, the rifles behind their doors during their later service with the Citizen Military Force (CMF) a constant reminder that the peace of 1945 had quickly become problematic. The war in Korea, in which all three Australian armed forces were involved, would come to an end in 1952. The principal adversary was not North Korea but ‘Red’ China, with the Soviet Union presumably giving aid and support. Anxieties about the direction of communism abroad joined itself to anxieties about how exactly far ‘left’ the ALP and the unions were. Industrial conflict, shortages, inflation caused by unsatisfied consumer demand and a sharp rise in wool prices made up the domestic themes. At the level of state politics, housing, railways and roads, schools and dams, and electricity shortages added to the preoccupations. Labor was in power in New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania, the Liberal and/or Country Parties in the other three states. Newspapers and radio provided Australians with news, information and entertainment. Television was eagerly awaited, but was still a few years away. The big cities had morning and afternoon papers, the morning paper usually in broadsheet form, the afternoon one a tabloid. In the conventional picture of the newspaper-reading public, middle-class people had a morning paper delivered to their homes while workers bought their afternoon papers to read on the train or tram on the way home from work. Radio was broadcast in the AM band, which has a short 16


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range and is of low quality for music; the weekly ‘hit parade’ offered a quickly changing choice of popular music. Records spun at 78 revolutions per minute and required frequent changes of steel needles. The local lending library, usually run by local government, provided books for those whose tastes went to reading; Australian publication was of small scale, and books were expensive. The cinema (‘the pictures’, ‘the flicks’), dances and picnics were the principal pleasures. And of course, there were drinking and sport. Beer was the almost universal male drink, sold in pubs that closed early so that the men might be home for dinner. The short time between knockoff and dinner caused rapid drinking, known as the ‘6 o’clock swill’. Whisky was for the nobs, table wine the pleasure of a small proportion. More people drank fortified wine, sherry and port, though ‘fourpenny dark’—probably a muscat—was the choice of indigent alcoholics. The evening meal, typically served without wine or indeed any alcoholic beverage, was classically ‘meat and three veg’. Indeed, the Class of ’53 commonly recall a weekly cycle, of which an example might be roast dinner on Sunday (in the middle of the day), something made from the roast for Monday’s evening meal, chops on Tuesday, sausages on Wednesday, a braise on Thursday, fish on Friday, a salad and cold meat on Saturday. Red meat (beef or lamb) was plentiful and cheap, as was basic food generally. Poultry was for special occasions, while bacon was the way most people ate pork. Australians knew that if they were good at anything, it was sport. In 1950 Australia had beaten America to win the Davis Cup in tennis and, in the long summer that led into 1951, Australia comfortably beat England in cricket by four Tests to one—even without the presence and inspiration of Sir Donald Bradman, who had retired after the 1948 series. Cricket and tennis provided the two great international sporting contests, which for the moment were played against the two great rivals. Australia had most recently beaten England in Rugby League and New Zealand in Rugby Union, and performed comprehensively well in the 1950 British Empire Games in Auckland. Australian Rules Football 17


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was a private obsession and an object of veneration and great tribal loyalty in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. In the other great obsession, Australia stopped for a quarter of an hour in November 1950 to hear Comic Court win the Melbourne Cup in three minutes and 19.5 seconds, the fastest time since the race’s beginning in 1861. Railways, tramways and buses took the city populations to work, though many rode bicycles and many others walked. Men going to work almost universally wore hats, and underneath the hat the hair was cut ‘short back and sides’. The hems of women’s dresses finished at mid-calf, and women too wore hats, some of them gloves as well. Most families did not possess a motor car, and for those who did, holidays were often spent at the seaside under canvas. A good deal of family visiting, swapping houses and helping out provided a structure to social life. Houses were rather shabby, because paint was not easily available, and very little improvement had been done since the 1920s. Life for children centred on family and the school. After school kids returned home to Mum and afternoon tea, then (if chores had been done) disappeared into neighbouring backyards or their own to play with friends. At around dusk mothers shooed other kids home and gathered their own family for dinner (‘tea’ in most households). Saturday arvo was reserved for the matinee at the local cinema, where Hopalong Cassidy and other cowboys reigned, and admission was a shilling. For that sum you would get a ‘short’ and one or two cartoons as well as a serial. At school children learned that money was measured in pounds, shillings and pence, and other quantities in the imperial system; the decimal system, hardly talked of save as something foreign, would be introduced in 1966. Sunday meant Sunday school or church, or both; apart from a café or two everything else was shut. Perhaps half of all Australian families had at least one family member who attended a weekly church service; the proportions were much higher among Roman Catholics than among Protestants. Almost everybody claimed to have a religion, and church leaders had a prominent role and voice in society. 18


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One country town Australia has been characterised from the mid-nineteenth century by what geographers call ‘metropolitan primacy’: each colony and later each state (with the possible exception of Tasmania) possessed only one large city—the capital—in which political, economic and social power resided. Major shopping took place there, the top medical specialists lived and worked there, all railways lines radiated from there, all public services save the municipal were organised from there, and professionals of various kinds in public employment were posted from there to country towns. So the regional towns and their hinterlands depended, especially, on bank managers and teachers who came from elsewhere and who might or might not stay. Accordingly, such transients were not fully accepted into the community. The country town resented its dependence on the big city all the more because it saw its own region, and others like it, as the true source of Australian prosperity. The Country Party drew on these emotions, as much as or even more than on its policies, for its electoral survival. Armidale was in some respects in the heartland of that party, at least in New South Wales. Established in the 1840s, its 13 000 people made it in 1951 the fourteenth largest town in New South Wales. Unlike all of the others it possessed an infant university, a teachers’ college, two cathedrals and six secondary schools. The guard announcing arrivals and departures on the Northern Tablelands Express (which left Armidale at 8.55 a.m. and arrived in Sydney, 580 kilometres away, ten hours later) referred to Armidale unself-consciously as ‘the Athens of the North’. The term had some status in municipal rhetoric as well, though it rather raised the eyebrows of those in academia. Economically, however, Armidale was much more the commercial centre of a well-established pastoral region, the source of much fine wool and of merino sheep for fine-wool studs. Armidale did very well out of the wool boom of the 1880s, and its public buildings and houses—especially the mansions of the graziers outside it—testified to that prosperous period, as they still do. Like 19


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so much of pastoral Australia, however, there had been little growth since then. In 1951 Armidale’s streets were a mixture of tar and gravel, the town’s water supply was precarious and depended in part on oak-lined pipes from the nineteenth century, and (partly for that reason) the city lacked street trees. The same family owned both the long-established newspaper (The Armidale Express) and the radio station (2AD). Politically, Armidale was divided between Labor and the Country Party, with the strongly Country Party rural areas usually carrying the day. In 1953, however, the seat was to be won briefly for the ALP by a local pharmacist, J.E. Cahill. At the federal level, Armidale was a subdivision of the electorate of New England, held since 1949 for the Country Party by the Hon. D.H. Drummond, the former state MLA for Armidale (1919–49). Newcomers discovered Armidale to be a somewhat stratified and starchy town, hardly warranting the title of ‘city’ it acquired in 1885. Those connected with the teachers’ college or the university found it difficult to gain acceptance, as did teachers and bank staff. Established grazing families, some of whom sent their children away to school in Sydney, led the social hierarchy. Then came the city’s bourgeoisie, including those connected with the two dioceses. Perhaps because of the town’s educational and clerical activities, such things as manners, dress and deportment were taken seriously. The wife of a staff member newly appointed to the teachers’ college was told by a college identity that she was expected to wear gloves if she went ‘down town’. When she replied, a little tartly, that wearing gloves was not really done any more, she received the answer ‘It is still done in Armidale, I assure you!’ as though the metropolis, once again, had been letting the side down. Distinctive school uniforms made the identification of all secondary school students relatively easy, and high standards of behaviour in public were expected of them. The Catholic/Protestant divide was a clear one in Armidale, no doubt because of its episcopal status for both Catholics and Anglicans. A comprehensive network of Catholic schools, a tennis club and social clubs catered for members of that faith at every age and for every purpose. It was well known that work for tradesmen was 20


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allocated according to the tradesman’s denomination. As elsewhere at this time, sectarian chants and taunts were common among young boys. One newcomer, wandering in Central Park, bordered by both cathedrals and the Presbyterian church, was challenged by a group of young boys to say the Lord’s Prayer. Startled, he did so and was then punched for ‘getting it wrong’. The division between the denominations was so complete that when one of the Catholic mothers decided at the end of 1953 that it would be a good thing for those proceeding from secondary school to university to get to know one another before term started, at least one of the Armidale High students had never even seen some of those who had attended the Catholic secondary institutions in the same town.

On a hill, a school where we were young together . . . Armidale High School was one of a number of country high schools established in New South Wales in the 1920s. The extension of publicly funded secondary education to the country, as well as to the new suburbs of the growing metropolis, was a generally accepted goal of New South Wales governments of all parties. In Armidale, the local member, D.H. Drummond, had been the Minister of Education for New South Wales for a long period (1927–30 and 1932–41), and was often credited with the building of the high school. He was certainly responsible for establishing in his electorate both Armidale Teachers’ College (1930) and the University of New England, established as a college of the University of Sydney in 1938. Both tertiary institutions were important to the high school, because Armidale High became a demonstration school, like the city’s main primary school, whose title in the early 1950s was ‘Armidale Demonstration School’. These schools were staffed on the whole with excellent teachers able to show those in training what good teaching was and to give the novices an opportunity of trying their hands at a class under able supervision. The trainee teachers from the university held Teachers’ College Scholarships, which gave them an exemption from fees and a small 21


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living allowance, but bound them to serve the state of New South Wales as secondary teachers for five years. Pupils at Armidale High knew little of this. Student teachers came every year, and were more or less good, and more or less teasable. Like inspectors (who pupils believed came to inspect them, a belief fostered by every teacher), student teachers were simply part of a somewhat incomprehensible annual calendar. Pupils also saw their own teachers as more or less good, but they were to be teased only at one’s peril. Those pupils who themselves later entered the teaching profession came to recognise that they had been fortunate. Few could remember a bad teacher or any who were systematically difficult. Armidale High gained its students not only from the small city of Armidale, but from the wide New England region as well. Those from out of town boarded privately or in one of three hostels within walking distance of the school, two administered by the Church of England (one for boys and one for girls) and one, for girls, administered by the Methodist Church. Armidale, as the seat of both Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops, also possessed five other secondary schools: The Armidale School (TAS, the only GPS or ‘Great Public School’ in the bush), the New England Girls School, the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, De La Salle College and the Ursuline Convent, which among other things was the source of much of the formal musical education of Armidale’s young. In 1951, the members of the Class of ’53 were in Third Year, most of them in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ classes. The ‘A’ class was for the academically more proficient and those studying foreign languages and/or mathematics at the highest level; the ‘B’ class contained those who might go on to commercial or technical occupations. Two further classes, the ‘C’ and ‘D’, brought together those less successful in school examinations. Two years later the survivors, plus a half dozen or so others who had entered the school from elsewhere or were ‘repeats’, made up the sole Fifth Year class, which consisted of 40 pupils, thirteen of them girls. The Fifth Years were the senior class, providing the school with captains, vicecaptains and prefects. 22


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They were distinctive in another sense, in that their parents considered it important for them to complete high school. They were all going to sit the statewide external exit examination in order to obtain the Leaving Certificate (‘the Leaving’), a credential of value in the world of business, commerce and government. They were also a small minority in a school population of nearly 500. Most students in New South Wales left school at about age 15, clutching the much less valuable Intermediate Certificate (‘the Inter’) if they had been academically successful. Most pupils, and most families, could see no reason to stay further at school: unemployment in these postwar years hardly existed, and wages for unskilled workers, even those just starting in the world of work, were relatively high. Why stay at school, which was tough, academic and (for almost everyone at least some of the time) boring, when you could be out there earning money? The high school sat on the side of a hill to the south of the railway station. It was exposed to the frequent winds, cold in winter and hot in summer. Built of the dark bricks made in the city’s brickworks, it lacked both colour and style; little money or effort had ever been invested in gardens, trees or landscaping, but it did possess sporting ovals, tennis and basketball courts and a good deal of spare land. The school’s culture emphasised academic prowess and sport. Inter-school sporting contests in Armidale were made easy by the abundance of secondary schools in the city, but the high points for the athletically inclined were the visits to and from the high school in Tamworth, 110 kilometres to the south, and Fort St Boys High School in Sydney (for Rugby). As was the case in other secondary schools, Armidale High students were organised into four ‘houses’, which provided the context for intra-school sport, especially swimming and athletics. Such a nod to an older English public school tradition was echoed in the school song, which put forward courage, good faith and happiness (in their adverbial Latin forms, fortiter, fideliter and feliciter) as the values that would be learned or perhaps imbibed through attendance at Armidale High. Since only a few students in the ‘A’ class actually studied Latin, the Latin would have meant little to the school 23


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assembly, which sang the song each week. The rebellious among the boys sent it all up: Armidale, though far away we will remember On a hill, a school where we were young together . . .

became: Armidale, though far away we wish it further . . .

and the ‘tit’ within ‘fortiter’ was hugely emphasised. Something of the colour and texture of any school at a given time can be gained by reading its magazine. Indeed, since school magazines of that period—in New South Wales at least—were remarkably similar, they suggest that school life was probably pretty similar from high school to high school, town to town. The Acorn in 1953 was in its 26th year and ran to 100 pages, most of them sponsored by local businesses, or by classes in the school which had raised the money from voluntary collections or at the annual fete. Alert to the possibility of employing outstanding students, the Royal Military College, the Army’s Apprentices School, the Commonwealth Bank and BHP all took advertising space in the magazine in the early 1950s. The Acorn’s content provides a detailed account of all the sporting victories and triumphs of the year, the academic results (which took up much less space), some creative writing by students, photographs of staff, students and teams, the choral, debating, dramatic and social activities that occurred within the school or outside it, and what had happened over the year to past students or past staff members. The name of every student in every class appeared in a section called ‘Class Notes’. The Acorn appeared in December, and was always issue No. 1 of the annual Volume. That there was never a second issue seems not to have been noticed by successive editorial boards—or perhaps no one wished to disturb what had rapidly become an imperishable tradition. In 1953 the school took part in the celebrations to mark the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. So the headmaster 24


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and the two captains went off to sign, along with all their counterparts in secondary education, a Schools’ Resolution of Loyalty on 1 June. On the following day special services were held in all the churches after which the Resolution of Loyalty was presented to the Mayor by the District Inspector of schools. That was not the end of it. The school took part in the afternoon Procession of Allegiance, while some students marched as members of district organisations. A further ceremony took place in Central Park, and in the evening anyone who could went to watch the fireworks display. The Acorn’s editor added his own gloss: ‘As a loyal school, we take this opportunity to wish Her Majesty a long and happy reign’. One of the Class of ’53, Rodney Rich, a Queen’s Scout, was selected to go to the Coronation as a member of the Boy Scouts’ Coronation Contingent. He was widely envied, as much for being able to miss weeks of school for an honourable reason and travel on a ship as for attending the Coronation. Politics, religion and sex were forbidden topics for dinner-table conversations in the 1950s, let alone for school magazines, but of course the Coronation was not seen as ‘political’. Nor, presumably, was the inclusion at the centre of the school magazine of a version of ‘A Call to the People of Australia’. The Call, signed and voiced in November 1951 by leading clerical figures and the Chief Justices of the Supreme Courts of the States (though not by any Judge of the High Court), began with dark forebodings: ‘Australia is in danger. We are in danger abroad. We are in danger at home. We are in danger from moral and intellectual apathy . . .’ The signatories called for ‘a restoration of the moral order from which alone true social order can derive’. They called more explicitly for ‘a new effort from all Australians to advance moral standards’. What was this document doing in The Acorn? There is no indication at all as to the reason, and no reference to it anywhere else in the magazine. Perhaps the headmaster thought it was conventional wisdom, and timely. It has to be said that, despite memories of winter cold, wet and dirty roads, aching boredom and adolescent trials of all kinds, almost all the members of the Class of ’53 remember their years at Armidale 25


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High School with pleasure and affection. Those who lived in the hostels liked the life and the comradeship, and probably enjoyed school the most, though one or two of the boys remembered bullying as an ever-possible nightmare. Townies had more freedom, but the hostel groups had a major share in effecting the peer group alliances and the romantic pairings, by now widespread and important. Academically, the great majority of the class remembers being well taught by teachers who were fair as well as competent, interested in their students as individuals and prepared to do their best to prepare them for the next stage in life, whatever that might be. Since some of the class went on to become teachers, subject masters and principals in their turn, their judgment has a certain force to it. The school held the traditional Farewell Banquet and Dance for the Fifth Year class at the end of October, which marked the unofficial end to classes and the beginning of a week’s ‘stu-vac’. For much of the year teachers had been preparing their classes for what lay ahead by getting them to answer question after question from previous Leaving Certificate exam papers. In some subjects there had been a series of trial exams, and a ‘Trial Leaving’ commenced in every subject at the beginning of third term. The high school was the seat of the Leaving Certificate examinations for all Armidale students, which were invigilated by citizens appointed for the purpose. The examination supervisor used a stopwatch to time, first the short reading period, then the moment when pens could be seized and writing begun, and finally the dreadful moment when pens must be put down again and the papers handed in. The examinations started in November and the last ones—the Honours papers—took place in early December. As the members of the class completed their final papers, they walked out of Armidale High School and into working life. What was on offer?

From school to what, and where? Earlier in the year, careers officers from Sydney came to Armidale to assist the two staff members who had careers responsibility 26


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within the school and discussed career opportunities with each Fifth Year student. Heady notions of careers as an airline pilot, a diplomat or an actress were gently swept aside. These ambitions were possible, of course, but hard to achieve, especially from the country. The career officers were polite and helpful. In fact, the options were pretty clear. Those who did well in the Leaving could go on to university—that is, if their families had enough money to support them. If they gained the necessary results but money was a problem, there was the possibility of a Commonwealth Scholarship, which would pay the university fees and provide a means-tested living allowance. Your parents had to be poor indeed for the allowance to be paid. A Teachers’ College Scholarship was also available, which paid fees and provided a living allowance that varied in size according to whether or not you would be living at home or away from home. No means test! According to your Leaving result, you could go to university to secure a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science. That out of the way, you would undertake an extra year to attain a Diploma of Education concentrating on your disciplinary strength, and then become a high school teacher. These assets would equip you to climb the seniority ladder and in time become a subject master, and then deputy and headmaster. If you failed one subject in the Leaving, or missed the cut for another reason, you could go directly to teachers’ college for a two-year course that would propel you into the primary school or junior secondary systems. If teaching did not attract, you could join the New South Wales or the Commonwealth public services. You could join a bank or an insurance company. You could enter a firm of accountants or lawyers and learn the ropes, eventually gaining the appropriate professional qualification. You could train to be a nurse, if you were a girl, but you would have to wait until you were 18. The retail world was open to you as well, and you wouldn’t even have to start at the very bottom. BHP offered cadetships to able lads who wanted to be trained as metallurgists or engineers, and some of the other large companies had similar schemes. The armed forces gained their officer recruits from Leaving Certificate holders. John 27


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Gilmour, captain of the school in 1953, had Duntroon and a career in the army in his sights, but a long bout of illness was to rule him out. He became a teacher instead. John Bennett also wanted to be an army officer: he succeeded, after enlisting in the Army and travelling to Japan as a member of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces. As soon as he could, he went to Portsea and then Duntroon, and would serve in Vietnam as a Company Commander. In fact, the world of work was keenly interested in the Fifth Year of Armidale High School, even without a Leaving Certificate. Australia had under-employment in the early 1950s, not unemployment, and employers competed to get competent, literate, knowledgeable recruits. Several class members had already been approached by businesses and one boy started work on 23 December, a little paid holiday being the inducement to choose that firm over another. One of the girls, Nola Lewis, had left at Easter, believing that she was not going to perform well in the examinations. Having undertaken a stenography course at the Convent for the past year she went to radio station 2AD as the receptionist and within weeks found herself scheduling the radio programs. Before long the major General Motors dealership lured her across to become the personal assistant to the owner, and there she acquired skills in finance and management as well. Nola made these moves on her own initiative, and was somewhat reluctantly supported by her parents, who would have preferred her to sit for the Leaving. Other parents were tougher. The mother of one of Nola’s classmates, annoyed that the bank she wanted her son to enter was being too slow in offering him a job, rang the manager to say that her boy had received offers from another bank as well as a firm of accountants. If the manager wanted the lad to join the bank, he’d better make sure her son started on the following Monday. He did. Mothers were important, very important. To understand why, we need to appreciate the life histories of the parents of the Class of ’53. Most had been born in the first decade of the new century. Their children, members of the Class of ’53, had been born in the mid1930s, years in which the Australian birthrate in the first half of the century was at its lowest. The parents had experienced wartime 28


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Australia in their childhood or adolescence, a brief period of prosperity and hope in the 1920s when they were young adults, a dreadful Depression when they were married, and a new and more immediate war when they were in their thirties. Several of the fathers of the Class of ’53 had served during the war. John Gilmour’s father had been killed, leaving his widow to bring up four children. bricks; carting hay whatever I could find. Jobs were not scarce. Soon I found I was adept at all sorts of jobs from fencing to crutching, rabbittrapping and tractor-driving— though I was a poor horseman. As the second-eldest, and male, I was given considerable responsibility from an early age. I was first out of bed to milk the cow; I grew a large vegetable garden, and I even butchered a sheep or two—all before I was 12years old.

John Gilmour’s father had been a subsistence farmer before he joined the Army, and his death in a skirmish before the Battle of El Alamein left his wife, aged 22, with four children under seven years and a large mortgage. She was a worker and an excellent manager: we were never cold, hungry or insecure. Money was scarce, and this taught me the lesson of frugality. I worked most vacations picking peas; cleaning

One father had been so badly wounded in the earlier Great War that he was a ‘TPI’ (he held a pension for being Totally and Permanently Incapacitated). A common desire for the parents was that their children would have a much better life than the one they had known. The rhetoric of the end to the war, with its Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, a new world order and the whole notion of ‘postwar reconstruction’, implied a new life for everyone. That meant, given their parents’ experiences, making sure that one had a skilled, secure, white-collar job with a decent pension at the end of it. And that in turn meant staying at school to sit the Leaving Certificate examination. Bruce Chappell could say that his parents’ proudest achievement was that all five of their children gained the 29


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Leaving Certificate. They would not have been alone either in their success or in their pride. The parents were by no means either well educated or well off. Some were farmers and graziers, but none of them in a big way. One boy could have gone to The King’s School in Sydney, as his father and grandfather had done before him, but that would have required an undue amount of travel, given where his family lived, and a degree of expense, given that he was one of four boys. So he was sent to the hostel, which proved just right for him. The father of another boy owned a relatively large business in the town. Otherwise, the parents were teachers, bank managers, smallbusiness and shop-owners, and workers of all kinds—white-collar, blue-collar, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. Almost every wife would have described her occupation as ‘home duties’. There was not much money about, and no one had a lot to spend at the school tuckshop. That did not matter a great deal. On the whole, social contacts after school occurred outside, not in one another’s homes, unless it was wet—in which case the rate of after-school activities plummeted. Not every child had his or her own room, by any means, even at the age of 16 or 17. Very few students at Armidale High School were driven to school, and the Fifth Years were generally not old enough to have a licence, let alone to have a car. Most families did not possess a car, and all practised a form of economy that has by and large disappeared from our society: saving containers, especially glass ones, lengths of string, old nails, screws and bolts, and wrapping paper. Several, like Bruce Chappell or Judy Tosh, had long bicycle rides or walks to school. Some houses lacked running water or electricity. Isobel Corin’s account of her upbringing is the most comprehensive, but many of her classmates would

Although all the members of the Class of ’53 had working fathers (or mothers, if the father was dead), their material conditions were not always pleasant. Phyllis Mace lived in a house far too small for her to study effectively.

(continued)

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tank and a storage tank to collect water from the outbuildings. Dad had bought two cows, Molly and Gipsy, and it became the task of the kids to milk them. Part of Dad’s plan was to make his children independent and appreciative of the necessities of life, so a Job Book was instituted where all the jobs were listed down one side: washing up, set– ting the table, milking, feeding the pigs, ducks and chooks, separating the milk, making butter and so on. The going rate was usually 3d, with a shared job paying 11⁄2d. At the end of the week we might have amassed something like 10s. It may seem a lot, but we were responsible for all our own costs, including clothing and medical expenses. I remember I was still paying off some dental bills when I went to teachers’ college!

have nodded their heads at one or more aspects of it. When my father returned after the war he was appointed PMG Divisional Engineer at Armidale so the family returned to live there. He cherished the idea of self-subsistence, so that when a farm on what were then the outskirts of Armidale (Markham Street) became available, he bought it. The fact that there was no town water or electricity were to him minor disadvantages—he at least had acreage, and he became a weekend farmer. We kids were thrilled that it was a two-storey house with a cellar and a pantry. There was no bathroom, but Dad soon built one off the landing. We used kerosene and Aladdin lamps for lighting until electricity was installed. Shortage of water was always a problem, though we had an underground

In fact, the wearing of the compulsory school uniform masked a good deal of family poverty, which revealed itself in other ways. Phyllis Mace puzzled afterwards about how she managed even to remain in the class: ‘I don’t know how they did it. I really appreciate my mother. But I could never go out. I had no clothes to go out in, no social life. It did influence me: I became a loner.’ Peter Shields, like many of his fellow inmates, was conscious of the sheer 31


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cost to the family of his being there: ‘I was aware, oh yes. Every holiday I worked. I bought my own school clothes. They did their best, but there wasn’t a lot of money about.’ Another knew that he was able to travel to Armidale and stay at the hostel because his father had won a lot of money at the races. Chris Lawrie’s grandparents had supported her throughout high school in Armidale, but she had to return to Maitland in Fifth Year because that source of funds had dried up. Lack of family money would prevent her completing medicine at Sydney University a few years later. Those who had possessions had well-used bicycles, tennis racquets and the like. Not only was there not a lot of money about, there were not a lot of new things to buy even if the money had been available; the postwar manufacturing boom had only just begun. The textbooks borrowed from the school’s book room were similarly ancient, and an initial pleasure in accepting one’s annual load of textbooks was to see how far back the borrowing went, and which notable figures from the past had used the books before you. In such a context it was perhaps understandable that mothers were decisive. For about a third of the class, mother and father were united in the decision that the child would continue at school. For these children, staying on at school was hardly thought about or discussed; it was just what would happen. A very few seem to have made the decision themselves, and won support from their parents. For the rest, Mum is remembered as the compass and the engine. David Davidson of Tenterfield, 180 kilometres further north, came to Armidale High School in 1952 because his mother wanted him to become an engineer. To enter engineering at university, he would need good results in maths, physics and chemistry. Armidale High was more likely to provide that outcome, she felt, than Tenterfield’s secondary school. Rex Dollin’s mother in Armidale said ‘no’ to an apprenticeship for him, even though Rex was one of the top metalwork students in Third Year and had a job offered to him at once: he must go on and finish high school. Cass Campbell’s mother wanted him to study law. Her husband was a logger out of Guyra, and the extra years at school meant that ‘Dad worked his arse off ’. Bob Hawke, who had some years to go before his name 32


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became something of an introductory liability, was the son of a stock and station agent who died when Bob was seven. His mother took over the business and brought up her three children by herself, retiring when she was 72. She had banking in mind as her son’s career: ‘You’re not going to chase drovers around stock routes or yard sheep at midnight!’ Cass Campbell secured a decent-enough Leaving Certificate to get him into law at Sydney University, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to enable him to do so. He ticked the box for the meanstested living allowance, which required his father to provide evidence of his income over the past three years. This was a real problem. While Dad (whom I loved dearly) had lived under his father’s name, he had been christened under his mother’s name. He probably

didn’t exist in the legal world, and he hadn’t paid income tax in his life. He wasn’t going to do so now! So uni was out. I took the Teachers’ College Scholarship I also received, and went off to Armidale Teachers’ College. He discovered that teaching was not to his taste, started singing in clubs and pubs— three nights a week tripled his teaching income—and left by ship for England and the rest of the world in December 1958.

The Leaving results were crucial to the Class of ’53, and some of its members were outside the offices of The Armidale Express when the results were posted on the wall. A certain amount of hindsight on the part of teachers and students from other classes has since credited the Fifth Year of 1953 with a special quality. But in fact its Leaving results, while quite good, were no better than those of a number of other years, and not nearly as good as those of the rather larger Fifth Year of 1955, which won eleven First Class Honours and seven Second Class Honours to the five Firsts and five Seconds of the Class of ’53. No matter, it was a good outcome: 32 achieved the Leaving, seven missed out and 33


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one had to wait a year to gain his own Leaving Certificate because of illness. A year later The Acorn Vol. 27 No. 1 reported what it knew of the most recent Fifth Year ex-students, which was reasonably comprehensive though not complete. Fewer than half went on at that time to some form of further education: three to the University of New England, four to Sydney University, seven to Armidale Teachers’ College, one to Sydney Teachers’ College, one to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and one to Hawkesbury Agricultural College. Four were about to move into nursing, six joined banks and three went into separate sections of the New South Wales public service. The rest were working in Sydney, or in Armidale, or in another northern town, or elsewhere. They had gone, and would fade quickly from the memory of the school—and from that of the town, for those who left, either to study or to work, rarely came back to Armidale to live. In fact, most of them would not meet again as a group for 50 years. It is not only students who leave schools. The teachers at Armidale High School were employed by the New South Wales Department of Education, and its head office in Sydney moved teachers around the state as vacancies or pressure occurred. Teachers themselves earned seniority through length of service, and could apply for posting to a vacancy for which they were qualified or for a move that would satisfy family needs of one kind or another. Because teachers were in short supply, the Department was usually prepared to help if it could. The state possessed a major private school system to the side, most of it Catholic, no less harassed by booming numbers and equally happy to secure teachers wherever it could. So it was that, as the Class of ’53 left, so did their well-respected deputy headmaster, Jack Williams, to become headmaster of Deniliquin High School. And a year later, in the issue of The Acorn that told of the whereabouts of the Class of ’53, the school learned that the headmaster of those years, the gown-wearing E.R.S. Watson (universally referred to by the pupils as ‘Doggy’, perhaps because of the tufts of hair on either side of his head) was to move to Canterbury Boys’ High School. There he 34


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would find that one of the senior boys, and a member of the debating team, was a certain John Winston Howard. It is recounted in the CBHS school magazine, The Canterbury Tales, that in 1955 John Howard’s team lost to Wollongong, opposing the proposition ‘That immigrants are proving beneficial to Australian culture.’ A year later, in reviewing the year in debating, the anonymous contributor asserted that: ‘The outstanding features of this year’s debates have been the strong personal impact and manner of the speakers. No one could mistake, or fail to be impressed by, the Churchillian oratory of John Howard . . .’.

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2 THE BIG PICTURE

My father was conservative—really conservative. There would have been a complete family rupture over Australia’s part in the war in Vietnam, had he lived until then. (Phyllis Mace)

In the rest of the book we will look at what happened to individuals in the 50 years after 1951. But we need first to consider what happened to the society as a whole, because what happens to the society represents the backdrop against which we live our own individual lives. Human societies change slowly in their values and practices, because we human beings are creatures of habit who like to hold on to our ways of doing things. Law and custom, which change incrementally, determine the pattern of social arrangements. In addition, peacetime populations alter only at the margins. In contemporary Australia each year, about one in a hundred dies and slightly more than one in a hundred arrives through birth or immigration. Other things being equal, from one year to another— even from one decade to another—Australia will look a very similar place, a slowly changing social system. While the quick march of technological innovation can introduce sudden jolts to a society, these shocks are absorbed by the culture and the legal system, which both adapt the shocks and adapt to them. We all copy what 36


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we see as attractive, but we copy in our own way. So Australian supermarkets are plainly versions of the American model, but they are very Australian too. Despite the rhetoric of choice and individual decision that is characteristic of democracies, we are as individual human beings subject to events and movements that affect whole societies. Natural disasters, wars and economic depressions affect almost everybody. No individual can prevent a tsunami or an economic depression, and no ordinary citizen can avert a war. On the more cheerful side, we all benefit from long periods of peace, good seasons and economic growth. All of us live in two domains at least. At the ‘micro’ level we earn a living, bring up children, spend money and operate in family and social networks. At the ‘macro’ level each of us is one of twenty million Australians, subject to the many forces affecting our country. During these 50 years two distinct generations of 25 years were born and grew up, while the original population aged and declined. The different life experiences of recent generations have been the subject of much attention by social analysts, and of course by those in advertising and marketing as well. The Class of ’53 does not really fit Hugh Mackay’s category of ‘the lucky generation’, since he focused on those born in the 1920s; the class is very much at the younger end of that generation. In 1951 the members of the class were in their mid-teens, while most of their parents were in their thirties or forties; their grandparents, born in the 1870s and 1880s, were retired and old if they were still alive, as many of them were. In contrast, the surviving members of the class are now grandparents themselves, at the head of their families. Their own grandparents—powerful figures of the past—are long gone, and so are most of their parents. The slow passage of human replacement has a straightforward political effect too, so that after a half-century the body politic is substantially altered. Those who were voting in the late 1940s when Prime Minister Chifley decided to nationalise the banks are now a very small proportion of the Australian electorate, but in 1949 they were the electorate. 37


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Major events shape our perceptions of what time periods were ‘about’. So, while from one perspective there has been extraordinary continuity from one day to the next, or one year to the next, if we break the 50 years into longer periods another picture emerges. The years immediately after the war were a time of relief that the war was over, growing alarm at the quick fracturing of the peace, and a return to the business of civil life. From 1951 to the mid1970s Australia can be seen to be prosperous, confident and expansive, with its role in the war in Vietnam the most divisive issue. The following ten years were economically uncertain and industrially disputative. The fourth period, from the mid-1980s to the present, has been characterised by almost continuous change in the economic underpinning of Australian society. The outcome is another Australia, one whose way of life possesses many contrasts to the practices ruling in 1951. And the Australians who make up our society are, as we shall see, very different people. The story of Australia over the last 50 years can be summarised like this: in contrast to the first half of the twentieth century, Australia avoided major wars and economic depressions, it replaced Britain with the United States as its Great Protector, it grew both in size and in wealth and became absorbed in the building of its ‘economy’, and its political system continued with little important change.

Australia in the world To put things in this way may sound quite domestic and parochial, given the wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet a preoccupation with the domestic was one of the least expected outcomes of the uneasy 1950s and 1960s. The prospect of a Third World War seemed very likely in 1950—that was bad enough, but both sides would employ nuclear weapons, and that was frightening. In 1956, when the British and French invaded the Suez Canal area in response to the Egyptian government’s nationalisation of the Canal, it seemed likely to many—not least to those 38


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of the Class of ’53 completing their National Service in the Citizen Military Forces—that Australian troops would, for the third time in less than 50 years, be fighting in the Middle East. In 1963, the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring war fearfully close again. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 raised the prospect of the Red Army over-running Europe. The war in Vietnam in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s was undertaken by the United States and its allies, in part because of the effect of a powerful metaphor: a set of country dominoes falling over one by one as something called ‘communism’ pushed the first ‘free’ government over. The vivid television image of a flowing tide of communism pulled by gravity over the globe down to Australia characterised the force of foreign affairs in a series of federal elections. In the 1970s and 1980s the superpowers seemed to spend more and more on armaments claimed to be ‘defensive’ that could only be used in a war of almost unimaginable technological intensity. Indeed, the foreshadowed conflict was termed ‘Star Wars’, after a popular science fiction film and its successors. Yet the tension between ‘East’ and ‘West’ was contained, at least for the likely central battlefield of Europe, and erupted only on Australia’s periphery. As a consequence, countries like Australia were able to concentrate on their domestic development. Australia’s defence expenditure, which had been significant in the 1940s and 1950s, began to decline proportionately. More and more attention went to social infrastructure: schools, hospitals, universities, roads, airports, dams and the like. A war between the United States and the Soviet Union was never far away from people’s minds, but in daily practice it seemed that Australia was not in any sense preparing for it militarily. And when in 1989 the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down and the United States emerged from a half-century of opposition to communism as the surviving superpower, that policy could seem in retrospect to have been a sensible one. Australia is now fully connected to the world in a way it was not in 1951, when air travel was expensive and the voyage to Britain took six weeks. Australians were then cut off in a fashion that is 39


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now hardly comprehensible. Australia attracted few visitors, and few Australians travelled abroad—that was a major undertaking, both in time and in money. The first members of the Class of ’53 to go overseas did so by ship. Academic research did not exist in any consistent way, because communications were too slow and Australia too far away for Australians to take part in discovery. The Boeing 707 changed all that when it first came into service in the early 1960s, and airfares steadily diminished as a proportion of average wages. More and more Australians could travel, and since even Singapore was a long way away, once abroad they tended to keep going. From 1984 to 2004 almost nineteen million passports were issued to Australians, and around a million people now apply for new passports each year (about a quarter of them renewals). Australian consular services look after Australian interests in 165 cities overseas. Australians are a well-travelled people and, with New Zealanders, probably take the longest journeys of all nationals. They are also well connected electronically, keen adopters of communication devices and great users of the Internet, which became increasingly available in the 1990s. For nearly the entire second half of the twentieth century, Australia was able to focus on its own economic and political development—something that the Australia of the first half of the twentieth century had been in no position to do. And a great deal happened in those 50 years.

Economists and the economy One of the most significant changes in what Manning Clark called the ‘great conversation’ in Australia over the 50 years after 1951— the general debate between people in Parliament, newspapers, talkback radio, barber shops, around dinner tables and in private conversations—was the growth in the importance of the word ‘economy’ and in the attention paid to the fortunes of the rather cloudy entity the term was thought to refer to. In 1951 ‘economy’ was something that households and individuals practised. Fifty 40


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years later it was one of three great collectives: ‘society’ described us as individuals, families and organisations; ‘polity’ referred to us as citizens, voters and democrats; and ‘economy’ included us as workers, spenders and investors. Dictionaries (in this case, the Macquarie Dictionary) give a definition for ‘economy’ like ‘the management of the resources of a community with a view to productiveness and the avoidance of waste’. The term is used widely and probably never with equivalent meanings, but there is no doubt that in 2004 ‘the economy’ is perceived generally to be of the utmost importance. The change can probably be attributed, at least in part, to the work and influence of one of the great thinkers of the century, John Maynard Keynes. It was Keynes, more than anyone else, who gave us the idea that the great set of values, desires, commercial and labour relationships, products and processes, savings, investments and interactions that we think of as ‘the economy’ could be ‘managed’ by wise and skilled governments to achieve better, or at least good, outcomes for everybody. The role of government came increasingly and explicitly to be centred on economic management, something that had not been the case before the Second World War. Today the daily fortunes of the economy are spelled out for us in the evening news bulletins. The rise and fall in the value of stocks and shares around the world, the price of oil, the price of gold, the price of the Australian dollar in other currencies, unemployment rates, current account deficits—all of these indicators of economic health are thought to be understood by and important to the ordinary citizen. The economy has become a thing which possesses some of the qualities of a living creature. Paradoxically, it is no longer the case that governments fully accept responsibility for the economy’s state of health, save when it seems to be robust. ‘Globalisation’, or someone else’s economy, or a war somewhere, or the decision of the oil-producing cartel OPEC to reduce production can lead a Treasurer to wash his hands of any responsibility for a current economic headache. Nevertheless, the economy has come to displace the polity, let alone the society, as the real centre of government and public attention. 41


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Very generally, and bearing in mind the imprecision of the term, the Australian economy did well in the second half of the twentieth century, even though it sometimes had a bumpy ride. Australia’s population rose just under two and a half times, from just over eight million to just under twenty million. Its gross domestic product (GDP) per head of population—meaning the value at constant prices of all goods and services produced in the country divided by the number of people—rose from just over $9000 to just under $27 000, with a good deal of the improvement occurring towards the end of the century. That does not mean that everyone in our much larger population is three times wealthier. A few people are stupendously wealthy, even in contemporary terms; some are not much better off than their counterparts were a half-century earlier. But Australia is in general a much wealthier country, and the increased wealth has helped to change the look and feel of Australian society. A common experience for Australian families is that each generation after the war improved its position relative to its parents’ generation. It needs to be said at once that GDP is not an especially good way of defining wealth produced by human energy, in that it leaves out of consideration all value-added effort that is not rewarded in cash, such as household and voluntary work. Something further will be said about measuring ‘real progress’—a plainly tendentious phrase—in the final chapter. Gross domestic product has become such a widely used term, however, that we need to consider its values here, even if we later consider other measures as well. Australian GDP per capita rose at about the same rate as that of the United States. In 1950, Switzerland, the United States, New Zealand, Canada and Australia led the set of wealthy nations. Fifty years later, that set was much larger, and now included Japan, the United Kingdom and most of Western Europe, but Australia and Canada were pretty much where they had been relative to the United States, while Switzerland and New Zealand had fallen a little. On the face of it, a large group of countries with essentially the same kind of standard of living is a better outcome for the world than is a small group. That Australia remains in the leading 42


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group is a result not simply of its being a fortunate country, in having already been rich at the end of the nineteenth century, but of having been able to negotiate the changes of the second half of the twentieth century with much more skill (and much more luck) than had been evident in the first half. For the Class of ’53, whose working lives neatly encompassed that period, several trends and events marked the changing shape of the Australian economy, and everyone was affected by these changes, whether or not they realised it at the time. First, the terms of trade for much Australian primary production—the relationship between costs and prices—after a brief flurry in wool during the Korean War, never regained their nineteenth century levels and slowly declined. Many competitors for wool appeared in the market, wheat production grew as other countries improved their own agricultural techniques, while dairy products began to be associated in the medical and public minds with heart disease. The United Kingdom, after some years of agonising about it, applied to join the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1962, and that decision meant the end of any preference for Australian products—especially dairy products, meat and fruit—in what had been Australia’s largest market. Australia may have ridden to prosperity on the sheep’s back, but it could not stay prosperous that way. Australian governments floundered about what to do about the rural industries thus affected, and were saved in export income terms by the rising importance of minerals. Australian producers developed new rural industries in horticulture, and found new markets for meat (beef, rather than lamb). Adding as much value as possible to what was grown before it was sold became the new strategy, and that attracted new players into rural production—people who had made their fortune in the city. Nine members of the Class of ’53 came from the land, but only two of the class were to make their lives in rural industry. John Hamel, the only son of a grazier east of Armidale, was kept at high school so that he would be properly educated, ‘in case the wheels came off the cart’. He followed a good Leaving outcome with study 43


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at the technical college in Armidale in welding, wool-classing and accounting. After inheriting the family property, Argyle, he managed to add some land to what was regarded as a good property, but steadily dropping prices for wool made the financial arithmetic of wool-growing awkward, despite his knowledge and skill. Herb Higgins also followed his father, taking up some family land in Nowendoc and developing a cattle property. He too added a little adjoining land, and learned about wool, beef and wheat on other family properties. He dealt with the cost–price squeeze by reading widely and attending courses on subjects of interest to him, greatly improving productivity per hectare as a consequence. Faced with prices that only ever went downwards, both on many occasions had the prospect of selling out and finding something else to do. Neither did, and the other possibility—of doubling or trebling the size of their property—was not available to them. Like most other graziers in the second half of the twentieth century, they were asset-rich and income-poor. Each had, however, made provision for their children early in life, helping their sons to acquire land and to get started as farmers and graziers themselves. ‘It’s hard to survive these days without some steady non-farm income,’ reflected John Hamel. ‘The life itself is marvellous, but when the money gets tight you begin to wonder if you’re doing the right thing.’ Because his property Argyle is within an easy drive of Armidale, the Hamels are able to take an active part in the sporting and cultural life of the university city. He feels that he has the best of both worlds, contrasting the peace and quiet of the property with the noise of Armidale—‘not to mention the bedlam of the old classroom!’ Herb Higgins is also philosophical about the life and its rewards. ‘You have to take calculated risks in our game, and you have to be careful with your money.’ He recognises that decisions taken elsewhere, such as the OPEC oil-price increases of the mid1970s, which forced Japan to reduce beef imports in order to buy oil, can wreck even the best calculated risks. But the humour shines through: ‘I’ve been affluent enough not to have to be a rogue or a scoundrel!’ 44


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The second great trend was the reverse of most people’s expectations. The end of the Second World War was followed not by unemployment and recession, as had been the case after the Great War, but by nearly 30 years of sustained economic growth. While shortages persisted until well into the 1950s, full employment proved to be not only an ambition that worked but also a policy that gained bi-partisan support. The consequent demand for new housing, new motor cars, new consumer durables and new clothes stimulated domestic production. Perhaps even more importantly, the Commonwealth government found that its revenues consistently exceeded its planned expenditures, which allowed an unbudgeted surplus or ‘fiscal increment’. The Menzies government gained job satisfaction as well as electoral mileage in using its extra revenues to develop public infrastructure. It carried Labor’s ambitious Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme to completion, built airports, established new universities and assisted in road construction. The state governments built new schools and hospitals. ‘Growth’ was the vogue word. As had been the case a hundred years earlier, when the stimulus had been the gold rushes and closer settlement, Australia was rebuilding itself. Motors in Sydney and, after a 4 a.m. start, driven 700 kilometres to Tenterfield the next day, arriving before sunset! I knew from long experience that a mob of cattle walk 14 miles (22 km) a day and a good horse 35 or so miles (56 km). This new mobility and independence gave me freedom from a small conservative village, and a chance to play summer cricket and winter tennis—not to mention having a social life.

Members of the Class of ’53, all at work in the late 1950s, were among those purchasing a car for the first time. The pos-session of a car provided an enormous gain in mobility and autonomy, and class members had their cars much earlier in their lives than was true of their parents, some of whom still had no vehicle. Few could have experienced quite the pleasure that Herb Higgins gained from his purchase, a Volkswagen bought brand new for £710 at Lanock

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Almost without exception, the Class of ’53 remembered their working years up to the middle 1970s with pleasure and affection. John Knoff ’s sharp summary would get almost universal agreement: ‘ We were very lucky. I could do what I wanted to do. I could go from job to job because they were all there. I’ve been able to shape my life.’ The rapidly expanding economy needed skill and energy. With that, plus a little experience, you could rise quickly in your profession, or move quickly into new and interesting areas like computing, or advertising or publishing. As Neil Conn put it: ‘ You took the opportunities as they came. I’ve been as lucky as all get out.’ Or John Vickery, in much the same vein: ‘I’ve been more successful than I could have imagined. I’m very happy with that. Opportunities came, and I took them.’ Those of the class who went into teaching saw new schools opening or promised wherever they went. Many soon became subject masters while still quite young, much faster than the generation who began teaching in the 1930s. The universities and colleges not only offered them opportunities for further qualification, but took a few of them as staff. Where else within Australia would the growing professions have found their senior people? The third great change, an almost universally accepted conclusion reached during and after the Second World War, was that the kind of economic management that had assisted the successful war effort could be applied to the nation in peacetime. It is hardly possible to over-emphasise the effect that the Depression of the 1930s had on the generation born around the turn of the century. Indeed, that generation had known of the consequences of the earlier depression on their own parents. Ben Chifley’s antagonism to banks, and his attempt to nationalise the banking system in the late 1940s (which may have cost him victory in 1949) flowed in part from his family’s experiences with banks in the depression of the 1890s. Politicians, public servants and the educated middle class may have divided on party lines, but they were nonetheless united in the belief not only that depressions should not occur again but in fact that they could be avoided. ‘Full employment’ was not a nostrum of the left in 1950: unemployment in the 1930s had 46


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reached into every section of Australian society, and every member of the Class of ’53 knew about it through family history. The great economic oracle, Lord Keynes, had died in 1946 but his message was known to all. Governments should manage aggregate demand sensitively, ‘priming the pump’ when the private sector was flat, and applying the brakes (sensitively, of course) when the economy was over-heating. A generation of economists had learned that Keynes was right, and agreed that the Great Depression could have been avoided had his precepts been followed. As a result, governments in Australia and elsewhere in the Western world managed their economies in a much more direct fashion—and much more successfully—than would have been conceivable earlier in the century. Success led before long to confidence of a high order, and to a view that all social problems could be solved, provided that one’s society had sufficient knowledge, money and will. Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the American President Lyndon Johnson (whose ‘Great Society’ program aimed to end poverty and racial discrimination, among other things) and the Australian Gough Whitlam, waiting in the wings of opposition, all exemplified this expansive vision. Those like the Class of ’53 who grew to adulthood in the 1950s and 1960s were especially confident, for every year seemed an improvement on the last. The ‘New Left’, a formation on the radical side of politics, put forward a vision of a world that could be free of inequality, discrimination, disease and poverty. More interested in personal development, liberation and creativity than in whether or not or to what degree the economy was socialist or capitalist, its aspirations and its argument affected the outlook of both sides of politics. All good things come, in time, to an end. A generation of economic expansion had led finally to a growth in expectations, stimulated in part by stock market booms in minerals in the 1960s. The Great Society dream in the United States dissipated because of lavish spending both on domestic policies and on the Vietnam War. More generally, the good times in the Western world vanished suddenly when in 1973 a cartel of oil-producing countries, the 47


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Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), raised oil prices by 70 per cent. The sharp rise in prices for everything (energy being basic to all production) led to demands for compensating increases in wages and salaries. Worse, unemployment began to rise. In the confident late 1950s pundits had stated as an electoral axiom that if unemployment passed 2 per cent a government would be defeated. Unemployment had hovered around 2 per cent in 1961, so the bare victory of the Menzies government in that year was seen as proof positive. From 2.1 per cent in 1973, unemployment rose quickly through the next few years, reaching 9 per cent before the end of the decade. It would not fall much below 6 per cent for the next quarter of a century. Governments now found that they could not spend their way out of trouble, and most developed countries after the mid-1970s experienced ‘stagflation’, a combination of sluggish economic growth, high inflation and high unemployment. The ‘Keynesian Revolution’ had run its course. That revolution had not, of course, been complete. No strain of thought exists in isolation or without criticism. Keynes’ major work was itself a departure from the orthodoxy of classical economics and, although it in time became orthodoxy itself, it always had dissenters. Another strain of thought at the end of the Second World War had seen freedom as the essential goal of the war, and powerful governments, such as those of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, as the real problem. Two of the best-known exponents of this view, Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek, were Austrian emigrés who built influential academic careers in Britain and the United States. Schumpeter argued that innovative entrepreneurs were the basis of all productive change, and that they should be given the maximum possible freedom to work their magic. The best government was therefore a minimalist one. Friedrich von Hayek emphasised the importance of free markets and the role of prices in regulating them. The most influential opponent of Keynesianism in the mid1970s, Milton Friedman, the American-born son of Jewish immigrants, held that governments were at best a distraction, at worst a menace. In his view, the market had much more long-term 48


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stability than Keynesians believed, and should be allowed to operate without interference. Friedman won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976, a year in which the Australian economy—like a number of others—was behaving in a most unpleasant and unexpected way. Thereafter, his views that governments should not try to control demand or employment became increasingly significant within parties of the right, and in time within those on the left as well. One plain reason for the growing acceptance of the views of Schumpeter, von Hayek and Friedman was that the Keynesian alternative no longer seemed to work, and governments were increasingly unable to meet their own goals, let alone those of the electorate. A second reason was that, in Australia, the great architects of postwar reconstruction, both politically and in the public service—all of them Keynesians in practice, if not in theory—had now retired. The same was largely true in North America and Europe. A third factor, for Australia, was the increasing tendency of postgraduate students in economics to choose American rather than British universities for their further study. There they were more likely to be exposed to anti-Keynesian perspectives than to the Keynesian orthodoxy. They in turn taught ‘American’ economics in Australian universities when they returned, or sought to practise it if they were in government service. The new economic thought was not new at all. It was sometimes called ‘neo-classical’, which correctly portrayed its intellectual roots. In Australia it came to be called ‘economic rationalism’, which was on the whole an empty term, since all economics is ‘rational’ in that it searches for the best way to employ scarce means to attain given ends. In practice, the public orthodoxy in Australia became a kind of ‘market fundamentalism’—the belief (by no means held by all economists) that markets produced better outcomes for everybody than did government decisions. By the 1980s, economists had become the most important ‘state intellectuals’, guiding ministers and running their departments and at the elbow of many managing directors. It is fair to say that, like other social scientists, they were and are much better at explaining why things have happened than in predicting correctly what will happen. 49


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Rebuilding the economy The economic watershed in Australia was the election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983. The displaced Fraser Coalition government was the last Australian government to operate within Paul Kelly’s Australian Settlement. Its members quarrelled internally over what ought to be done to end an unsatisfying period for them as managers of the Australian economy, which at times produced unemployment rates at almost 10 per cent of the workforce and an interest rate of 20 per cent per annum. At the end, an international downturn that looked as though it might lead to another depression, plus a drought worse than any since the 1940s, made that government’s defeat more than likely. The new Labor government had used eight years in opposition to argue out what it should do when in office again. A time in opposition is a great release for any political party. In government, one is committed to what one has done already and to what one has promised to do. The public service, always worried about continuity, will try to keep the government on track. External events have to be accommodated, but must not dislodge the government’s own strategy. The government must look as though it is in control of things rather than as a rudderless sailing boat. In opposition, however, there is time to think and argue, and the argument can be public, since the conventions of Cabinet solidarity do not apply. If the argument leads to new approaches and new policies that are accurately aimed and attractive to the electorate, the opposition has a sound basis on which to run for office. And the government— much as it might like to adopt these approaches and policies—will be constrained by what it has already proclaimed and defended. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Labor leadership group began to accept that whatever else it might want to achieve for Australia, good economic management would be central. In the short-lived Whitlam period (1972–75), the mentality of ‘crash through or crash!’ had been part of Labor thinking: better to be defeated while pursuing a glorious goal than to lower ambition, remain in office but do nothing. Perhaps understandably, Labor put 50


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that romantic trajectory aside. It would achieve office, manage things sensibly, accomplish its goals and yet remain in office. How could all this be done? What would be central to sound economic management in a world where technology now allowed capital to move around the globe almost instantly? The answer was a bold one: to abandon the pretence that Australia alone could determine the value of its currency. Before the end of 1983, the Labor government had decided to deregulate the financial system and to ‘float’ the Australian dollar, allowing it to find its true or unprotected level. The intended effect was that Australian industries and the financial system would have to become competitive in world terms. Foreign banks would be allowed to operate, and non-bank institutions like credit unions would be able to compete with the banks. Exchange controls would disappear, allowing Australian corporations to operate overseas. Provided that the electorate understood what was being done and why, and provided also that the outcome demonstrated the strength of the Australian economy, the government would no longer be seen as responsible for the ebb and flow of the economy. Australia would be part of the world economy, and affected for the better by greater opportunities and competitiveness. Financial deregulation was not a new idea, and had been proposed from within the Fraser government, but without effect. The Coalition, now in opposition, adopted the new policy, if initially in a some-what grudging fashion. Floating the dollar was probably the most important single economic decision taken by any Australian government after the Second World War, and its effects were profound. Exposure to the world economy quite quickly affected every industry, every profession and indeed every aspect of Australian life. Within a few years, for example, the almost century-old system of industrial arbitration suffered a consequential blow, as enterprises had to work out their pay-to-work ratios in terms of what was affordable, not what the Commission might think was reasonable. Deregulation of one aspect of life prompted a reconsideration of what purposes regulation generally was intended to achieve, and over time government 51


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began to remove itself from its once Olympian purview of Australian life. In contrast to the 1960s perspective that all social problems were inherently soluble, it was now asserted that governments could not solve some problems, which were best left for the citizens themselves to grapple with. ‘Nation-building’, once the almost explicit first priority of the national government, was now sidelined. There was no longer a Minister for National Development, or one for Supply; they had disappeared some years earlier. Even the rhetoric of nation-building had gone. If more nationbuilding occurred, it would presumably happen as the outcome of market forces and individual decisions. Old ideological garments continued to unravel. If governments had no place in regulating matters that were the province either of the market or of the citizenry, there was obviously no need for such a large public service. Public servants began to decline in numbers in any case as enterprise bargaining and smaller funding from the centre controlled the amount of money available to department heads to pay their staff. From 1987 to 2002 the Australian Public Service declined from 180 000 members to a little over 120 000. Some functions, like the Commonwealth Employment Service, were simply privatised, while others were reduced in scale and scope. The government freed universities from direct regulation, but also from regular financial supplementation. Little by little, benefits that were once seen as universal began to be seen as more legitimately directed, or ‘targeted’, to those in real need. ‘Choice’ began to appear as a rationale for decisions which citizens would make as consumers, displacing an older feeling that certain fundamental services should be available to all members of the community. Language changed to reflect the new values: ‘citizens’ became ‘clients’; ‘passengers’ became ‘customers’; ‘patients’ became ‘consumers’. There was still a safety net, but it moved closer to the ground. Nostrums from the private sector that each corporation should concentrate on its ‘core’ business now applied themselves to government. The outcome was a mania for ‘downsizing’. What was the government doing owning an airline, a bank and a telecom52


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munications provider? There had been good reasons, but these were lost in the past and could be seen as no longer relevant. Posts and telegraphs, for example, had always been seen as a central national service—one important reason why the colonies saw value in federating. So important was the service, and so central to the linking of the new nation, that the responsible minister had a distinctive title: ‘Postmaster-General’, and in time he acquired power over radio broadcasts and television as well. But in 1975 the government separated the postal and telephonic services and established two statutory commissions to run them. Telecom became famous for the kind of featherbedding that would require two vans and two crews to work on Sundays at maximum penalty rates to install one domestic telephone. Privatising Telecom to create a new hybrid public/private company called Telstra allowed market discipline to end such comfort zones. The sale of Qantas and of the Commonwealth Bank occurred without dramatic public protest, especially as the bank’s customers were allowed to purchase its shares: it all seemed part of an unstoppable trend. In time, half of all Australian households would hold shares— an astonishing change since the war. In the 1940s there had been an urge to nationalise or socialise major industries so that they would be run in the public interest. Forty years later, the urge was to privatise what public enterprises remained so that they would be run efficiently and at lower cost to consumers—in short, run in a new conception of the public interest. State governments privatised their electricity systems, and closed institutions such as mental asylums, allowing the inmates to return to ‘community care’—however helpful that might turn out to be. Government departments ‘outsourced’ such hitherto essential corporate services as information technology; police hired security services to staff some of the entry points to their buildings; and governments used private contractors to operate detention centres and prisons. The Commonwealth, once a large landlord, now began to divest itself of some of its buildings, outsourcing their provision to the private sector, and paying rent like anyone else. 53


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The Commonwealth established companies rather than statutory authorities to run activities viewed as commercial. By 2003, the Commonwealth had converted thirteen statutory corporations to companies, and had sold its interest in most of them. Another 50 companies, wholly or partly owned by the Commonwealth, managed aspects of Australian life ranging from motor vehicle theft reduction to art exhibitions. Telstra, a company in which the Commonwealth still owned 50.1 per cent of the shares, had itself created 110 ‘controlled entities’ by 2003. The Australian Broadcasting Commission transmogrified into the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; by 2003, some of its symphony orchestras had been re-established as subsidiary companies, and it owned a successful chain of ABC Shops. A statutory corporation called ‘The Australian Government Solicitor’ now delivered legal services to the Commonwealth in a competitive context. Each such change affected the lives and careers of the staff of the organisation. No less importantly, these changes shifted the balance of Australian life powerfully from what we call ‘the public sector’ to ‘the private sector’—and of course, in doing so, reduced public scrutiny and control. It is important to emphasise that there was a strongly bipartisan agreement to the thrust of these changes, if not always to their detail. It was the Labor government, in power from 1983 to 1996, which had initiated the direction of many of these changes. Once in power again in 1996, the Coalition enthusiastically continued the process. Governments began to see personal health as a matter of choice rather than one of community standards; education was viewed in a similar way. Perhaps the most significant consequence over the 50 years was that Australia had moved to being one of the four lowest taxed countries in the OECD set (the others being the United States, Japan and Turkey). The Howard government, in its second term, introduced a goods and services tax (GST), first proposed by the Labor Treasurer, Paul Keating, in 1985. The GST was not plainly regressive (that is, it did not hurt the poor more than the rich), but the income tax cuts that preceded, accompanied and followed the GST certainly were. Income and wealth inequalities were much greater by the early 54


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twenty-first century than they had been in the mid-twentieth century. Ordinary Australians watched all this happen without pleasure, but also without huge protest. For one thing, the bi-partisan agreement in Parliament from the mid-1980s until well into the new century that these changes had to occur meant that no political remedy offered itself to the electorate. For another, the long boom throughout much of the twenty years after 1983 cushioned some of the adverse effects, as did the growth of multiple-job and multiple-income families. The Hawke government, through an ‘Accord’ with the unions, managed to temper the worst effects via its ‘social wage’ policies, through which non-cash benefits of various kinds moderated wage claims and assisted low-income families. These years also saw the beginnings of the reconciliation movement with Aboriginal people, a more balanced immigration program, a good deal of affirmative action for women, together with attention to women’s health issues, and some overdue attention to policies aimed at restoring Australia’s environment. Nonetheless, a profound feeling that in some way Australia had fundamentally changed could be detected everywhere. It could be seen in the disaffection within the Labor Party after the election of 2001; it emerged from sociological researches into the Australian middle class; it was plain in the rise of the right-wing One Nation Party; it was a pervasive theme for comment in newspapers and journals of public opinion. It was also a familiar theme in the interviews with members of the Class of ’53. No one could doubt that there was now much less security in the workplace, or that there was far more long-term unemployment, or that unions were no longer as powerful or as well supported as they once had been. Full employment had ceased to be a goal, or had been redefined to mean something like 5–6 per cent unemployment. A short recession in 1990/91 had seemed to cap it all off. No society could be expected to endure economic and social change of this magnitude in a state of smiling good humour. It didn’t matter that governments would go on telling the electorate that things were better than they had ever been, that economic growth greater than 3 per cent per 55


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annum had continued unabated for the longest period ever. For many Australians a settled, predictable existence had been overturned. Their jobs and their employers were not the ones they used to have; the world had become scarier and their confidence had been rattled. Just as the Class of ’53 loved their earlier working years, so many of them deplored what seemed to be happening to them in the 1980s and 1990s. Displacement, golden and not-so-golden handshakes, uncertainty and loss were regular themes in discussions about their working lives at this time. We shall hear some of these stories in a later chapter, but it is important to recognise that, even when bad things were happening, some knew that ‘it just couldn’t keep going the way it was’, as one put it. Everyone could point to a particular way in which Australia had become infected by the notion that you solved problems by shifting them sideways: in universities, a difficult staff member was allowed to teach only his own special field, despite the fact that he had few students; a New South Wales statutory authority had fourteen levels of management to accommodate all the ambitious; organisational problem cases went off on sick leave with a sigh of relief all round; eight executives from a large firm could run up a dinner bill of many thousands of dollars. When there was plenty of money, it didn’t matter. Now that money was tight, and you had to deal with your own problems with your own resources, it was a different matter. For that reason alone, it is important not to over-emphasise the damaging effects of the powerful changes set in motion in December 1983, for no obvious alternative was available. Had Australia not opened itself to the world financial system at the end of 1983, it would inevitably have done so at a later time, almost certainly with harsher consequences. The rapid advance of telecommunications technology, particularly the Internet, has affected the whole world, and Australia could not have avoided its effects. It is true that in the 1980s and 1990s hundreds of thousands of Australians had their jobs redefined, opened to competition from 56


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others or simply abolished. They had little say in the process. Yet it seems most likely that the longer the decision to float the dollar was delayed, the worse the consequences would have been. Paul Kelly argues that the excesses of the 1980s (which he terms ‘the decade of greed’), the horrific failures by banks, the job losses, the overturning of community expectations, even the fact that the value of the Australian dollar is even today more affected by money market speculation than it is by the fundamental worth of the Australian economy—all this has to be set in context. For Australians have survived into the twenty-first century with an economy that is performing much better than most, notwithstanding the brief recession in the early 1990s, and in world terms Australians gain excellent value for money when they purchase goods and services. It is hard to disagree with Paul Kelly on this issue. While it is small consolation to the long-term unemployed and to those whose retirement is a good deal less comfortable than they had reasonably expected, the Australian economy and Australian society have proved to be more resilient than might have been expected.

Politics: plus ca change . . . Australia’s political system, defined rather formally, changed much less than its economy over the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the same statement might be made about the past 150 years. Australia is arguably the world’s oldest continuing representative egalitarian democracy. Its basic democratic institutions date from 1851; it has had no civil war to interrupt its history (unlike the United States); it possessed manhood suffrage with its first representative and responsible government—that of New South Wales, while adult suffrage ruled almost from the beginning of the Federation in 1901. As in other Western democracies, the ebb and flow of national and local politics make up some of the daily fare of Australian newspapers and television, which can provide the appearance of crisis and uncertainty. The system itself, however, is highly stable. 57


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The sequence of national governments after 1951 can easily be summarised. Robert Menzies finally retired in 1966, but the Coalition continued in power until December 1972, led successively by Harold Holt, John McEwen (very briefly after Holt’s presumed drowning in the surf), John Gorton and William McMahon. After 23 years in opposition, Labor returned to power in 1972, retained office at the election in 1974 and was dismissed in controversial circumstances in 1975, failing completely at the elections called a month after the dismissal. The Coalition under Malcolm Fraser won that election and two more in 1977 and 1980, but itself was defeated in 1983. Labor then enjoyed thirteen years in office—its longest sustained period in power at the national level—under Bob Hawke (1983–91) and Paul Keating (1991–96). The Coalition had an easy victory in 1996, and remained in power under John Howard, whose government won a fourth successive term at elections held in 2004. As it happens, the coming and going in government of the major parties was somewhat similar in the first 50 years of the twentieth century. The two most signal political events after 1951 were the decision taken by the Menzies and Holt governments to involve Australia on one side of a civil war in Vietnam, and the GovernorGeneral’s dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975. ‘Vietnam’, unlike Australia’s earlier and later involvements in wars far from its shores, divided the polity, the political parties, friends, colleagues and even families. A number of awkward ingredients made up the issue mix: the prevailing fear of communism; ignorance about the actual context in the zone of war; the lottery-assisted conscription of some 18-year-olds to fight there; a felt need to stand up for the ‘free world’ alongside the new protector, America; and a plausible metaphor in the domino effect. The war itself, conscription and Australia’s role all became increasingly unpopular after 1966, and the newly elected Whitlam government ended the country’s participation very quickly. ‘The dismissal’ three years later caused great anger among the Whitlam government’s supporters and great uncertainty in the general body of citizens. It also morally undermined both its 58


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Coalition successor, whose leaders had engineered the dismissal, and the Governor-General himself, who retired from office in 1977 and lived for much of the rest of his life in London. Despite the uncertainty, the dismissal was accepted at the time, not only by the electorate—which voted in the Fraser Coalition government a month later—but also by Gough Whitlam and his ministers. Thereafter there seemed to be general agreement within politics that such an event should not be allowed to occur again. What has kept Australia’s political system stable over at least the last century is the development of ‘party politics’, a twentieth century innovation now widespread in the Western world. Most Australians now and in the past century have seen one or other of the major parties as ‘their’ party, and they vote for its candidates at most elections. The modern party system emerged in Australia in 1910 and, nearly a century later, it flourishes still. Political parties serve a number of useful purposes for the citizens of Western democracies by simplifying the choices presented to them. Voters in effect delegate their decision-making function to the parties of their choice. Having done so, they can concentrate on other aspects of life. The parties also pass on their own accounts of Australian history, as well as their own analyses of what is good and bad about Australian society. These ideological perspectives colour how most of us view the past and the present—and not simply in terms of politics. The parties survive from generation to generation because children grow up to accept or adopt the partisan choices of their parents—again, most of the time and in most cases. The parties of 1951 remained the parties of 2004. Labor and Liberal were as they had been, in most respects. Certainly the Country Party had changed its name twice—first to the National Country Party and then to the National Party—but it was still the Coalition’s junior partner. A split in the ALP in 1955 had generated a ‘Democratic Labor Party’ that had helped to keep Labor out of office until 1972; it was gone a few years later. From time to time disaffected groups, generally on the right, formed electoral organisations and found candidates. Environmentalism emerged in Australia as it did elsewhere in the Western world, but it too did 59


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not push aside the established parties, which simply added ‘the environment’ to their platforms and, when in office, to their departments. No new political organisation was remarkably successful on polling day. The Australia Party, the Democrats, the Greens, One Nation—all have found it impossible so far to break the stranglehold that the major parties have had on the affections of the large electorate—and on its benign indifference, it should be added. We Australians are habitual and somewhat ritualistic in our politics: the great majority are not Athenian democrats, alert to what is happening in the polity and anxious to play their part. The parties, aware of this, turn election campaigns into self-interest auctions. In this respect, very little changed between 1951 and 2001. Given the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of ‘communism’ as the central issue both of international and domestic politics, is the party battle still the same? All the evidence points to this being the case. Few members of the Class of ’53 commented on any fundamental changes in their own party or in any of the others. And, although one or two felt that the parties had ‘come together’, a comprehensive analysis of whether or not the Australian political parties had ‘converged’ in the last part of the twentieth century found against the notion. It was, of course, true that Labor had moved away from a high-spending perspective towards ‘sound economic management’, but in social policy terms it was and had always been well to the left of the Liberal Party, which moved even further than Labor towards market fundamentalism. And the Australian electorate itself had changed, seeing lower taxes and greater personal choice as important in a way that was not true in the 1970s. In terms of their own political journeys the Class of ’53 conformed to the conventional picture of political partisanship in Australia. Since enrolment and voting came to them at age 21 (the shift to adulthood at 18 occurred in 1974), most voted first in 1958, a high point for the Coalition. In that year, the Coalition parties won most of their votes. As Keith McIntyre put it: ‘When I got the vote I always voted Country Party both State and Federal, and never gave it any consideration.’ In 2004 the parties score about equally well from the class. Fifteen of the class are now regular Coalition 60


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supporters, twelve are regular supporters of the ALP, and one has moved from Labor to the Greens. But, in a significant change from their youth, twelve now decide either on the quality of the candidates or on the issues of concern to them. Rod Rich put it quite forcefully: ‘I have always voted for a man, never for a party. I would never vote for a donkey, and I’ve seen a few put up. If a party wants my vote they have to put up a good candidate.’ Herb Higgins, though a grazier like his father and grandfather, sees voting strategically: ‘At an early age I realised that you ought to vote against the people in power. Nothing ever happens until the electorate is marginal.’ Around half of Australians vote much as their parents did before them, so family background is important. Of the majority of the class, who were confident that they knew their parents’ party preference, most began to vote with the same preference. Most of those who had no idea of their parents’ partisanship are now Coalition supporters. Of course, it has not been a simple process. Diana Pearce, daughter of a farmer and grazier, became a primary school teacher and spent her career in schools in Sydney’s poorer innercity suburbs. The contrast with her original surroundings radicalised her: ‘Coming into contact with really disadvantaged kids made me ask: What is a teacher for? Things were just different to the way I had thought. It made things real.’ Rex Chidley, an otherwise staunch Liberal, voted Labor in 1972, attracted by the vision of Australia set out by Gough Whitlam. ‘Never again!’ he commented sardonically on his own lapse. George Edwards had a similar experience, borrowing a large amount of money in order to acquire a printing business just before encountering significant increases to wages and conditions in the Labor period, for which he held the Whitlam government accountable. The effects nearly sent him to the wall. The Whitlam years were remembered as important for many, in focusing their attention on political issues for the first time, in arguing with friends and family, or in drawing former conservatives into the Labor fold. (‘When Whitlam got in I went Labor with the hope that things would change.’) Keith McIntyre’s personal story gives a good account of the kind of conversion process that occurred to some. 61


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rights. I also met Charlie Perkins and many of the Aboriginal activists in Canberra . . . I had great empathy with their cause. When Whitlam came to power Billy Snedden became Leader of the Opposition. John Knight became one of his private secretaries. Every Thursday afternoon after work I would go to Parliament House and drink in the Opposition Leader’s office. There I met a great range of politicians from both sides . . . and many journalists. I also became good friends with Neville Bonner. I still have very strong anticonservative views . . .

Keith McIntyre arrived in Canberra as a mature-age student to commence a postgraduate degree at the Australian National University, and moved into a new student residence into which came ‘all the senior troublemakers’. The year was 1965, ‘the Vietnam war was hotting up’, and Keith became involved. His parents had belonged to a small fundamentalist Protestant sect and were Country Party supporters as well. Keith had started out that way. Now he moved to the left, debating issues passionately with another UNE contemporary, John Knight, who would later become a Senator. Of course I got caught up in the Whitlam push and for a brief time joined the Labor Party. My first wife was a big mover in WEL and women’s

John Knight’s unexpected death a few years later was an awful blow: ‘I lost a great deal of interest in day-to-day politics.’

Over the half-century the whole parliamentary system became more ‘professionalised’. In an era that saw the establishment of dozens of new knowledge-based professions, parliamentary politics became a profession very like the others. It was no longer an arena in which citizens selected one of their number to represent them in the nation’s councils. There were now ways into the profession that had not existed so obviously in the past. The trade union was still important for the Australian Labor Party, but it was by no means so important, if only because trade union membership had 62


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proportionately more than halved in the second half of the century. Now the political parties themselves, and the private offices of parliamentarians—ministers especially—were an important source of new aspirant MPs. As Parliament became a profession, so political sons saw their fathers’ occupation as one that they might follow themselves. In 2004 the MP for the New South Wales seat of Richmond, Larry Anthony (elected 1996), was the son of a former MP for his seat, Doug Anthony (1957–84) and the grandson of another parliamentarian Larry (also Richmond, 1937–57). A minister like both his father and grandfather, he faced across the floor of the House of Representatives two other parliamentary sons, Simon Crean and Kim Beazley. Their fathers had been ministers in the Whitlam government, the sons were ministers in the Hawke and Keating governments. The younger Beazley and the younger Crean had been successive Leaders of the Opposition. A century earlier, such dynasties were quite rare and would have been thought of, by some at least, as examples of nepotism. Now they, and many others like them in state politics, occasioned little comment on that score. Larry Anthony did not retain his seat in 2004: Richmond, though still in the far northeast corner of New South Wales, was no longer a farmers’ constituency, but a largely urban seat containing retired people, academics, a ‘welfare ghetto’ or two and a familiar mix of occupations and professions. The federal system remained much as it had done. In the 1950s a generation of students at university learned that the federal system was on the way out. The Commonwealth’s control of taxation revenue and the increasing command of the whole nation that technological innovations provided together pointed to a future in which, inevitably, there would be only one government for the nation. The states would be swept aside. Fifty years later the states were, if anything, even more firmly positioned, having won a share of the growing GST revenue. The electorate had shown no inclination whatever either to give the Commonwealth more power or to reduce that of the states, let alone to abolish them. Moreover, the Commonwealth’s zeal to take over 63


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state functions had waned a good deal after the 1970s and the growth of the small-government ideology. The relative longevity of state governments and the tone and language of federal–state discussions—even some of the topics that caused the language— were little changed from the 1950s. Professionalism had another outcome. Federal parliamentarians had once possessed an office in their electorates and shared secretarial assistance when in Canberra. When Whitlam came to power in 1972, he introduced for the first time the appointment of people from outside the public service into ministerial offices, in part to help enforce the government’s policies on what was (probably incorrectly) seen as a conservative and anti-Labor service. Though that experiment was not wholly successful, and Fraser reduced the size of private offices, when Labor returned to power in 1983 it brought advisers back in even greater numbers. By 2004 they had become numerous and important, while the Australian Public Service was now much smaller, less confident and less central. It had undergone a number of changes that reduced its independence and its size, so that while the secretary of a Commonwealth department still had the final right of advice to the minister from within the service, that advice might not be accepted by the Minister’s principal private secretary or the relevant advisers in an office that might have as many as a dozen staff. Departmental secretaries no longer had the eminence or the respect that their predecessors had enjoyed after the war. It needs to be said that such eminence is not always a good thing, and that wrangles between the mandarins had sometimes frustrated good government—a point never forgotten by the parliamentarians. It can fairly be said that, from the Whitlam government onwards, each administration reduced the power and the standing of the public service. These changes were themselves related to what was called— in Britain, Canada and New Zealand, as well as Australia—the growing ‘presidentialisation’ of politics. The Prime Minister had once been termed the ‘first’ minister, and there was then a sense that he was first among equals. By the end of the century both 64


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The big picture

Labor and Liberal Prime Ministers had assumed positions of prominence not shared even by Sir Robert Menzies. In part, it was the immediacy of television that was the cause; in part, the growing involvement of Prime Ministers in foreign policy as the jet aeroplane helped national leaders to meet one another regularly; in part, the obsession with ‘leadership’ that followed from both; in part, the tendency of what was now a very large press gallery to concentrate on the top figure. Fifty years earlier, a new minister would depend a great deal on the wisdom, guidance and support of the permanent secretary of the department he was responsible for. As the new century opened, the new minister might decide that he or she did not want to work with a certain secretary, who was no longer permanent, and could be moved, or dispensed with altogether. Ministers and their policies and prejudices had become much more important, and the public servants—despite the rhetoric—much less important. In consequence, the ministers, and especially the Prime Minister, were becoming both more important and in consequence more distant even from their own party and certainly from the electorate. One consequence of all of these changes was an increasingly noisy disenchantment with politics itself. It is important not to exaggerate this change, because there is ample evidence that scepticism about the motives and ethics of politicians is longstanding in Australia. The significant shift, however, may lie in the growth in importance of the market. If it were the market, not the government, to which one looked for the wherewithal to survive and to prosper, if government was plainly seeking to become smaller and less important, if tax cuts rather than new programs were the priority—why would one pay great attention to politics? Better to take that extra part-time job, or pay more attention to the stock market, or invest in a rental property. It certainly seemed to be the case that very many Australians went about their lives as though the political system was incidental to them. That seemed to be true also in the other Anglophone democracies. In every case, this state of affairs represented a marked contrast to the 1950s. 65


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A scepticism about the honesty of contemporary politicians and the political process ran through the comments of the class. ‘I am still an active branch member of the Labor Party,’ wrote Phyllis Mace, ‘although I sometimes despair that the best we are doing is supporting the lesser of two evils.’ Several thought Australia was ‘over-governed’, and that there were too many politicians. Rex Chidley wanted a Parliament ‘full of Independents who would vote on the merits of an issue, rather than on some pre-determined ideological position’. John Gilmour was one of a number who wanted to see more emphasis placed on local government. And there were those who

wanted an end to ‘nark’ parties, an obstructionist Senate, and the ‘sledging’ and rancour they saw as characteristic of Parliament. ‘Politicians are just “show ponies”,’ commented Deirdrie Harrison. ‘I’m not sure that most of them are worth a vote,’ said another. ‘I’m a bit disgusted and disillusioned about it all at the moment,’ offered Nola Nealon. Diana Pearce added another dimension: ‘I have become more uncomfortable with how good our political system is. The use of private polls and talk-back radio makes me uneasy. Maybe our system is better than others. But there’s a fragility in it—some sort of undercurrent that is undermining it.’

Compulsory voting in Australia keeps turnout very high, and there is no evidence that Australians wish to dispense with it. Yet all the evidence points in one direction. In the early twenty-first century, a much better-educated cohort of Australians is sceptical about politics, and both less enamoured of the political parties and less interested in the choices offered by them than had been the case in the early 1950s. In the following chapters, we shall see some reasons why this should be the case.

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3 THE 1 ENGINES CHAPTEROF TITLE CHANGE

I realise that our education at AHS gave us a solid foundation to build our lives on. We had very good teachers (with a couple of possible exceptions) who were caring, and encouraged us to think for ourselves. We were introduced to the classics and languages, which helped open up wider horizons, which was important for country kids in such a conservative community in the 1950s. (Nola Nealon)

Three factors working separately and together have been the principal ingredients of the changes to Australian society delineated in the big picture: they are education, wealth and immigration. Of the three, education has been the most important. It is possible— easily possible—to imagine an Australia three times wealthier at the end of the twentieth century but not much changed otherwise. It is somewhat less possible to imagine a postwar Australian world characterised by a massive inflow of immigrants whose members came to occupy the lowest strata of society and remained there. Neither scenario unfolded, however, for education acted as the catalyst in enabling a threefold increase in wealth and a massive inflow of immigrants to transform the Australia of the 1950s into a much more self-aware, creative and tolerant society. The immigrants and their children more than doubled the Australian population, and brought with them new possibilities of all kinds in languages and music and dance and food and wine. They brought new conceptions of beauty, of the good life, and of family life. But 67


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it was Australia’s substantially increased wealth that made many things possible, including immigration on a large scale, so we start by considering it.

The blessings of wealth The late Duchess of Windsor is reputed to have pronounced that a woman could never be too slim or too rich. Countries are at least removed from worries about their dress size, but there is some doubt that they can ever be too rich. Rich countries may squander their wealth, but poor countries—even if they know what to do— can never be sure where to start. Every advance seems to require an earlier achievement that has not yet occurred. A great reforming education policy will need teachers, whose preparation implies already existing high schools, universities and teachers colleges. Where are they to come from? Where does one start? Australia was one of the world’s wealthiest countries in 1950, and that was a great start. Much had already been done. There was, for example, an existing education system of good quality, if small in scale at the secondary level, and there were existing universities of good quality, if small in numbers and in enrolments. The first 30 postwar years gave Australia a strong fresh impetus. There was not, as there had been after the First World War, a massive increase in unemployment as returning soldiers competed for jobs. On the contrary, there was full employment for a generation, which greatly increased purchasing power and ended the need for governments to spend money on unemployment relief and connected social services. Governments now had money to spend on improving their domains. Run-down infrastructure, both public and private, needed replacement, and replacing it provided new jobs and greater productive capacity. Once production of peacetime goods recommenced, full employment and pent-up demand from depression and war kept factories busy. Immigration and the baby boom kept demand for housing high, while low interest rates and high wages enabled more people to 68


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The engines of change

buy rather than to rent, though the amount of public housing also increased. The cities and towns all began to spread out. New suburbs required new schools, new shopping centres and new roads. The development of a new minerals industry, especially in iron ore, copper and aluminium, a motor vehicle industry, new industries associated with television and communications generally, book publishing, advertising—these initiatives generated capital inflow and the creation of further jobs. Australia was becoming a diversified economy, with a larger services sector that generated more wealth than the traditional staples of wool and wheat and dairy, all of which faced troubles in the international marketplace. The oil-price shock of 1973 brought the boom to an end, but it did not cause a depression. The floating of the Australian dollar in 1984, the development of new industries built around computing, and the astonishing spread of the microprocessor all brought a new diversification of the economy, which in time would draw 100 000 foreign students to a greatly expanded higher education system, attract five million international visitors to one of the world’s new tourist destinations and make Australian wines sought after all over the world. These endeavours increased Australian comparative wealth to the point where, as we have seen, Australia stood in world terms much as it had in 1951, save that there were now many more wealthy countries to stand with it, and that its wealth came from a much wider range of endeavours. As with its creation, the distribution of that wealth at the end of the twentieth century was somewhat different to the distribution 50 years earlier. The ‘new money’ had eclipsed the old: television, mining, property development, banking and the retailing of ‘lifestyle’ had generated the new wealth, not wool and department stores. In any period where a country grows rapidly wealthier, there are always big winners. They are usually the people who already have money, or people with property, skills, inside knowledge and power. By 2001, several Australians had wealth estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and thousands more were very wealthy. At the same time, much of the wealth had been shared. It 69


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could hardly be otherwise. Money incomes rose steadily throughout the half-century, and prices generally fell. In 1951, for example, a new basic Holden sedan cost the equivalent of 107 weeks’ work for someone on the basic wage. In 2004, the measuring unit had become ‘average weekly earnings’, an income rather higher than the basic wage would have been. In that year, the cheapest new basic Holden equivalent, a Toyota Camry, required 32.4 weeks’ work at average weekly earnings, a figure very similar to that in the United States and Canada. But that Camry was now about twice the price of the cheapest available new car, and Australians had available to them 52 automotive brands with 320 models, which came from twenty different countries. As real incomes rose, food and clothing, lighting and heating and basic shelter used up smaller proportions of the expenditure of the household, and that meant more discretionary income. On the whole, the urge to save seemed to disappear—partly because of the now easy availability of credit and partly because of the insistent pressure from advertisers to buy. The possibilities for purchase expanded to meet the opportunity provided by the available money. As that occurred, and double-income families became the norm, the number of children likely in each new family declined, and that meant even more discretionary income. What Australians did with their new-found wealth in turn generated new money-making activities. In comparison with their counterparts in the 1950s, Australians in the early twenty-first century ate out a great deal and bought much processed food. They enjoyed concerts, the theatre, musicals and opera. They bought art and sculpture to adorn the much larger houses they now lived in, despite their smaller families, and often to adorn their second house at the beach or in the country. They had much larger wardrobes to accommodate a much larger set of clothing and shoes. They were devoted to self-improvement, enrolling in courses of all kinds to improve their minds and their skills, as well as in gymnasiums to improve their fitness. They shopped not simply to buy necessities but to enjoy the experience, and shopping malls now performed some of the functions of the village square of past 70


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times. Malls provided multiple opportunities for people to meet one another, by arrangement or otherwise, as well as hundreds of places at which to buy or simply marvel, and dozens of places to eat and drink. Not everybody did all of these things, of course, and there were losers as well as winners—at least relatively. Average incomes were notably lower in Tasmania, Queensland and South Australia than in the other states and the ACT and Northern Territory. The old were much wealthier than the young, partly because of the property boom that began in the mid-1990s and greatly benefited people who already owned or were buying their houses, who were more likely to be older than young. Australia’s regional areas were a good deal poorer than the cities. Not only had rural industries experienced trouble, but technology and the much better opportunities available in the city also induced farmers to sell up once they could not afford the new machines. Property acreages roughly doubled, and the numbers of farmers and their families were reduced by more than half. Small towns declined while bigger ones grew. To have a university campus, a base hospital or some equivalent component of modern Australia was a godsend. To be on the coast was a plus; to be inland was a minus. The sense of loss and betrayal experienced all over regional Australia as these changes slowly and remorselessly occurred was an important element in the rise of the protesting One Nation Party in 1998. In New South Wales, the New State Movement slogan of the 1920s that ‘NSW’ simply stood for ‘Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong’—the three large cities— was still widespread 80 years later. Relative disadvantage was not ignored, however. Around four million individuals, or a fifth of the nation, were receiving direct financial benefits from the Australian government, which amounted to $54 billion in 2002. Not all of the recipients were poor, by any means, for there was a good deal of ‘middle-class welfare’ mixed in with the help provided to those genuinely disadvantaged. We consider some of the less enjoyable effects of the distribution of wealth and income in a later chapter. 71


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More-or-less universal secondary education Of all the changes that Australia has experienced since 1951 the shift to a general belief in the virtues of education and training has not only been the most powerful but possibly the one least predictable in the early 1950s. While the urgent need to build and staff more schools has been a continuing element in Australian electoral politics, probably from the beginning of responsible government, the existence of full employment after the war, plus the high wages both for young workers and for the unskilled, offered a countervailing inducement to leave school as soon as possible. The Commonwealth government, aware of Australia’s widespread lack of skill during the war, developed an important Army Education Scheme during the conflict and established the Commonwealth Repatriation Training Scheme after it. In both cases a key purpose was to prepare ex-servicemen and women for university courses and for skilled employment. The Commonwealth also set up the Australian National University in 1946, to ensure that Australia had its own high-quality postgraduate training facility. In these endeavours the Commonwealth anticipated a nationwide movement into formal education that was already evident as the 1950s began. Even in 1951, education was a considerable endeavour: 50 000 teachers in 7 700 schools taught nearly 1.1 million pupils. A little over two thirds of all this activity took place in the public, or government, schools. Immigrant families had already supplied 75 000 of the increased numbers in the classrooms, and would supply legions more. In that same year, the Commonwealth government introduced a ‘free milk’ scheme for all schoolchildren, as much to provide more income to dairy farmers as to secure the health of the pupils. Many of the schools were tiny, catering only to a few families in isolated rural areas, and their pupils probably benefited most from the school broadcasts of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the other Commonwealth contribution to school education. These ‘one teacher’ schools were to be the first workplaces for several of the Class of ’53 when they left teachers’ college at the end of 1955. 72


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A half-century later school education was one of Australia’s major industries. It took place in nearly 10 000 schools, in which 225 000 teachers taught 3.3 million pupils. As had been the case in the 1950s, more than two-thirds of the industry was in the public sector, but now a very large amount of public funding went to the ‘private’ schools as well—a source of constant political wrangling. In retrospect, governments had never had much choice in providing ‘state aid’, at least in respect of the Catholic system, which cared for one child in every four. The Catholic Church could not have afforded anything like the expansion in school education that actually occurred, and in the 1960s a four-day closing of parochial schools commanded by the Bishop in one country diocese in New South Wales was enough to show all governments what the alternatives to state aid might be. Primary education in Australia had been ‘free, compulsory and secular’ for a long time, but public secondary education—even in New South Wales, which was the most advanced state in this field— was a creation of the later twentieth century. The growth in numbers after 1951, therefore, was far greater in secondary education. Primary numbers rose from just over a million in 1951 to 1.8 million in 1975 and then levelled out, reaching 1.9 million in 2002. Secondary numbers jumped from only 270 000 in 1951 to 1.1 million in 1975 and then to 1.4 million in 2002. Before long, the five years of secondary education became six. Such increases produced an intense demand for qualified high school teachers. One of the Class of ’53 who held a Teachers’ College Scholarship, the means by which many pupils made their way to university, sought permission to add an Honours year to his undergraduate study at university; he was told firmly by the Department, in an almost military metaphor, that he was ‘needed out there in the schools’. Five of the class who trained as primary teachers in the two-year course at Armidale Teachers’ College finished up as principals or subject masters in high schools; all had gained university degrees along the way. By the end of the twentieth century, there was not a town in Australia of any size that did not have its own high school, and the Year 12 enrolments were not much less than those in the beginning 73


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classes. The days when only a few students stayed on after the Intermediate Certificate (long gone) or their fifteenth birthday had passed. The increases in enrolments throughout the second half of the century were a little erratic in their timing, and had something to do with opportunities in the job market. But their trend was always upwards. The numbers of schools rose quickly to about 10 000, and stayed at about the same level thereafter. The small rural schools closed as better roads allowed school buses to venture further out from the towns, while new schools—particularly new high schools—were built in the new suburbs. But the numbers in the classrooms rose and rose; only the rate of increase declined as birthrates themselves diminished in the 1980s and 1990s. Teachers grew as a profession—from 78 000 in 1961 to 124 000 in 1971, 178 000 in 1981 and 200 000 in 1991. Something had occurred in Australia to make the education of one’s children a much more important item in family agendas than was the case before the Second World War. This culture change had a number of causes. One, already mentioned, was the postwar feeling that the future must offer a better life, and that education must be part of that better life—for girls as well as for boys. Another was the declared need for a more highly skilled workforce, so that parents had a clear sense that there would be jobs for their better-educated children if they persisted with that education. A third was the attitudes of the increasing immigrant population: immigrants were determined that their children should enjoy a good life, and for them education was the obvious escalator, whatever sacrifices the parents might have to make. A fourth was that, over time, the numbers of jobs requiring little more than physical strength or good eyesight diminished, as machines began to take over the domain of unskilled work. A fifth cause of change came from the increasing margins for skill in salaries and conditions; the old standard of the ‘basic wage’ received by an unskilled male worker, sufficient to keep a small family in a condition of modest comfort, gradually declined and then ceased to be relevant. It was replaced by the notion of a ‘minimum’ wage, which contained no implications about family needs. 74


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The teaching profession—at 225 000 still one of the most numerous in contemporary Australia—has not achieved autonomy: its members are employees and are highly unionised. The demand for teachers in the 1950s and 1960s could not be satisfied in the ordinary way. It was common for newly appointed teachers to be given classes outside their disciplinary competence, and to find themselves teaching much larger classes than had been the case in earlier years. Classes in mathematics and science were hardest hit, if only because the numbers coming through the schools and universities with high performance in these areas had always been quite small. The schools never caught up, because the wider options for professional careers that came in the 1970s and 1980s meant much more competition for the better-performing graduates—especially those in mathematics and science. Almost without exception, the Class of ’53 students who became teachers themselves encountered large classes when they were released into the system as novice teachers; some were thrown into subject areas for which their only preparation had been some dimly remembered school lessons of their own. ‘I first taught at Primbee near Port Kembla,’ wrote Isobel Corin, ‘the classes consisting mainly of Greek and German children. What a revelation that was! I chuckle when I hear the politicians argue about class sizes now—I had a combined 2nd/3rd grade of 52 pupils!’ John Gilmour commented that his generation ‘were thrown in at the deep end. My first class con– tained 48 pupils of low ability’.

Robin Faulkner found himself at Chullora confronting a class ‘consisting mainly of kids who had been expelled from other schools. I learned a lot quite quickly.’ A few started as ‘The Teacher’ in rural one-teacher schools. Nola Nealon, married to one of these teachers, recalled the first day like this: ‘There it was—a scattering of wheat– sheep farms, a cemetery, a corrugated iron hall, and us in this 1912-vintage broken-down house with a leaking roof next to a most neglected school, pit toilets, no phone and mail twice a week. I looked at Don and said, “I want to go home to Mum!” He said, “So do I.” Then we just laughed and got on with it. Seven years later we had a show place.’

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Another significant change at the end of the century was a drift away from public education: in the 1990s students began enrolling in private schools in much larger numbers. Between 1997 and 2002, for example, the numbers attending public schools increased by 28 000, while the numbers attending private schools increased by 104 000. A number of factors operated here. Private schools were no longer academically suspect (as most had once been to some degree), and indeed now frequently produced superior outcomes for their senior students to most public schools. Greater wealth allowed more parents to choose private schooling as an option, and the Coalition government gave ‘choice’ a high priority in its value system. The decline of denominational boundaries meant that the Catholic school system, now supported largely from public funds, was another option for those families who liked the greater discipline and respect for tradition perceived to characterise many of these schools. While a community-wide revival of religion was not one of the principal causes of the drift to private schools, it was nonetheless true that groups of parents concerned to ensure that their children were taught in what they defined as a ‘Christian’ environment did begin to organise the building and staffing of some new schools, especially in the outer suburbs of the major cities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, international comparative analysis ranked the Australian school education system highly in terms of outcomes in reading-literacy and mathematics, but not so highly in terms of equity. Family socio-economic circumstances still play a more significant role in determining educational outcomes in Australia than they do, for example, in Canada or Finland. Governments worldwide recognise the importance of their educational systems and puzzle over how to improve them. Their size makes the quick implementation of change difficult, while their budgetary importance means that small improvements over the whole system can be extremely expensive. Australian governments, constrained by low-tax regimes and by the fact that state and federal governments are deeply involved in providing and funding education (which in most other countries is 76


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much more a local responsibility), have experimented with interventions of various kinds and then increasingly called for ‘accountability’, which has usually meant generalised testing. Increasing accountability without the resources needed to achieve the targets set, together with the introduction by successive ministers of different fashions, has kept the domain turbulent. The result for the profession has been a certain demoralisation, which we will consider again in the next chapter. Teachers work harder, are less respected and are paid relatively less than was the case with their predecessors of the 1950s. The same could probably be said, however, for many professions. Underneath all of this change was a worldwide increase in the amount of knowledge, which had a push–pull effect on the world of work. By the century’s end, the quantum of human knowledge, measured in academic terms, had increased at least 50 times. New knowledge flowed from or led to the solving of problems, which in turn led to more new knowledge. The steady economic growth after the Second World War helped to generate the increase in knowledge, as did the belief that since the war had been won through the application of knowledge, the peace could be ‘won’ in a similar way. Governments initially set up research bureaus and began to see that effective problem-solving, not just administration, was within their reach. They later disbanded many of these bureaus when they came to see that problem-solving was just too hard and exposed governments to criticism. By the 1990s there was confident talk of ‘the knowledge economy’ and of the universal need for ‘lifelong learning’. New knowledge produced not simply new skills, but new professions, as in the case of computing. Since the universities were the principal homes and guardians of new knowledge, they became over time the places for the preparation and training of the new professions. Universities also quickly became the source of much advice and many advisers to governments and to the private sector, at first on an almost gratis basis, and later on for a fee. Moreover, many of the older professions whose practitioners had once undertaken their professional education in the workplace—like accountancy, law and 77


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nursing—moved the locus of that education into the higher education sector, to take advantage of the new knowledge available there. The outcome of all these pressures was an increase in the number, size and scale of universities which proved to be even more dramatic than the growth of schools.

The boom in higher education In 1951, eight universities and three small university colleges (in Canberra, Armidale and Newcastle) prepared 32 000 students for a small range of professional careers. Few of the students were there simply because of a love of learning. Fifty years later the 81 000 staff in 40 public higher education institutions, two private universities (Bond in Queensland and Notre Dame in Western Australia) and a small retinue of specialised colleges, like the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, the Australian Maritime College and the National Institute of Dramatic Art, taught nearly 850 000 students. Most of the careers they were preparing for had not existed in 1951, or had not then required university study and, once again, very few of the students were at university because of a simple love of learning. In general, not quite 80 in every 100 pupils who enter high school now complete six years of secondary education; two-thirds of them expect to go on to university, and most of them will do so—either immediately or within a few years. Work of any financially rewarding kind requires substantial education after school. As with schools, the growth of universities was erratic, but again the trend was always upwards. Increasing enrolments in schools and universities led instantly to pressure on governments to provide more schools, more classrooms, more teachers, more university places, more universities. Because state governments obtained most of their revenue from a taxation system administered and controlled by the Commonwealth, the states quickly sought to pass the responsibility on to the Commonwealth government, although education was (and remains) a domain where the 78


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states have possessed almost complete responsibility. Because education is not one of the powers given to the Commonwealth by the Constitution in Section 51 (save in the words ‘benefits to students’), successive Commonwealth governments have used their Constitutional capacity to make grants to the states to intervene in the shaping of Australian education. In school education, the Commonwealth was responsible in 1951 for what occurred in its own territories, notably the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. In the early 1960s it began to fund the construction of science laboratories in both public and private secondary schools, and that brought about an acrimonious state aid debate which is still alive in the early twentyfirst century. The Whitlam government set up a Schools Commission in 1973 that began to make grants to the states for school education; these rapidly amounted to half a billion dollars by the end of the 1970s. The changing division of these funds between public and private school systems has always been contested. By 2001, the Commonwealth was spending nearly $6 billion on school education compared with the $21 billion spent by the states (including the two large territories, now responsible for their own school education). The Commonwealth is a major player. In higher education, however, it has effectively been the only player for 30 years. The Menzies government commissioned a major inquiry into the universities once postwar enrolments began to cause cries of anguish from the states and from the universities themselves. The projections of the resulting Murray Report (1958) were exceeded almost at once. The government then assisted the funding of the growth and commissioned a new inquiry (the Martin Report, in 1963) which outlined a ‘binary’ or two-level system of higher education. In 1974, the Whitlam government legislated to take over the funding of higher education from the states and to make higher education free of tuition fees, and in 1988 it abolished the binary system, replacing it with a ‘unified national system’. Later Commonwealth initiatives put pressure on the universities to find new sources of funding, and reintroduced fees in a new form: the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) charge. 79


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In 2003 the Commonwealth provided only 40 per cent of the $12 billion spent in that year by the universities, a notable decline from the 90 per cent and more common in the late 1970s. The financial contribution of the states to their universities is now in most cases negligible. The universities themselves have become assiduous money-raisers, mostly from the fees paid by overseas and postgraduate students and from designing educational and training programs desired and paid for by large organisations. Most university students, in contrast with their predecessors in the 1950s, are now effectively part-time, although they are technically undertaking full-time study, since they somehow have to earn enough money to stay at university—which for most means finding paid work. As a consequence, university students in the early twentyfirst century are the hardest working of all. Universities have become central to contemporary Australia, for preparing the phalanxes of professionals on whom everybody depends, for developing, distilling and synthesising the knowledge the professionals use, and for undertaking the research that allows new generations of Australians to understand who they are and how their society and its environment work. For all that, they remain rather mysterious to the society and rather unpopular with politicians, with the left seeing them as a bastion of privilege, and the right regarding them as a hotbed of radicalism. Because these large institutions are naturally untidy, there is some justice in both assertions. Changes in scale of this magnitude produced major changes in culture and style. The universities of the early 1950s still had something of the character of a gentlemen’s club. Students were addressed politely as ‘Mr Brown’ and ‘Miss Smith’—a shock to the new male arrivals at the University of New England from Armidale High School, who were accustomed to being referred to mostly by their surname. Before long, new faculties appeared. The University of New England established a Faculty of Rural Science, the first in Australia, in 1955; 50 years later there were dozens of faculties that had no real counterpart in 1955. Many of them began in the colleges of advanced education, the second strand of the binary 80


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system set up after the Martin Committee report of 1965. But after 1988, when that system was abolished at a stroke, they could be found in every university. The great growth in the system did not occur in the old faculties of arts and science, which began to taper off in enrolments in the 1980s, but in the areas of management, business, computing, health, education and tourism—some of which had existed previously, though under other names and at much lower levels of interest and funding. Another source of the growth lay in the need to undertake more than one degree. In 1953 only the headmaster and the deputy headmaster at Armidale High possessed Master’s degrees, and they were unusually qualified even in the teaching service. But the rapid advance of human knowledge meant that before long professionals would need to refresh their own knowledge to take account of new discoveries and new perspectives. That meant refresher courses or postgraduate diplomas. Further, one might need two different kinds of specialised knowledge (for example, accounting and computing) to be able to move quickly and vertically within the workforce. That meant second degrees or postgraduate diplomas in other areas. Finally, the need for new knowledge stimulated postgraduate study in the same discipline. That meant doctoral study, a possibility that did not really exist in Australia before the war. These three effects were already visible in the 1950s, when Commonwealth Postgraduate Scholarships were established, but they saw their full flowering from the mid-1980s. In 2002, some 156 000 students were undertaking higher degrees and another 69 000 were enrolled in postgraduate certificate or diploma courses, compared with 624 000 in undergraduate courses. Critics could express concern over what seemed to them a growth in rampant ‘credentialism’, but in fact the scale of knowledge meant that one degree could no longer be enough for anyone who was ambitious or wished to insure against becoming redundant. In any case, most of these students were paying for the extra education, and they enjoyed what they were doing. Australians had become hooked on study and learning—something that would have seemed quite unlikely in 1951. 81


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Vocational education: The Cinderella The third sector in post-secondary education, Vocational Education and Training (VET) has a history almost as long the universities, and benefited in the same fashion from the explosion in knowledge and the need for skills. In 1951 the technical college, or ‘tech’, received boys who wanted to be apprentices in a skilled trade and girls who wanted to be secretaries, hairdressers and clerks. Over the whole country, some 7 000 technical teachers prepared 160 000 apprentices and other students in 146 technical colleges. Private business colleges had a high status in each of the capital cities, preparing girls who had completed their secondary education for work in company and professional offices. ‘ The tech’ also provided instruction in art (‘the plastic crafts’) and home care. Technical colleges were much affected in what they offered by the weight of local industry, so colleges in country towns would offer courses in agricultural and pastoral skills, those in manufacturing areas courses in machining and engineering, those close to major defence establishments courses in avionics or the central need of the base, and so on. The growth in technical education was comparable to that in higher education. In 2001, VET enrolments were 2.3 million in the publicly funded system alone. The VET field, like schools but unlike universities (with the sole exceptions of the privately funded Bond University in Queensland and the University of Notre Dame in Western Australia), retained an extensive system of private providers, while many employers themselves were deeply involved in training their own employees. The range of courses provided in the VET sector across Australia covered practically every skill that led to employment or to leisure-time activity. Increasingly, VET and higher education courses were becoming linked so that students could move without difficulty from one institution to another. In the early twenty-first century, it could truly be said that if one wants to study something, learn a skill or become knowledgeable in an area there is a course or program somewhere that will fit the bill. And people are increasingly prepared to pay to acquire such knowledge. 82


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The VET sector has found it most difficult to attract consistent public and political attention. It carries some historic baggage as the arena for the academic also-rans of high school, whom the sector prepares for skilled blue-collar rather than for the parentally desired white-collar occupations. The great majority of high school students completing their twelfth year of school think only in terms of university. ‘TAFE’ (from Technical and Further Education), as the sector came to be called in the 1980s, is simply less glamorous. Yet its enrolled numbers are enormous and, while universities focus on transition from TAFE to university, seeing TAFE simply as a supply source, the reality is that even greater numbers go to TAFE for further skilling after they complete their university courses. It offers specific skills which the older universities rather decry, seeing them as ‘training’ rather than as the ‘education’ which they regard as the proper role for universities. Governments knew that vocational education and training were important, and established and partly funded the Australian National Training Authority (ANTA) in 1992 to advise the federal and state ministers responsible. ANTA began to shift the emphasis on to ‘education and training for work’, in order to facilitate links with universities and bring better vocational training into the schools. It was the force behind the search for recognised ‘competencies’ and a National Qualifications Framework that embodied them. ANTA encouraged TAFE institutes to provide training packages which were then purchased by governments and industry. All this activity produced many inquiries and much restructuring, and the outcomes would have been better had governments funded the new initiatives properly, but in the TAFE sector governments were no more generous than they had been in higher education. What saved the TAFE system was the demand by students for education and training in new areas. For TAFE is attracting some young people who have aspirations quite different to a university degree and a white-collar job. From the 1980s came a steady growth in the quality of the food and service in Australian restaurants and hotels. By the end of the century some chefs were celebrity figures, and TAFE was happy to 83


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train those who wished to join them, along with those who wait on tables—an occupation which many university students undertake to help them survive higher education without scholarships. Australia’s film industry became notable for its capacity to find new possibilities in animation; the clever backroom boys and girls were TAFE-trained. TAFE institutes were the main training grounds for grape-growers and the value-added horticulture industry that sprang up after the 1970s, and of course for all the new skilled trades that were built on the back of computing and the microprocessor. And some TAFE institutes are successful enough to attract their share of the flourishing overseas student market; the skills they provide are in strong demand everywhere. Yet TAFE lacks the glamour of higher education. Ministers enjoy the glory of a media moment when awarding a university the funds for a Centre in Astroclassics, even though they know that any community payoff from this endeavour is years away. TAFE institutes are much closer to community needs in the research they undertake. In New South Wales, for example, TAFE institutes in different parts of the state are involved in areas like vocational rehabilitation, training for Indigenous people, regional development, youth at risk, tourism, sustainable rural industries and the training needs of Arabic-speaking youth. Australia needs a much greater recognition of the importance of technical education and training—a statement that could have been made (and indeed, has been made!) at any time in the past half-century. As with so many other areas of improvement, it is largely the matter of status that gets in the way. We consider ‘status’ in the final chapter.

What happened to the intellectuals? This broad outline of major institutional transformation points to several connected changes in the lives of Australians. It might seem, at first, that the growth in educational aspiration and achievement was the result of far-sighted Commonwealth and state governments—a view that these governments are happy to 84


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promulgate. In fact, any close analysis will show that, from the later 1940s, federal and state governments alike were simply responding to pressure created by parental decisions and children’s desire to enrol. Governments have always been seen as the major providers of educational opportunity, at all levels and at all times. To understand why this change occurred we again need to look past government announcements and electoral policies to the great cultural shift that was occurring in the body of Australian society. In a democracy governed by regular elections, such as Australia, politicians and their parties are quick to sense the mood shifts within the electorate. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, voters were keen to ensure that there were opportunities for themselves and for their children to gain education and skills, and thus to take a proper place in the body of society—increasingly a better educated society. The politicians and the public services responded as best they could. But it must be stressed that they did not lead the change: they followed. Second, around 3.5 million Australians can claim to have been to university, while millions more have completed twelve years of school education and possess TAFE qualifications as well. The size of the educational systems and their output has led over time to a major change in the intellectual quality of Australian public life and its desire for information. While most people obtain their quick sense of what is happening in the world via radio and television news, the newspapers have become the source for facts, opinions, analysis and discussion. The best are as good as any English-language newspapers in the world. Australia has been a book-buying society since the nineteenth century, and it remains one today, with a large Australian production to supplement that from overseas; this has been another major change. A further development lay in the gradual collapse of the censorship system, which had meant that Australians had to go overseas to read books they had heard about but which were officially proscribed. Such paternalism quickly grew unacceptable, and the system was dismantled from the 1960s on (though the state of Queensland still censors Playboy magazine). The diversity of Australian creativity 85


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and leisure interests, to anticipate a theme of a later chapter, can be seen in the thousands of magazines of all kinds available in the local newsagency. Whatever else Australians do, they certainly read about it, and their reading is supported by tens of thousands of creative producers—authors, photographers, journalists, editors, poets, playwrights, actors, musicians and the like, most of them educated and trained in a post-secondary environment. Third, a society in which millions are well educated, literate and interested in the world around them inevitably has a special sense of what it is to be ‘intellectual’. That word was once a putdown, and meant someone effete and pretentious. It has now gone out of fashion because it points to a distinction that no longer much exists. In 1950 the self-proclaimed intellectuals of Sydney all drank at an otherwise undistinguished hotel in the inner city, and had their minuscule sets of counterparts in Australia’s other large cities. Though they did not much use the word, they had some similarities to the ‘intelligentsia’ of Russia before 1917. That is, they saw themselves as having higher values than the rest of the society, which they saw as ‘bourgeois’—meaning middle-class and interested only in money and material things. Intellectuals were, almost by definition, opposed to current orthodoxy and therefore to the ‘regime’. A great deal of the literature of the past two centuries holds within it the tension between the intellectual and the bourgeois, however the protagonists are described. No doubt there are still people who see the world in this way, but it is a perspective hard to adhere to in a society where very many people are well educated and have multiple interests. Sport, for example, is not divorced from education in the way it once was. So the Carlton AFL team in Melbourne has had a significant proportion of students or former students from Melbourne University, while the ACT Brumbies, the Super 12 Rugby Union champions in 2004, have had as team members a significant proportion of students or former students from the University of Canberra. Medal-winners in the Australian Mathematics Competition (the largest endeavour of its kind in the world) turn out to like sport as well as the violin or chess. Australia’s medal-winners in recent 86


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Olympics have included a large number of students, while the waitress at your restaurant table may be undertaking a higher degree. Her musical tastes might run to Mozart; more likely it will be catholic enough to include Mozart as well as the most recent rock group. Her views on current issues will not be predictable from knowing that she is a waitress. Few people, so far as opinion polls indicate, are opposed to the general drift of society. On the whole they approve of it, and take life as it comes. They may worry about it, but they do not see themselves as distinct from it or as having higher values than the people around them. For all that, there is still division about ‘intellectuals’, though it takes a different form. For some they are ‘the chattering classes’, who sip latte and drink chardonnay, live in Balmain or Carlton, earn their living in the public sector and wear their hearts on their sleeves. Those who so stigmatise their fellow citizens seem, on the evidence, no less fond of chattering, not much less likely to live in trendy suburbs, no less given to enjoying good coffee and excellent wine and no less predictable in their ideology. But they often seem to work in the private sector, and the division between public and private continues to be a steady element of controversy in Australian public life. We will encounter it again.

Multiple intelligences The great expansion in the desire for and provision of education at all levels and for all people has produced a slow but steady growth in the understanding that everyone is intelligent enough to go to university, and certainly to complete high school. This change requires a short discussion. The notion that very many are ‘intelligent’ has been obvious enough to any interested onlooker just in teams of the simple growth in numbers. It was obvious to many teachers that disadvantaged children from immigrant backgrounds could and did excel at school. Once they knew the pupils well, they would learn that the fierce desire to excel came from the children’s understanding that academic proficiency was the only sure way 87


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into the well-paid professional careers that would justify their parents’ decision to emigrate to Australia. John Smith, one of the Class of ’53 who encountered immigrant children in large numbers as soon as he entered the teaching service, made the point eloquently: ‘If I’d worked as hard as the migrant kids I taught I’d be a magistrate or better.’ It was obvious to those teaching at university that the ever-greater numbers of undergraduates contained ever-larger numbers of extremely proficient potential graduates. It was obvious to those looking outside Australia that countries like Singapore and Japan had determined that their best national resource lay in their own ‘human capital’, and that these countries took education and training very seriously indeed. The pool of human capital grew larger and larger as more people went on to more education. Earlier notions that there must be a normal distribution of the ability called intelligence, such that only a very small proportion of any group had a high intelligence quotient or IQ, and was therefore ‘really’ intelligent, became less and less tenable as the century progressed. In the 1980s, several books appeared to suggest that a quite different way of constructing ability was needed. Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind proposed that there were in fact seven (later expanded to eight and a half) ‘intelligences’ and that all humans possessed all of them. It was motivation, preparation and encouragement, not intelligence, which determined life chances for the great majority. Because it takes time to develop any of these capacities (musical, linguistic, mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, inter-personal, intra-personal, and so on), few humans live long enough to develop more than a few of their own capacities to any degree. Indeed, we are all to some extent trapped in the capacity that we first present to our parents, who (if we are lucky) see it and happily develop it. Before long, we are said to be ‘good’ at it, or ‘bright’, or ‘a natural’. At the opposite end of the scale, we play down our deficiencies by explaining them away: this one doesn’t sing, she explains, because ‘I’m tone deaf ’; that one doesn’t play sport because ‘I’ve got no hand–eye coordination’. While there really are differences in degree with regard to the extent to which 88


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we possess certain abilities (for example, there are musicians whose sensitivity to certain musical sounds is acute to the point of producing tears if a particular sound is heard), the more important truth is that all of us have the capacity to become extremely competent musicians, tennis players, surgeons or physicists. What is necessary is that we really want to do so, that we have been encouraged to do so, and that we are prepared to put in the hard work. There is a legion of Australian stories about ‘late developers’ who found themselves and their capacity to contribute a long time after school; some of the Class of ’53, as we shall see, fit that description. Alas, there is a much-too-large group whose parents know nothing of this, never think of developing their children’s capacities, and see their children’s futures as a matter of chance. It is partly because of the emergence of this new perspective on intelligence that issues of access and equity have returned to be a persistent theme in policy discussions of education in Australia. Our schools and universities are still organised on the principle that IQ rules and that success in academic competition is a good predictor of success and worth in life. Winning is everything. A great deal of our social organisation rests on these assumptions as well. Yet the evidence points the other way: there is a fundamental human equality in attributes. One great tension in Australian life flows from an understanding that equality of opportunity is a farce unless children have similar opportunities in their family situation, for what seems critical is the quality of the first few years of a child’s life. If Gardner is right, we should be wary of directing children’s academic or occupational paths too early. We ought, as citizens, to be thinking of what outcomes we want our educational system to produce, rather than simply accepting it as it is. We ought to be especially interested in ensuring that all children grow up in supportive family relationships where there is determination to motivate, encourage and prepare. We ought, finally, to devote as much public funding as is necessary to these endeavours, because the outcome is a creative, harmonious and peaceful society. The education system is the core of it, and adding value should be its 89


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highest priority. It is said of actors, though it applies to us all, that while talent comes from God, skill comes from education and training. A further consequence of the realisation that all of us are intelligent enough to achieve high competence in anything we choose, provided the other supports are there, is the changing expectations of the education system itself. If IQ rules, then the pattern of outcomes from the system, the proportions of First Class Honours, Seconds, As, Bs and so on, should be pretty stable over time, because there can only be just so much real intelligence out there. If, however, multiple intelligence is a more accurate picture of reality, then the outcomes of the system should improve over time if students are encouraged, motivated and prepared. And that is what appears to have happened. There are much better outcomes from higher education and from the school system than was once the case, despite the fact that both systems are many times larger. There is not only much greater parental encouragement, but the character of Australian society now is generally encouraging, supportive and celebratory of aspiration and achievement, in education and art and music and writing, not just in sport. The characteristic Australian response now is ‘Go for it!’ There were and are, of course, critics of this new perspective and the change that has already occurred. They deplore the rising outcomes of the system, seeing in them a lowering of standards. They speak of ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’, of the ‘dumbing down’ of the curriculum, of ‘over-education’, and they are prone to categorise courses, schools and universities as ‘real’ or something else. Some of the products of the new universities, they assert, are just highly skilled barbarians. Graduates in law, nursing and accountancy are criticised for being too theoretical in their knowledge. Today’s university-trained nurses, it will be said, ‘don’t know how to fluff a pillow’, while newly fledged accountants ‘have to be taught everything again’ in the firm they join. One of the assumptions underlying such critiques is that the undergraduates of years back (usually the years in which the critic was an undergraduate) were more rigorously selected, prepared better at school, and so on. 90


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None of this is very sensible. The ‘A’ classes in the senior schools in the early 1950s were not the most intelligent children in the society. They were the small minority whose parents valued education for their children and were prepared to keep them at school. John Gilmour, a teacher throughout and a headmaster for many years, explodes at the thought that some kind of universal standard in education has declined: ‘When I think of what we studied for the Leaving Certificate! It would be a disgrace to a Year 10 class today. There’s been a great change.’ On the face of it, today’s young educated Australians are more widely read, more articulate, more self-confident, harder working and incomparably better educated than those of 50 years ago. And there are more than twenty times as many of them, as well. They emerge into the workforce and into society, as their well-educated predecessors have done for the last 50 years, much more confident in their ability to cope and to learn what has to be learned. They have some confidence—and with good reason—in their own judgment. In consequence they have some impatience with ‘authority’ that is not knowledge-based. They like to find and use research in order to discover what has gone wrong and what might be done about it. They and their predecessors have changed the character of the public service, Parliament, the unions, corporations and the community generally. Intelligence is everywhere. Were it not so, Australians could not have developed their creativity in the astonishing way they have in the last generation or so, a matter we consider in a later chapter.

The contribution of the immigrants The contribution of those who came to Australia in search of a new life and new possibilities has been, as already mentioned, one of the three great engines of change in contemporary Australian society. Australia’s success in taking in millions of immigrants in the second half of the twentieth century is important in itself, for there is no equivalent in the rest of the world. The scale of the 91


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migrant intake in terms of the size of the original population of the country makes the Australian experience special, as does the generally accepting attitude to immigration of the host population. Australia’s population in 1947, when the first postwar immigrants began to arrive in any number, was just over 7.5 million. Early in 2002 Australia officially recognised its six millionth postwar immigrant, a woman from the Philippines whose skills lay in information technology. Without those millions of immigrants, Australia could never have accomplished what it did. To begin with, their numbers and skills enlarged and diversified the Australian workforce, and the needs of their families added greatly to the demand factor in the Australian economy. No less importantly, they provided alternative possibilities of life and of living to what was a rather narrow monoculture. Those who were Catholic, for example, were used to one of several different kinds of Catholicism to that prevailing in the Irish-dominated Australian church. In time they helped to liberalise that somewhat intolerant and defensive tradition. Immigrants ate different kinds of food, and many of them drank wine with their meals. In time, native-born Australians followed their example. Immigrants were not greatly interested in cricket or either Rugby code, but many were fond of soccer. They took music and art and dance and theatre at least as seriously as the host population, but they had different understandings of these arts and brought different traditions with them. Above all, they grasped education for their children with great eagerness and, where it was available, education for themselves. And they worked hard—very hard. In all these respects, their example provided new possibilities for the native-born. The second great success in this process was the generally accepting, even welcoming, attitudes of the existing Australian population. One of the central cultural assumptions of the society encountered by our new immigrants was that it needed more people; the alternative facing Australia was clear: ‘populate or perish’. Of course, the early expectation was that Australia would receive more immigrants from the traditional source—Great Britain—and it did, though the British represented only a third of 92


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the arrivals up to the early 1970s. Irish immigration had virtually ended in the 1920s, when the United States gave the Irish a larger quota for immigration than the Irish themselves were capable of filling. Before long Australia found itself accepting 170 000 people from the refugee camps in unsettled postwar Europe. These DPs (Displaced Persons), alternatively termed ‘reffos’ or ‘Balts’ (many had indeed come from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Poland) worked in construction on the Snowy Scheme or in Tasmania before they could find homes for their wives and families—or indeed wives for the homes and families they wanted to create. They were followed in the early 1950s by Italians, Greeks, Dutch and Germans. By 1971 the population had risen to 12.7 million, and immigrants had contributed most of the increase. The belief that Australia needed more people was a basis on which immigrants could be seen as ‘New Australians’, a term that flourished in the assimilationist 1950s and 1960s. Since the fear of strangers or foreigners—xenophobia—flourishes when too many people compete for scarce resources or work, the acceptance of the mass of immigrants was cushioned by the fact that Australia had full employment from the end of the war until the mid-1970s. The migrants did not, on the whole, cost the community much, and did not cause a steady drain on social services. A government department was there to look after them once they arrived in Australia, and its activities were relatively inexpensive. Migrants were part of the rapidly expanding Australian economy, and recognised as such at least by governments and the well informed. Finally, these factors had good outcomes in terms of immigrant attitudes and behaviour. The earliest migrants were advised officially ‘not to behave in any way which would attract attention’, a commentary as much on the values ruling in contemporary Australian culture as on the likely behaviour of the newly arrived. On the whole they followed that advice. There were no immigrant political parties or protest movements. Migrants formed their own social and sporting clubs, but these served recreational rather than political ends. Indeed, for some immigrants the important politics remained that of the land of birth. Australian politics they 93


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seemed to see as usefully instrumental, and that was after all largely the attitude of the native born. In general, immigrants favoured the ALP if they were in manual and relatively unskilled occupations. Those who came from Central and Eastern Europe were inclined to see Labor as suspiciously far to the left, so they tended to follow the Liberal Party. It is a powerful commentary on the ease with which Australia accepted its immigrants that the pattern of voting in the second half of the twentieth century shows little trace of the millions of new arrivals, the great majority of whom were to become voting citizens. European emigration to Australia reached its peak in the early 1970s, partly because by then economic conditions in Western Europe were no less attractive than those in Australia and the threat of a Soviet invasion had not materialised. Thereafter, immigration to Australia became much more diverse in terms of origins, and was affected much more by the end of the old explicit selection policy based on notions of race and colour, a new search for skills in demand—whoever might have them—and the growing pressure to bring together families which had been separated by the immigration process. Emigration from Asian countries to Australia has averaged 40 000 a year throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and in 2004 was about 40 per cent of the annual migrant intake. Asian immigration had the capacity to alarm large sections of the population, because a strain of antipathy towards ‘yellow people’ has been part of mainstream Australian sentiment since the nineteenth century. That strain had many causes—Chinese goldminers during and after the gold rushes, the perceived industry of the Chinese and Japanese as a threat to hard-won Australian working and living standards, the war with Japan and the likelihood of an invasion, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, a resurgent China, and the consciousness of Australia’s small population in contrast to the ‘teeming hordes of Asia’. Yet the increasing numbers of Asian immigrants have not caused a hostile community response. They are not, to begin with, a very large proportion of the community. The seven largest Asian 94


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sources of the Australian population in 2001 (Vietnam, China, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka) provide just 4 per cent of the whole. Asian immigrants tended to be skilled and relatively well off, and they live not in the regional areas but in the cities, where they are likely to own their own houses. They need no instruction from the Immigration Department to avoid drawing attention to themselves, and live in very similar style to the rest of Australia. From the late 1980s, in addition, Australia began to accept large numbers of university students from overseas, the majority of whom came from Asian countries. No one in the universities, let alone in the wider community, can distinguish at a glance an Australian-born Chinese from a Chinese student. Australians are now used to Vietnamese and Indian restaurants as well as to Chinese, and to Asian food shops and Asian areas in supermarkets. There have been both a Chinese-Australian Senator and a Chinese-Australian Sheffield Shield opening batsman, though each was conspicuous as an exception rather than as the rule. (Indeed, for a multicultural society, Australia has notably monocultural parliaments.) Chinese and Vietnamese high school students have been conspicuous among the high scorers in the school exit examinations and in the Australian Mathematics Competition. But the generally welcoming climate began to decline in the 1980s. By then the ‘populate or perish’ assumption had been challenged by the view that Australia already had too many people, and that its existing population was pressing too heavily on a fragile ecosystem. Government had wound down its caring roles for new arrivals and had swung into control and detention. It was not the Howard government that established the detention centres for ‘asylum-seeking’ boat people, but the Hawke government in 1990. The notion that Australia might welcome refugees changed relatively quickly into one that saw refugees as ‘queue-jumpers’. By 2001 the costs of the detention program exceeded the costs of the migrant adult English program, and there was now a strong conservative critique of the whole notion of ‘multiculturalism’. The impressive entry of the One Nation Party in 1998, where it gained 23 per cent 95


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of the vote in the Queensland elections and later a million votes at the federal elections, was only partly a reaction to immigration, and not especially to Asian immigration. It was a protest against everything—globalisation, immigration, environmentalism, the growth of the cities and the decline of the rural areas, continuing unemployment, welfare dependency, perceived handouts to Aboriginal people, and the increasing distance between governments and the electorate. Though it did not last long as a political force, it gave ammunition to those who wished to be even tougher with refugees and those who wanted an end to immigration and ‘multiculturalism’. The members of the Class of ’53 overwhelmingly approved of the immigration that had occurred since they were young. Some had reservations about ethnic enclaves, and several—like Judy Tosh—had misgivings about numbers: ‘As far as numbers go, I really don’t think we can have too many more.’ One or two wondered about whether or not a Christian society could or should try to accommodate Muslims. Others were also toughminded about the recent past, as in this extract:

things have changed. There’s a poorer type of immigrant with strong religious views. I don’t believe that multiculturalism works overall. I’m pretty unhappy about letting in Arab people with closed minds. But their general tolerance and respect shine through: The benefits have far outweighed the costs. I’m now more sensitive to ethnic ghettoes, as with the Vietnamese and the Lebanese. I guess it comes with costs; we’re losing some of our basic Australianism.

I guess I’m typical of the country-bred older generation. There was no objection to immigration at the time of the Snowy Scheme: it was skills for jobs. They didn’t congregate in ghettoes. But

Immigration has done a lot for this country, and broadened us from our former colonial attitude. European (continued)

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and Asian immigrants have changed us. I’ve learned some Japanese, and some Italian, too.

the South Americans when I was running my business. They were good people— good family people.

I was a supporter of the ‘White Australia’ policy [when I was young], but not any more. After my first year of teaching, I met so many different people, mostly very good.

I’ve one daughter-in-law who’s Uruguayan and the other who’s Malaysian-Chinese— and I’m very happy about it. Immigration breaks down barriers. Postwar immigration caused a major change in our social structure and our attitudes, and in food, drink and entertainment. But it goes deeper than that—the fabric of society is better, too.

Immigration could only have been for the better. Ninety per cent of the good things that have happened have occurred because of the immigrants.

I’ve had a good run with immigrants—very few bad eggs.

The benefit to Australia has been immense. There have been some detrimental effects, too, but Australia wasn’t perfect then! I’ve met a lot of immigrants. Some of the abuse they copped would have knocked out lesser people. I saw a good deal of

The Forestry School was a mass of nationalities when I was there [in the 1950s], and I got to know many of them well. They were very happy days.

The Class of ’53 included one absolutely authentic immigrant—John Knoff, Norwegian-born, whose mother arrived in Armidale in 1952 to become the matron of St John’s Hostel. Armidale High was John’s eighth school, and a few years in England had given him a clipped English accent with some Norwegian overtones. Tall, slim and blond, he fitted in well, finding the presence of girls in the class an immense attraction after what had so far 97


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been a wholly single-sex education. His principal quarrel with Australians lay in having to maintain that he was Norwegian, not ‘a bloody Pom’. He became an Australian citizen early, and identified quickly with his new homeland. Immigration has been the making of this country, and Australia is the best country in the world to live. I love Norway’s beauty, and I like Europe because of its history. But what I like about Australia is the Australians—they are generous, open-minded people who make very loyal friends. People don’t realise that Australia is a very successful country and very sensible in what it has done. It has made multiculturalism work. That’s why I hate what Howard is doing.

The other class ‘ethnic’ was Peter Comino, the one GreekAustralian in the class. He was born in Armidale, but his father and mother came, at separate times, from Kythera in the Greek islands. Few of the class would have known his background, for there were other Cominos in the town and the school, and the IXL Café, one of the milk-bar haunts of the young, was owned by a Comino family. As far as the class was concerned, there might always have been Cominos in Armidale. Peter, who became a successful accountant in Sydney, simply hadn’t understood about ethnic prejudice when he was young: It wasn’t until I was older that I realised that we were social outcasts. I wasn’t allowed in some kids’ homes—you know, ‘little Dago bastard’. I picked up a lot of prejudice when I left school. But the policies after the war were great. They made Australia a European country. Mum’s in an old people’s home in Lakemba, and there’s every kind there. I’ve got Arabs as clients.

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It’s a pity that multiculturalism is actually [only] multiculturalism. All of the cultures should produce a single culture that brings the best from each. What we have is really multinational, with different groups tucked away in different places. It’s really not how it should be.

One theme runs through nearly all the comments made by members of the Class of ’53, whether or not they had reservations about some aspect of the process. It is this: that Australians and their society were enriched and broadened by the continuing flow of people from the rest of the world. The fact that immigration occurred with a minimum of conflict, and the fact that in Australia’s big cities people of different ethnic origins live in creative harmony, point to one of the nation’s great postwar achievements. In this respect, Australia can serve as a role model for an ethnically troubled world.

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4 THE WORLD OF WORK

I loved my work from the very first day—and I’ve achieved what I set out to do. (Peter Shields)

For Australians—indeed, perhaps for everybody—and for much of life, work is not simply a source of income and therefore a means to an end. It also provides a social context, a personal identifier and, for the fortunate, the most satisfying form of self-expression. To become unemployed, certainly in Australia, means not only a loss of income but also a loss of society, the acquisition of a social stigma and a pervading sense of failure. The Class of ’53 knew all about that. Each of their families could tell its own depression and unemployment stories: the New South Wales Apprentice of the Year in the early 1930s who first found work when the war came; the uncle who tramped the roads looking for work, or at least tucker; the women who lost their jobs when they married; the change to rabbit as the family’s main source of animal protein; the enterprise that closed down overnight and brought disaster to a whole town. In the mid-1950s unemployment was apparently far away, but its icy memory persisted. The Class of ’53 had stayed on at high school so that its members could find better and safer jobs 100


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than those who left at 15, and virtually all of them—the girls no less than the boys—found work that they liked and pursued until their retirement. Unemployment they hardly knew.

The transformation of work They are part of probably the last generation to have been so fortunate, for one overwhelmingly important change to the world of work in the second half of the twentieth century was the end of security and tenure. The main reason was technology or, more fundamentally, a rapid acceleration in the growth of knowledge. ‘Knowledge’ is a fuzzy word: an appealing definition ordains that it ‘is made up primarily of facts and ideas and values which, when assembled in particular ways, guide judgments about what to do’. It is a word that has been almost appropriated by the academic community to describe what its members are engaged in. Defined that way, ‘knowledge’ has grown at least 50 times in the last halfcentury, and has transformed work. The most obvious consequence of new technologies is that new jobs are created while old ones simply disappear. Those who had the old jobs become unemployed and have to find new work. The technological transformation of work is never an easy process for those displaced, even though one excellent outcome has been the elimination of much repetitive, boring and dangerous work. New machines replaced much manual work in the second half of the twentieth century, so that a few men and a number of specialised machines costing a lot of money eventually replaced the local government council’s team of unskilled labourers. Highly skilled jobs, like that of flight engineer, disappeared when the simple, reliable jet engine displaced the sometimes temperamental reciprocating engine. The introduction of television provided jobs for new servicemen; indeed, all new machines require new service people. A new industry appeared on the back of the new technology of computing, and with it some new professions as well. Then advances in computing led to further new alternatives 101


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to old processes, such as computer-aided design, which displaced other workers and their old skills, now unvalued. One sad rule is that the people displaced are hardly ever the people who gain the new jobs. The extraordinary growth of knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century led to a transformation of work that provided new opportunities and made many people happy. Yet it probably made just as many people deeply unhappy. The transformation of work can be illustrated by the way we describe and account for occupations. In the 1950s the focus was on occupational ‘status’. Were you an employer, or selfemployed, or a manager, or a professional? If none of those, were you a clerk or another kind of skilled white-collar worker, a tradesman, a semi-skilled worker or a labourer? These occupational status categories were enough, when applied to the classifications of industry (pastoral and agricultural, manufacturing, and so on) to provide a two-dimensional picture of work in Australia. By the mid-1960s, however, it had become necessary to start classifying occupations in terms of the skills they required and the tasks demanded of those working in a given occupation. In the early twenty-first century, because of the growth of knowledge, the classification system has become vast. There are now some 2500 occupations, alternative occupations and specialisations. The general category ‘computing professionals’, for example, includes seven separate professional occupations with eight further specialisations. All fifteen occupations can be seen in job advertisements, which presume a common educational preparation on the part of applicants plus the later acquisition of some extra skills. It was not like that in the early 1950s. The great majority of the Class of ’53 entered the older professions, like teaching, nursing, medicine and pharmacy, and the old white-collar occupations, like banking and accountancy. A few, contrary to their original expectations, helped to develop the Australian academic profession as the universities grew. A couple, sons of graziers, went back to the land and coped with the terms of international trade, which went slowly and steadily against them for the rest of 102


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the century. Almost without exception, no one had trouble finding jobs for, as new entrants to an economy desperate for knowledge and skill, they were much in demand. If they were successful early in their careers, they rose rapidly as the economy grew and sought able young people to fill senior jobs. If they needed further education after entering the workforce, it was available to them, for distance education and adult education both became increasingly available from the mid-1950s. Of the 40 who started Fifth Year in 1953, seven went immediately to university, as we have seen, but another eight, most of them primary-trained teachers, undertook higher education at some later point in their lives. Several more primary teachers continued in their profession without undertaking further courses. Four of the girls entered nursing, and another six of the class at one time or another undertook courses of various kinds that would today be offered by universities as part of undergraduate or even postgraduate education. They were part of the first generation to really be able to take advantage of what was available. Only one, having left high school, remained out of the embrace of the education and training system; she later wrote a novel. Although the occupations they chose have been central to the growth of Australia in the last 50 years, and although nearly all of them did well in their professions, they were all conscious of change in the workplace—some of it unwelcome change. This was especially true of those who became teachers. In the early 1950s the largest single occupational group was that of railway workers. By the 1970s they had been displaced by teachers. Indeed, education became so large an industry, as we have seen, that its impact on state and federal budgets was profound. The salaries and conditions of ‘education workers’ of all kinds, from preschool carers to university professors, first rose and then declined relative to the rest. As the move to smaller government and lower taxes gained momentum, the probability of people in education ever getting ‘wage parity’ with other professionals grew smaller and smaller. 103


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Those of the class who chose teaching retired from it with at least some sense of disappointment, though they had all loved their work. Their last few years, for almost all of them, had been burdensome and unrewarding. Ken Hoy, the son of a motor mechanic, finally took a redundancy from a senior position with the New South Wales Department of Education, having previously been told that no one in his position would lose their job. ‘The so-called reforms to education implemented by the Greiner government left [me with] a sense of bitterness and betrayal,’ he wrote. He spent some of the next few years helping other people to come to terms with redundancy and separation. Rex Dollin, who had put his name down in 1953 to enter the office of the Clerk of Petty Sessions (along with two other boys from his year), got a late offer to train as a primary teacher, and moved quickly into the secondary system as a maths teacher, completing two degrees along the way and enrolling for a Master’s degree. He also retired early, as a mathematics master—in his case because of his wife’s illness, although he admits that a certain disillusion with what he saw as ‘the crap’ that came in with new ministers and new aspirations played its part. Robin Faulkner, another primary-trained teacher who discovered an ability with mathematics and made his career in high schools, retired when he turned 60: It just got harder. The respect wasn’t there any more, and there was too much pressure from the Department. If you’d just been able to teach, just do your job, it would have been OK. But you had to fill in new forms and keep new records. I couldn’t see the point of a lot of it. The day I left, I felt so happy.

He still has dreams, both good and bad, of school situations and individual students. Diana Pearce, a highly successful school principal, finally just gave up: ‘I couldn’t stand the Department any more. You’ve no idea how many changes there have been.’ John Smith’s story provides an example of the kinds of opportunities and frustrations that all the teachers had experienced. 104


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John Smith, at 11 the Dux of the public school in workingclass West Armidale, was one of four boys from that part of town, along with Rex Dollin, Robin Faulkner and Peter Comino, who survived to Fifth Year at Armidale High. He was the first of his family to go past Sixth Class. Armidale High School’s tennis champion, he was more interested in sport than study, and went to teachers’ college on a second-round offer mostly because he ‘had to go somewhere’. In his second year as a teacher he was posted to Fairfield Boys’ Public School in Sydney’s western suburbs, where most of the 1200 pupils were happier speaking either Polish or Italian. Like others from the country who had a similar posting, he found that experience absorbing and fulfilling. He then moved to Casino on the North Coast, studied externally at the University of New England (graduating with a BA in Economics and Geography),

and moved into the secondary system. Attracted by the possibilities of audio-visual technology, he won an educational innovation grant, studied for a graduate diploma in media from the Australian Film and Television School, and became the head of media services for the schools of the North Coast region. After ten years in that role, he moved to a special head teacher’s position in administration, but took early retirement at 60, as did his wife, also a teacher. He simply had no desire to keep going: ‘I was sick of all the crap and bullshit.’ He had discovered a talent for administration, but even that lost its savour once the quantum of administrative work grew excessive. Yet he had enjoyed his career. In retrospect, it had taken him longer than most to find out what he was good at. He left the service with a feeling of disappointment rather than satisfaction. Teaching just wasn’t what it once had been.

What happened in teaching happened, in different forms, in all the older professions. First, the scale of the activity and of the profession grew and grew. By the end of the century the Australian Industrial Relations Commission had redefined as ‘industries’ many of the areas that had once been seen as professional 105


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domains, to the alarm of older practitioners. Larger activities led to the need for managers and management, and many professionals found themselves plucked out of their skill base to ‘run’ a part of the organisation. Rod Rich, the Queen’s Scout who went to the Coronation (and finds it hard to remember the trip as other than ‘an unreal experience’), became a university-trained forester in Tasmania. He loved the ‘outside’ work: ‘The life of a field forester is excellent [but Head Office] was all forms and figures.’ As he rose in seniority the chances of his getting back to the forest receded, to his dismay. The larger scale of organisations and professions led quickly to specialisation and to the formation of ‘mini-professions’ inside the larger one. Each soon acquired its own career system, its own national association, annual conference and journal. Libraries had financial troubles in buying journals, or ‘serials’, the form in which much new knowledge became available, since by the end of the century there were more than 500 000 in the English language alone. Name and fame went with specialised knowledge, and the generalist became seen as someone who knew very little. Second, as numbers in the professions increased, and as the number of professions also increased, the general respect in which professionals were held declined. Whereas in mid-century patients, parents and clients had been somewhat grateful for the care and attention they received, and respectful of the professionals they encountered, by century’s end ‘clients’ had much higher expectations, were much more knowledgeable themselves and were also much more demanding. The professions did not, by and large, assist their public status in the way they conducted disputes, or argued their cases, or claimed higher fees. One of the oldest professions, that of the clergy, lost its own confidence and that of the society at large both through the rapid secularisation of the society and by the increasing tales of sexual abuse that seemed to have been condoned by the churches. Another, that of university academics, lost its mystique simply because so many of the population had been through higher education and were relatively unimpressed either by the quality of the teaching they received or 106


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by the intellectual or human qualities of their teachers. Doctors lost esteem because many seemed more interested in money and power than in their patients, and seemed determined to resist any change to the status quo. Third, notions of professional independence were replaced over the half-century by the new notion of ‘compliance’, as governments wrestled with how to ensure that professionals behaved properly in an era when governments were reducing their own size. Fourth, the growth of knowledge meant that professionals had continually to acquire new skills and new perspectives. Finally, and for all these reasons, everyone seemed to be working for longer and longer hours. Where professionals still had some control over the fees they charged, like doctors and dentists and lawyers, the extra work and extra knowledge could receive at least some compensation. Where they did not have control, like teachers and nurses and most engineers, they saw the demands being placed on them increase much faster than the increase in their salaries. Schools and hospitals became to some degree cockpits for acting out, on the part of some pupils and patients, the tensions of modern life produced by boredom, self-indulgence, a lack of purpose and the decline of strong social bonds. For teachers there was the special problem of over-confident, undisciplined pupils who could not be controlled in any effective way, and whose parents were as likely to threaten the complaining teacher as to quell the unruly child. The cane of the 1950s had gone, and its use would today be counted as assault. Many older pupils would be adults in Year 12 and had to be approached as adults—no easy task for teachers with several classes and many responsibilities. The failure of the hospital system to admit universitytrained nurses into any effective partnership in the care of patients hampered the full professionalisation of nursing. Nurses were still seen as the underclass, there to do the bidding of the doctors. Industrial relations remained bad, and unions remained powerful in both the education and health sectors long after unions and industrial unrest had declined elsewhere in the white-collar sector. 107


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The private sector was in many respects another world. Seven of the Class of ’53 were children of parents who owned small businesses—shopkeepers or stock and station agents, for the most part. Almost as many of the class, but not always from the same families, entered the private business world, usually after a professional or quasi-professional beginning elsewhere. The owners of small businesses are arguably Australia’s hardest-worked people and, significantly, this group comprised those members of the class who were still working in 2004, if at a somewhat slower pace than in the past. All of them were relatively healthy, and for all of them ‘superannuation’ was something that they had had to provide for, and were still providing for. Their enemies were capricious and unsympathetic governments and technological change. George Edwards battled to keep value in a once-thriving printing business that was being assailed by desktop capacities available to almost anyone. Ian Hall, who did not own the business he worked in but was for a long time one of its senior managers, was eventually made redundant by the ability of machines to do much more cheaply what he and his staff had once done. Ian Hall, the son of the Postmaster at Uralla, south of Armidale, loved chemistry and wanted a job where he would be using and developing his love for that subject. In 1953, as the Leaving Certificate exams grew closer, he looked for likely jobs in the Sydney Morning Herald, and wrote away to several firms. With a comprehensive Leaving Certificate pass (two As, one in Chemistry, and four Bs), he landed a job as one of the two juniors appointed for 1954 at

O.T. Lempriere’s mineral assay laboratory, and there he was to stay, through several changes of ownership and name, until he retired in 1992 as the much larger plant’s Chief Chemist and Laboratory Manager. His work increased in importance as Australia’s mineral industries boomed in the 1960s and 1970s, and his skills became almost legendary within his company and elsewhere. Described as one of the three best analytical chemists one of his bosses had ever worked (continued)

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with, Ian developed formidable professional skills: ‘His analytical technique was faultless. He could always get the job done in half the time, with no effort, and his duplicates always checked out.’ His calm demeanour under pressure was a strength, as was his capacity to train young chemists. Assay work made him interested in the quality of the companies submitting ore samples, and that led to his investing wisely in mining stocks. In 1966, as a consequence, he was able to resign from the company and support himself for four years through a science degree at the University of New South Wales. On graduation, the company invited him back to his old job—but at the higher salary appropriate to his university qualification. Ian liked his earlier years in the lab more than the later ones. The managers of the 1950s and 1960s had been chemists in an earlier phase of their working lives, and understood what went on in the labs

and why it went on there. Once the firm started to be an element in other companies’ purchasing strategies, management, as he saw it, became the purview of ‘bean-counters’, who had no idea of what was important in the laboratories and were often not interested. Perhaps more important, computers and automated processes of various kinds began to take over significant elements of the ‘wet chemistry’ that was his love. In the early 1990s, a laboratory system that had once employed twenty people was reduced to two people aided by a host of machines which provided ‘read outs’. ‘You had to hope the numbers meant what they were supposed to mean,’ he said. There was no job satisfaction in all this, despite the titles, and he took early retirement, moved to the Blue Mountains and devoted himself to his extensive collection of minerals, which in 2004 was on display at the Sydney Museum as ‘The Hall Mineral Gift’.

The passion for work Unless your family is very wealthy, work of some kind is unavoidable. Children are introduced to work in the house and at school, 109


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and the two are combined in ‘homework’, the bane of adolescent life. Children need to learn that, whether they like it or not, some things have to be done. It is almost impossible to convince children that something quite outside their experience, like algebra or a foreign language, may in the long run be of great benefit. Because our sense of time is to a large degree a function of how much time we have experienced—how old we are—children cannot comprehend the long run. A two-period Latin class on Friday afternoon sometimes felt like eternity to one member of the Class of ’53, even though the elapsed time was only one hour and twenty minutes— and even though, in retrospect, a competence in Latin was of great help to a future writer. There was no help for it: you had to stay there. So compulsion has been part of the school culture ever since schools were established. In the 1950s the culture of the world of work had a strong element of compulsion as well. Much employment at that time in factories, offices and agriculture was routine, boring, noisy or dirty. There were rules to follow and penalties if rules were not observed. Hierarchies of status existed, and the boundaries were clear. White-collar and blue-collar employment defined much else in life aside from the work itself—where you ate and what you ate there, career paths, training. Where progression through the ranks occurred, as in the public service or large corporations, seniority tended to rule, and you had to wait your turn. Compulsion bred a reaction in the trade union movement, which was a highly successful guardian of the Australian Settlement. At the same time, unions provided their own form of compulsion: some forms of employment were ‘closed shops’ in which possession of a union membership ticket was an essential precondition of starting work at all. Unions promoted a culture of equality within the union that built on another characteristic of Australian male life: a reluctance to put oneself forward in case others suspected pretentiousness. That could be seen during the Second World War in the Army, where competent soldiers might avoid non-commissioned rank so that they could stay with their mates at the same level. Unions also acted to apply their own 110


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controls to the work done, both to ensure ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ and to provide more employment opportunities for members. The ‘darg’, from the Scottish and northern English dialect for ‘day-work’, came to mean the amount of work you ought not to exceed in a day, lest you show up your mates as slackers and provide undeserved profits for the bosses. These characteristics of work in Australia seemed quite permanent in the 1950s, yet they too had been transformed 50 years later. Part of the cause was that the protective cover of the Australian Settlement, as we have seen, quickly frayed once the Australian dollar was floated in 1984. Another part was the expansion of knowledge, which created new forms of work for which no union existed, or changed the arrangements of work in older forms. Increasingly, work became more highly skilled and more individualised, which over time increased the earning power of the worker and reduced the blocking power of the union. Generally increased wealth made higher wages possible for those possessing the newer forms of skill. A third part of the cause lay in the fact that a higher level of interest in the work tends to accompany higher levels of skill provided for it. A fourth was the displacement of compulsion from the business and the union to the worker, as people devoted themselves increasingly to their work, rather than to leisure—sometimes to advance in their career, sometimes because of the intrinsic interest of the work itself. A class member recalled a friend who imagined, as the point of all the boring work that was ahead of him, a shack on Lake Macquarie where he could fish away the weekends and forget about the working week. Forty years later, as a successful solicitor, the friend owned a beachfront house worth millions—and still worked a 70-hour week to maintain it. Australians would work hard when they saw a need for it, a comment of the 1960s proposed, but otherwise, why bother? There were better things to do. ‘If a job’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well’ ran another jibe of that time. By the end of the century, however, Australia had moved from a ‘near enough is good enough’ attitude to a high degree of professionalism. And working hours were longer than they had been. While unions, having achieved an 111


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apparent 40-hour working week, were seeking a 35-hour week, real hours worked were rising, on average by 8 per cent in the twenty years from 1983 to 2003. Working hours in administrative and professional occupations in 2003 ran at 50 or more hours per week. Much larger proportions of Australian workers were bringing work home, in the mind as well as in the briefcase. The main cause did not lie either in slave-driving owners and managers or in the Protestant rediscovery of the work ethic. As we will see in the next chapter, the 50 years in view saw a sharp decline in the power of organised religion. More fundamentally, the outlooks of the workers themselves were changing. Australians had, by and large, come to love their work, which was now much more interesting than had been the case 50 years earlier. They no less depended on its financial remuneration, which enabled them to live at the material levels they generally aspired to. For the quite large numbers of people who lived alone, work played an important role in providing meaning and context to life. As one book title put it, for some people at least, work was Better than Sex. What is most striking about the entire Class of ’53 is its love of work generally and of the work that each member finally found to do. Within a few years of leaving school most were married, employed and parents of young children, working hard and building careers. Occasionally criticised by their teachers for being lazy, they now threw themselves into the opportunities that work provided. Good, fulfilling work was a wonderful discovery, and there is no mistaking the feelings, almost of triumph, that finally they had found their metier. Often, there was a preceding challenge. Peter Shields, now a prosperous and hard-working stock and station agent in Tamworth, had difficulties as a boy coping with his returned soldier father, who had his own problems finding work as a station manager. Peter ran

away from more than one school. Put into Armidale High as a last chance, because an elder brother was already there, he adjusted quickly to the structure and discipline of the hostel and enjoyed his time at school, especially the (continued)

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football. At some time in his Fifth Year he was called in to talk to the Headmaster. Doggy said to me that I was wasting my parents’ money. ‘Right,’ I said, and waited until the end of the football season, when I came home. Doggy suggested that I get a job on the Council, but Rowena [a tiny settlement in Northwest NSW] had no Council! He tried a number of casual jobs, and then earned enough

Keith McIntyre, whose political awakening we saw in Chapter 2, was one of the few in the Class of ’53 who did not move from Armidale High instantly into a preferred job or further education. Then physically small, clinically blind (a later discovery), the second youngest in the class, and with a poor academic record, he moved despondently around a variety of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. Three years later he was unemployed and on the dole. Then came what he saw as the turning point: he was the only appointable applicant for a job

money shooting wild pigs to pay cash for his first car, a new Ford Zephyr, to the astonishment of the salesman. Through football connections (he played for Riverina) Peter joined Commonwealth Wool and found himself in the saleyards. ‘Suddenly I knew what I was for. I knew this was me. It was a great feeling!’ Not long afterwards, he had to fill in for an absent auctioneer. Again he had the uncanny feeling of arrival. He proved to be a good auctioneer from the beginning.

as a laboratory technician at the University of New England. The terms of the job required that he pass Botany I. Since his Leaving Certificate was the bare minimum (four passes at the ‘B’ level) he thought he had better do the Leaving Certificate again by correspondence. The Dean of Science suggested a harder but more profitable route: he should undertake Chemistry I as well as Botany I. If he did well in that, he could forget about the Leaving Certificate. Eighteen months later Keith topped the year in Botany and (continued)

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got a Credit in Chemistry as well. He then completed his degree at the rate of two subjects a year, obtained his Honours degree, gained a job at the Australian National University and began studying for his Master of Science degree. The turning point, the moment of self-realisation, came when he became research assistant to Professor Lindsay Pryor, formerly the head of Canberra’s Parks and Gardens. He saw very quickly how good applied research could lead to improvements in society. He now knew what he wanted to do, and why he wanted to do it. From improving Canberra’s parks and gardens he moved into the design of ‘elite soil profiles’, the bases for the

grass in stadiums, racetracks and golf courses:

John Knoff, the class’s Norwegian immigrant member, had three traditional family career lines open to him—the Lutheran Church, the army and the merchant navy. He chose the last of these, joining the Norwegian Wilhelmsen Line as a cadet once school had finished (his mother would have preferred him to go to university). After a few trips backwards

and forwards to Norway, he found his maths inadequate for a career leading to captain, and tried several other executive trainee jobs before joining Cadbury’s in Hobart. There he became part of Cadbury’s export drive, moving up the company in the marketing area and accepting responsibility for overseas management in New Zealand and Japan. ‘I loved it all.’

We became involved in the construction of almost all of Australia’s best grounds from Cairns to Melbourne. These included Cairns, Townsville, Lang Park, ANZ, SCG, Olympic Stadium, Bruce, [three at] the AIS, the roof of Parliament House, MCG and Colonial Stadium. Along the way, he and his team picked up a Commonwealth Gold Technology Award, while he was awarded the American Ed Hunter Award for excellence in urban irrigation, the first non-American to win it. He is now a world authority in this field, acts as a consultant, and has published several books.

(continued)

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He stayed with Cadbury’s for nineteen years and left for family reasons. Then he used his overseas knowledge and experience as a senior manager in the Tasmanian Development Agency, moving to Brisbane to essentially the same kind of work in the Premier’s Department there. He loved that too, but eventually the job satisfaction declined as managerial imperatives became more oppressive. In a remark which echoed his fellow Tasmanian Rod Rich and his classmates who became

teachers, he said: ‘One day I knew that I’d had enough of the public service.’ He resigned, and went back to Hobart to retire. It was a matter of special irritation to him that the Tampa, the Norwegian cargo ship that had picked up hundreds of refugees in the sea when their boat sank and had thereby become a pawn in the 2001 election chess game, was a Wilhelmsen ship. The treatment of refugees by an Australian government managed to offend both his Norwegian and Australian sensibilities.

Many of the class can recall their own defining moment. For one, it was the flash of understanding in a research project, when he saw that what he had discovered had major implications—and knew, at the same time, that he had found his career. For another, it was exchanging routine classroom work for involvement with difficult and disadvantaged children: suddenly, teaching offered much greater challenges and much greater rewards. ‘There was a purpose, and I could help. It was a life-changing experience, and how lucky I was!’ For a third, teaching provided no great satisfaction, but being a salesman (after a lot of ephemeral work and travelling) gave him the rewards of quick success, increased income and enhanced self-esteem. He became a highly successful salesman for one of Australia’s electrical goods retailers and then a successful businessman in his own right. A fourth moved from pharmacy into supermarket building, to the point where he wondered if he had ever really been a pharmacist, so great was the pleasure he obtained from the larger world of property development. He still visits the site of his first foray into property 115


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development, to recapture the feeling of excitement he remembers in moving out of his constrained premises into something much larger. While Australia’s growth in scale and wealth allowed many options to the Class of ’53 that were not so readily available to their children, they were also to some degree captive, as we have seen, to the very expansion that initially benefited them. One of the class, Ron White, the son of a railway worker, was captive in another sense: his career was a roller coaster whose engine was the dairy industry. After some initial false starts, he commenced a career as a dairy technologist with Peters Ice Cream in Newcastle. While still a young man he was transferred to Peters’ Grafton factory to supervise the quality control of the machine that was to produce new types of instant powdered milks and baby formula, as well as of ice-cream and related products. It was an absorbing and successful period. When Britain entered the European Economic Community and Australian dairy products found no market in the United Kingdom, dairy farmers began to leave the industry and the North Coast factory began to run out of milk. The company sent him, other key personnel and the drying machine to Warrigal in Victoria, where production of dried milk products continued. Circumstances changed in Grafton, but when Ron was transferred to take control of the laboratory again he found that he was persona non grata because of earlier company decisions over which he had no control. He moved to a Hunter Valley dairy company, rising from Laboratory Supervisor to Manager. The deregulation of the dairy industry in the 1990s forced the closure of the Muswellbrook factory, and Ron had to progressively dismiss the staff and then see himself made redundant. He had loved the work and had developed a good rapport with his staff. Disgusted with it all, he moved to Queensland to manage a large block of apartments on the Gold Coast. He looks back over his career with mixed feelings: he feels his family suffered because of his devotion to the enterprise—and what was there to show for it all? 116


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The loss of security It is easy to make the transformation of work in Australia appear as a highly progressive process that we should all be in favour of, and there is no doubt that in material terms most Australians have gained in both income and enjoyment. But there have been some corresponding costs. An obvious one is job security, perhaps the single most important attribute of any job as far as the parents of the Class of ’53 were concerned. It was job security that would enable people to build a nest egg, pay off a house and retire in some comfort. In the 1950s and 1960s, when unemployment was very low, Australians became less enamoured of the need for job security. You could move from employer to employer and increase your wage or salary each time. Money wages rose faster than inflation, and houses and cars became more affordable. The future could look after itself. As we have seen, the OPEC oil price increases of 1973 put an end to that kind of rosy optimism, and from the mid-1980s the future of one’s job became more uncertain. Perhaps technology would displace you, as in Ian Hall’s laboratory; perhaps government decisions about industry regulation would do it to you, as in Ron White’s case. Perhaps your whole area would be made redundant. Perhaps a company takeover would displace everyone in middle management. Perhaps the march of knowledge would make your carefully acquired expertise much less relevant and saleable. When Ansett Australia, one of the country’s most reputable and widely known corporations, collapsed in 2001, its employees found that the company’s superannuation fund could not meet its obligations to them. All its investments had been with the company. The future now looked a more worrying place for everyone. What could be relied on? Many middle-aged men found that, once they had been displaced from their management positions, there was no new role for them. Unemployment was, for many of them, a real fact of life. Companies were still being created, but they wanted younger people, and those with new skills. Those who missed out on the acquisition of skill in their youth, and found 117


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themselves displaced later, discovered that they had no assets to offer on the job market. Experience did not count for much, because the experience was seen to have been in older occupations and in now-defunct companies. Unemployment was at nearly 11 per cent in December 1992 during a short recession, and then declined quickly to between 5 and 6 per cent. But in the middle of 2002 there were still more than 80 000 people who had been unemployed for more than two years. Long-term unemployment was a spectre that faced everyone at work, no matter what they were doing. The least educated were still the worst affected, but there were also university graduates among the long-term outof-work. The floating of the Australian dollar, the deregulation of the banking industry and the computerisation of banking produced a wave of bank reorganisation. Among its victims were hundreds of branch managers, one of whom was Jolyon Sinclair, a member of the Class of ’53. Jolyon was one of the first of the class to go overseas, posted by the then Bank of New South Wales to Fiji in 1958. He loved being a country banker, and enjoyed helping customers and the respected role that bank staff had in country towns. Manager of the Westpac branch in Kempsey in 1988, he was given the golden handshake, like dozens of his colleagues who ran country branches, as Westpac reduced its entire structure. Jolyon was just over 50. What would he do now? He decided on a professional course in real estate, but then discovered that he could not obtain work in this area because of his age, and retired. He was greatly depressed at the condition to which all the banks had descended, and would not recommend a career in banking to a young person. ‘Americans don’t know how to run a business with a large number of branches,’ he said. (The mover and shaker at Westpac had been Bob Joss, an American.) ‘Westpac had a thousand branches!’ His classmate, Bob Hawke, had entered the Commercial Banking Company (CBC) of Sydney and, like Jolyon, had moved up and down the country, in Queensland as well as New South Wales, before becoming Manager at Goodooga. In 1981, when he 118


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was working at Head Office as Manager of Premises and Property for New South Wales the National Australia Bank acquired the smaller CBC, and he was offered a move to Melbourne or a redundancy. He turned down the Melbourne move and decided to do something else entirely, managing a contract cleaning company for four years and then establishing his own business. He did well for a time before encountering union opposition that finally forced him to sell out cheaply and retire. He too loved the life and work of banking, as indeed he loved the work and involvement in contract cleaning. Like Jolyon Sinclair, he felt somehow cheated that he had missed the rewards of the senior years of both his chosen careers. Those displaced in the 1980s and afterwards had to grapple with a new phenomenon in work—the rise of the part-time job. From 1982 the number of hours worked in part-time jobs doubled, and for women 26 per cent of all hours worked were in part-time employment. Part-time work suited many people, especially the young who needed some kind of work to support their tertiary education, and women who wanted to supplement the family income but be available for their school-age children as well. It did not necessarily suit anyone unemployed who wanted to return to full-time work, but it was a start. Increasingly, many people found that they needed a portfolio of part-time jobs in order to acquire the money needed to develop a deposit for a house, or even just to make ends meet. In this cause–effect cycle, the possibilities for part-time work increased the numbers attracted to it, which further increased the possibilities of this form of work for employers. Some part-time work became permanent, as employers changed the rules to keep especially valued employees. Shopping, once confined strictly to weekdays and Saturday mornings, moved into the whole of Saturday and then into Sunday and, for some supermarkets, into very late or 24-hour operation. These changes suited, and were in part driven by, those who had complicated working and family lives, like students and working mothers. The twin guardians of Sunday, the churches and the unions, had now lost much of their force. Shops, restaurants, 119


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service stations, hospitals, universities and TAFE institutes all now began to acquire a corps of part-time workers to supplement the regulars. The part-time workers were hard to organise into unions, and in any case many saw their future in full-time work elsewhere, rather than in more civilised hours or better part-time pay. Because they worked from home, or had no office or desk at their place of employment, some part-time workers could be almost invisible to the organisation. The growing tendency to ‘outsource’ some work, or some aspects of work, or work of a particular kind for a determined period, rather than to find staff and do the work ‘in house’, further accentuated the trend to part-time work. The term ‘consultant’ became a widely used occupational classifier, and often meant people who were working part-time, however well they were paid and whatever work they were doing. Communications innovations, like the Internet and email, made it easy for some ‘knowledge workers’ to operate from their own home offices. Most of them were engaged in part-time work: full-time work implies a permanent employer, and conditions such as superannuation, holiday and sick pay, and at least some sense of continuity. Part-time work theoretically has the absence of these benefits built into higher hourly pay rates, but the onus of guarding against ill-health, providing for retirement and financing holidays falls on the worker, not the employer. And part-time workers enjoy much less social contact than is available to full-time workers.

The growth of the ‘underclass’ Australia has usually had a labour shortage, and all immigration programs have focused on a search for more workers. In the traditional view, work has usually been available for any man who sought it, and Australia’s welfare systems have from the beginning been based on that supposition. Family welfare is to a large degree still predicated on the notion of an adequate minimum wage for a male breadwinner. Depressions aside, welfare support has tended to be a supplement to work, not a replacement for it. Since the 120


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1970s, however, Australia has experienced the phenomenon of long-term unemployment; it is plain that our society has not returned, and seems unable to return, to a condition of full employment. Even that term meant, in the 1950s and 1960s, between 1 and 2 per cent unemployed; very few of those without jobs would not have found some kind of work quickly. Most were out of work only briefly. Some of the reasons for the growth in long-term unemployment are clear. Two, already mentioned, are the decline in the need for people whose only skill is physical strength, and the corresponding growth in the demand for skills. Most jobs today require not just a particular skill but literacy and numeracy as well, while many jobs require a knowledge of and facility with machines of one kind or another. In the 1950s you could, if a male of the right height and weight, enter the police force or the army, while the railways provided another alternative. The local council might well provide day labour, while farmers and employers usually had jobs that needed doing, even if they were not permanent jobs. All that has changed. Machines now have replaced much manual labour and even semi-skilled workers in some factories. The armed forces have high standards for entry; the police study for a university degree; retail salespeople need bright personalities, self-confidence and people skills; waiting on tables benefits from TAFE training. Another reason is that women now make up 45 per cent of the workforce. Women’s superior capacities in dealing with multiskilled tasks give them an edge in many occupations, while their better performance at school and university education gives them an edge in any occupation that has competitive entry. It is men, rather than women, who have been the notable casualties in the transformation of work. It is certainly the case that nearly 30 per cent of men aged 25 and more cannot find full-time work, while part-time work has to some extent been colonised by women and the young. While it is true that 6 per cent unemployment means that 94 per cent of the workforce is in some sense employed, 6 per cent unemployed in a workforce of 16 million is very close to a million 121


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people. The social effects of unemployment of this scale have been accentuated by the increasing wealth of the society, so that over time the unemployed are not just worse off than the employed but increasingly worse off. Furthermore, the rapid growth in the size of cities means that certain suburban areas have become the areas to which many of the obviously disadvantaged gravitate. Those in better circumstances do not need to go to these ‘welfare ghettoes’, and thus simply do not see their relative deprivation. Disadvantage in Australia is now spatially concentrated to an extent that did not exist in the 1950s. The City of Armidale in 1951 contained some grand houses of the 1880s, a few new and glamorous houses of successful businessmen, modest houses of all kinds and very poor houses indeed, some of them almost hovels. The contrasts were inescapable, and one purpose of the public school system was to give children a relatively even chance at life through participation in education. The education system today is even more the conduit to skilled work but, as we have seen, it is a highly competitive world at every level. While the great growth in the number of welleducated Australians has been of enormous benefit to Australia, not everyone is well educated. As was true for the Class of ’53, parents still play a vital part in determining the life chances of their children, through providing them with a loving, supportive environment in which their several intelligences can be developed. A preference for education over entertainment, for physical activity over indolence, for investment in the children rather than in expenditure on themselves—these parental choices have always been crucial. Quite quickly, Australian society has sorted itself into a new set of groups: those who have plenty of money and can buy what is needed (books, computers, entry to particular schools) for their children; the hard-working double-income families whose capital base is small but who invest in their children; the single-income families who find it all a struggle; working couples without children; single professionals in their inner-city apartments; and those outside the domain of well-paid work, the new ‘underclass’. 122


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Social context is never an absolute determinant of anything. Overindulged children can do dismally at school and fall well behind, saved only by their family’s money. Those from the poorest backgrounds can do remarkably well. Armidale High School in the 1950s could produce several examples of boys and girls who came from completely underprivileged backgrounds, but went on to make distinguished careers for themselves. Nonetheless, to be in contemporary Australia without good education, marketable skills and a modicum of self-confidence is to be at the end of any queue for a job, and not even to be considered for most of them. Australia is not a punitive society in terms of welfare, and there is a safety net, which in 2004 provided support to around four million Australians under one or other (or several) of 33 separate categories. But, to repeat an earlier comment, Australian concepts of ‘welfare’ still assume that a man goes out to work and brings home a good wage. No government wants to feel that it is responsible for human misery, and both Labor and Coalition governments have pointed at separate times to the growth in average weekly earnings as a sign that things must be getting better. Welfare agencies, on the other hand, keep pointing to their own clients whom they see as caught in a poverty trap from which neither the adults nor their children can escape. Changing social values about sexual behaviour mean that family formation now goes on whether or not there is a male breadwinner. Between 1986 and 2001 the number of families without any breadwinner increased by 100 000 to 357 000. Almost one half of them were families of single mothers, living on a variety of welfare payments that could not give their children any kind of good start. While much of the comfortable rhetoric of contemporary society revolves around our ‘planning for the future’, for the single mothers and the long-term unemployed, the future is only 24 hours away, and it is bleak. From the middle of the 1990s social commentators began to use the term ‘underclass’ to describe those without work or any prospect of it, single mothers and their children, those living in the most disadvantaged suburban areas and those whose means of 123


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subsistence came almost entirely from the state. Those on the right of politics were prone to see such people in pejorative terms as ‘dole bludgers’ and layabouts, and to worry about the morals of third-generation welfare families. Those on the left were more inclined to see them as examples of stinginess on the part of society and as a failure of government. A new approach, which brought some of its force from the notion that all people were intelligent and capable, argued against both traditional perspectives, and sought to enable those in the poverty trap to get themselves out of it. We will consider the poverty trap again in a later chapter.

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5 LOVE, GOD AND DEATH

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique made more sense to me personally than Germaine Greer. Her book came at a time when I began to see teaching as a career, not just a second income. I wasn’t part of the movement but—oh yes!—it was important. (Diana Pearce)

While the argument for seeing wealth, education and immigration as the great engines of change is a clear one, it is also obvious that, in the matter of social change, causes and effects have a reciprocal relationship. Wealth allowed an immigration program that included special attention to the needs of the recently arrived, so that they could participate quickly in their new homeland. That participation increased society’s wealth, as the migrants and their families contributed to production and then used their incomes to buy goods, stimulating further production. We will see the same kind of process in this chapter, which focuses on the emotional and physical life of the individuals who made up the society. The place of women in Australian society changed a great deal over the 50 years, for example. Once women obtained control of their own fertility, they were able to make more effective choices about the kind of life that they wanted to lead. That meant, in many cases, a much longer period in the workforce than had been true before, which reduced the free time and labour that had been available to the 125


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churches. That loss of free time and labour contributed to the decline of organised religion, a decline that reduced the power of the churches to affect women’s lives—in the matter of the control of fertility, for example. Causes and effects are two sides of the one coin whenever we look at the elements of social change.

Love, sex and the role of women There were no sex education classes at Armidale High School. Indeed, there was no formal sex education at all for that generation. Their parents, products themselves of a strict and repressed generation, were quite unequal to the task. One of the girls remembers being presented with an orange-coloured book by her mother with the injunction ‘Read this!’ Another was given a diagram of the female reproductive system. One mother discreetly left a book nearby for her son. No one else could recall anything so forthcoming. John Knoff, sailing to Australia as a 12-year-old, recalls his mother finding him on the deck one evening, and asking ‘Do you know about sex?’ He thought the best answer was probably ‘Yes’, and gave it. ‘Thank God!’ cried his mother, ‘I’ll go down and have another drink.’ One of his new classmates was told, darkly, ‘Be careful!’ During their final year at school, the local cinema showed a film about sexual reproduction to which entry was permitted if the parents had given their approval. Some were refused approval; others were too embarrassed to seek it. During that year, an incident occurred at the school whose outcome required separate small assemblies of the boys and the girls in the senior years. No one can now remember what the incident was supposed to be, save that it was about sex. The whole business of sex was, in the light of twenty-first century Australian norms, extraordinarily secret. More or less unreliable information came from older siblings, friends and books. English literature, studied by everyone in Fifth Year, was interrogated for meaning. The Class of ’53 studied Macbeth for one of the Leaving exams in English, and agonised as one of the girls had to 126


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read aloud Lady Macbeth’s almost contemptuous speech to her husband in Act I Scene 7 that included an all-too-vivid metaphor: I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this.

Love, however—well, love was everywhere: at the cinema, in popular songs, in novels, in radio serials and, embryonically at least, after the school dances. But what it was no one could yet say. The crushes that one had on another felt real enough, and were charged with meaning by Nat King Cole’s song ‘Too Young’, immensely popular in the early 1950s, which reassured everybody that young love would survive to be recognised one day as true love. The words of pop songs in the 1950s were banal, and emphasised the earliest stages of love, rather than its climactic moments, which no one in the Class of ’53 claimed to have experienced. Born in the mid-1930s, the Class were still only 16 or 17 as 1953 came to an end. But they knew that if you wanted sex the only socially acceptable place for it was inside marriage. They were told so by no less an authority than Frank Sinatra. Love and marriage, so he sang, went together like a horse and carriage. Then came the heavy warning: you could not have one without the other. That they knew. Sex led to babies. The shame of an unwanted, illegitimate pregnancy, the social stigma, the near impossibility of abortion in a country town, the sheer lack of knowledge of their own or anyone else’s sexuality—all these factors led both to sexual repression and to the attraction of early marriage. Some early fumbling went on after the school socials and at the pictures. A widely understood scoring system applied to such encounters, with the boy as the scorer, the girl the scoree: two for a kiss, four for a feel of the breasts outside clothing, six ditto inside, eight for a feel lower down and outside, ten ditto 127


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inside; twelve was ‘Bingo!’ an outcome that could only be imagined. ‘Going with’ someone was, at least for the senior class in the school, an indispensable accompaniment and precursor to anything other than the most fleeting physical contact. And, even for the steady couples, there cannot have been many high scores. In any case, no one in such a relationship would actually claim in any public way to have scored: reticence combined with honour to keep girls’ reputations unsullied. Those of the class who married—the great majority— did so in their early twenties. They did so—again the great majority—with their parents’ blessing, both in the choice of partner and in the timing—and, according to many, with a sigh of relief that the young person had managed to get so far without an unplanned pregnancy to contend with. Since the great majority had left Armidale to find their careers in the professions or the world of the large organisation, it was not surprising that their partners did not come from Armidale. The romances of 1953, important as they were then,

faded fairly quickly into the past. This was true even for the steadiest of the class couples, Rex Chidley and Robyn McRae, who soon went their separate ways, Robyn into nursing and Rex into pharmacy and then travel. Within a few years, both were married, but to other people, and they lived in separate states. The deaths of their partners occurred for each at much the same time, 30 years later, in the 1980s. In the next decade, Rex learned about Robyn’s situation and contacted her. In the great tradition of romance, they finally married, 48 years after they had left school.

The marriages of most of the Class of ’53 occurred at around the time that the oral contraceptive became readily available, in the early 1960s. Marriage certainly made less pressing the problem of how and where to secure a contraceptive device. Any contraceptive was difficult to obtain in a country town, and not much easier in the city. One major chemist in Armidale was a staunch Catholic, and no such product was to be found in his shop. Sheer reluctance to ask, in the tight-mouthed reticence of the day, deterred some who were 128


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in need. The condom, the pessary and the diaphragm were awkward, unaesthetic and not wholly reliable. For these reasons, early and unwanted pregnancies were common. As some kind of counterweight, early marriage was the expectation, and if it was advanced because of a pregnancy and (universally termed ‘shotgun’ wedding) well, that had been the lot of some of the parents, as well. Parents were usually more anxious about the marriages of their daughters than of their sons, but few made any real fuss about their children’s choice of husband or wife. Nola Lewis, brought up as an Anglican, married Don Nealon, a Catholic who had been educated at De La Salle College in Armidale. While there were whispers around the town about the likelihood of such a union failing quickly, the young couple had the support of both sets of parents. Peter Comino married a girl from outside the Greek community, but she had the advantage of being a nurse who was liked and respected by Greek women who had encountered her in hospital. Margery Mitchell’s story of her father’s pronouncement on whom he would accept as in-laws carries the flavour of the times, but has no counterpart in the stories of the rest of the class. My father, a war veteran, was sitting at the kitchen table at breakfast—it was in 1953, as I remember—and suddenly

spoke to us, out of nowhere. ‘None of you will marry a German! None of you will marry a Jap! None of you will marry a Catholic!’ He went on and on in this vein. While he was talking my brother came in and said ‘Good morning, Dad,’ but my father didn’t hear him. He saw him, however, and swung around. ‘Don’t come in without saying “Hello” to me!’ My brother said nothing, so I spoke up. ‘He did, dad.’ ‘No he didn’t!’ ‘Don’t argue!’ I said, ‘and furthermore, I will marry whom I like. I’m the one who’ll have to live with him—you won’t. And it doesn’t matter if he’s a German, a Jap or a Catholic. If he’s the one I want, then I’ll marry him. And that’s that!’ Margery was indeed to marry a Catholic, Brian Murphy, but she married rather later in her life than most of her classmates. By then, no one would have commented.

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The oral contraceptive changed all that. It owed its existence to the persistence of two American women, Margaret Sanger, a reforming nurse, and Mrs Page McCormick, a feminist philanthropist. Not even they could have perceived how far and how quickly their innovation would spread. In any short catalogue of the most important inventions of the twentieth century, the oral contraceptive would have to take its place alongside the computer and the jet aeroplane. It was supported by two other important changes to women’s traditional lot: abortion law reform and widespread family planning advice and assistance. The consequences went far beyond placing control of fertility in the hands of women, though that was the prime outcome. Women could now decide how many children they would have, who would father them, and when the children would be born. Those decisions, accepted readily enough by men because messy or cumbersome contraceptive methods would no longer interfere with their own sexual enjoyment, allowed women to aim, like men to have a working life, to train for the professions, to go to university—in short, to make important choices by themselves. In turn, more women were able to become important players in the economy, to earn an independent income, to be consulted, to be promoted, to become bosses, MPs, intellectuals, activists. Women’s sports became important and celebrated. Because more and more women had jobs and came home at much the same time as their husbands, it could no longer be assumed that they were ‘housewives’ or even that they would cook the evening meal. Over time, fast foods became not just an indulgence, but a response to need. Eating out, or buying prepared food, became steadily more important, not just because families had more disposable income—though that was part of it—but because it was a simpler option when both partners were tired and had worked late. The changing status of women, their preparedness to put off the time of the birth of their first child and their determination, on the whole, not to have large families, led among other things to the redesign of apartments. In the early twenty-first century, a new 130


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apartment might not possess a ‘proper’ kitchen at all, just a microwave, a hotplate and a technologically sophisticated drawer or two that served as a dishwasher. Breakfast might be the only meal prepared from such a kitchen, and many people in the cities would buy a cup of coffee on their way to work, and enjoy a Sunday brunch at a cafe. Dinner might be ordered by phone from a restaurant close at hand or delivered by another small-time entrepreneur, the owner of a small car acting as a meal chauffeur. The changing roles of women led to the decline of some neighbourhood shopping centres, because women—like their partners—now worked somewhere else, and would buy whatever they needed on the way home, driving their own car. It led to new industries, like childcare, new products, like easy-care clothing, a new political organisation, the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), and a new spirit of equality between men and women, especially among the young. Clear signs appeared that some aspects of the change were probably permanent—for example, the greater proportions of women than men at university, their greater academic success there and their increasing numbers in the ranks of the professions. New language forms emerged to mark the change: ‘Ms’ replaced ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’, especially in the workplace, ‘Chair’ replaced ‘Chairman’, ‘wives’ and ‘husbands’ became subsumed into ‘partners’. Such gender-neutral forms were introduced with difficulty, resisted by linguistic conservatives and then slowly accepted by the majority. ‘Sexuality’ became a much-used term, and sex became a much more openly employed element in clothing, advertising and pop songs. The sexual revolution of the 1960s started a push for the recognition that male and female homosexuals simply had a different sexuality, a different ‘sexual preference’, to heterosexuals, rather than being seen as ‘sick’ or perverted. Their battle for full recognition had not been won by the early twenty-first century, for homophobia still exists in the community. But the day of same-sex marriages and the full legal recognition of homosexual unions (now available in the ACT) seems reasonably close, while Sydney hosts a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, an annual celebration of ‘gay pride’ said to be the largest such event in the world. 131


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All these changes produced a much lower Australian birthrate and a much higher age for women at the time of their first pregnancy. Australian families produced on average a little more than four live births in 1901. By the 1930s, when the Class of ’53 were born, that birthrate had halved, one of the outcomes of high unemployment and low marriage rates. After the Second World War, the ‘baby boom’ produced a rate of 3.55 babies per woman in 1961, but the rate never returned to that of 1901 and declined steadily during and after the 1960s, falling below two in the late 1970s and reaching 1.73 in 2001. A birthrate below two means that Australia depends on immigration for any net growth in its population. In 2001 the median age for Australian women having their first baby reached 30 years, while the proportion of teenaged mothers had fallen to below 5 per cent. The importance of the shift can be summarised in total figures. The Australia of 1954, with a population of 9 million, welcomed 182 000 babies; the Australia of 2001, with more than 19 million people, welcomed rather fewer than 250 000 babies. Fertility shifts of this magnitude have led in consequence to a very different pattern of need for social support. Smaller families also brought about changes in the pattern of living. Over the whole of the twentieth century, the number of households in Australia grew faster than the population. More people now live alone, or live without children. Less than half of all Australian ‘couple families’ presently have children, but there has been a significant increase in the number of ‘single-parent’ families, in part the consequence of divorce and of the ending of de facto relationships. Of course, some of the change is simply an outcome of the greater age to which Australians now live: many couple families without children are best described as ‘empty nesters’, who may have a further 30 years together after their children have grown up and left home. These changes in family size have prompted a great increase in apartment living in the cities, something that many Australians of the 1950s thought of as rather European and somehow decadent. From the 1980s on, some primary and infants schools found that their catchment areas had insufficient numbers for the schools to continue. 132


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The falling birthrate has led also to a profound anxiety within government about how a relatively smaller workforce in the next 30 or so years will be able to provide for all the needs of a large population of elderly people. That anxiety in turn led to wider but less generous superannuation provision and to warnings that those in the workforce will need to stay at work longer to ensure that they are able to provide for themselves in retirement. Perhaps the gloom has been overstated. Were Australia to increase its wealth in the first 50 years of the twenty-first century by three times, as it did in the second half of the twentieth century, there would be ample support for a decent retirement for everyone. Since Australia has a globally low incidence of taxation anyway, there is much that could be done now, simply by replacing tax cuts with better targeted aged care. The change in the status and autonomy of women, combined with the easier availability of divorce, led to a profound dissatisfaction with the institution of marriage, or at least with the assumptions on which marriage had been constructed in earlier times. The marriage rate began to decline after 1971, and was at only a little more than half the 1971 rate in 2001. Many more people lived in de facto relationships than had been the case in earlier times, and in 2001 they represented one of every eight couples living in a marriage-like status. To some degree ‘living together’ has been experimental, to allow a couple to determine whether or not they are suited to a long-term relationship, and de facto relationships now have greater recognition in law. To some degree, however, it represents a recognition that the traditional form of marriage sits uneasily with the autonomy of two individuals who are both income-earners, with the woman not economically dependent on the man. Divorce quickly became the terminal point of an unsatisfactory marriage once the Commonwealth brought its Family Law Act into operation in 1975. The new legislation provided one ground only for divorce: the irretrievable breakdown of the relationship, made evident by the separation of the partners for more than one year. A spate of divorces occurred in the next few years, and since then the 133


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rate of divorce has settled down to be a little more than half the marriage rate. Women have been more likely to initiate divorce and the end of what they see as unsatisfactory marriages, often to the bewilderment of their husbands. Family life changed as women went to work. In part, it meant for very many women that they now had two jobs. But there were other changes, too. People were much less likely to know their next-door neighbours well, let alone to knock on their door and ask for a cup of sugar. Old and lonely people could die in their own houses and their deaths pass unnoticed for several days. More money meant more skills for children to learn, more cars to ferry them to and from the music teacher and the sports oval and the swimming pool. Dinner came to be a meal built around the television set rather than around the dining table. In the new century, young teenagers were almost as likely as adults to have their own mobile phones. Child-care, like health and education, was becoming a matter of choice, not a community standard. The world of work became, as we have seen, much more competitive in the 1980s and 1990s, and for many men, working women were simply another form of disagreeable competition. Worse, women were effective competition. Just as the second half of the twentieth century saw a growing recognition that everyone was intelligent, and that our society needed to consider what that meant, so there came a growing recognition that women and men actually had different skill sets and different brain architecture. To use a term borrowed from computing, men and women, over two million years of natural selection, had become differently ‘hard-wired’. Men could navigate across cities without much help from a map, and seemed to know where north was, but had to concentrate on one thing at a time. Women, by contrast, could do several things at once and were more interested in good outcomes for everyone than in simply winning. That made them increasingly valued in large organisations where cooperation and multi-tasking were important. A further perspective on the fight for equality appeared—one that recognised the need for real equality, but saw 134


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its outcome including the proper celebration of the caring professions like nursing and teaching and social work. These professions remain dominated by women, have low salaries relative to the professions dominated by men, and are given scant attention by governments. The real millennium breakthrough would come when society as a whole gave the same weight and valuation to the areas of life and work that attracted women to those that attracted men. That outcome seemed a long way distant in 2004. Perhaps more important to most in the early twenty-first century, the belief that women could have it all—a satisfying career, a loving husband who shared the domestic work and a delightful small family—foundered on the rocks of time and energy. Among the young there was a preparedness to give it a try, to give the woman the leading role if she would obviously be the principal breadwinner. But as the new century moved on there was considerable agreement that there was another long struggle ahead for real equality. What stood in the way was a powerful male culture, which excluded women and which women were not much interested in anyway. In 2002, women made up still only 8 per cent of board directors and of senior executives in Australian companies, though they represented nearly a third of both the Commonwealth’s Senior Executive Service and of the members of government boards. Australia had rather lower proportions of women in senior positions than either the United Kingdom or the United States. Australian women received lower salaries than men and, perhaps in consequence, were moving into becoming selfemployed: almost one third of self-employed people were women in 2003, compared with only 11 per cent in 1996. Forty years after the development of the Pill, it was understandable that women could still think that nothing had really changed. But in retrospect, at least for those of the Class of ’53 who could remember the culture of a society when sexual intercourse seemed to lead remorselessly to babies and when women lost their permanent employment if they married, it was a different world. Not only did the girls of the Class of ’53 marry young; with one or two exceptions they stayed married to their initial choice. So— 135


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again with some exceptions—did the boys, though in their case the exceptions mostly married again. The assumptions of the time were that you married young and you married for life, and the ages at which they married conformed to the Australia of the time. The class had strong models to follow, boys and girls alike, for their own parents had stayed married, no doubt in part because the Family Law Act only came into force when many of them were in their seventies. Perhaps the class inherited a powerful tradition of battling through, and certainly in 2003 they appeared an animated and together set of couples, many of them looking forward to their golden weddings. Oral contraception had been available to them in the early 1960s, but for some it was not a great option. ‘It didn’t agree with me’ was a not uncommon report from the wives, and indeed the early oral contraceptives had their problems. For all that, the women had their children early and kept their families smaller than the baby-boom brood grown in the years straight after the war. Most of the class had two or three children, and the average for all those who had married and then had children was 2.6 children per family. Nor was feminism, or the feminist movement, an especially important marker for most of the women. While a very few were antipathetic (‘a lot of hocus pocus’, said one), a more common attitude was a kind of positive ambivalence, and one likely reason was that they themselves had been valued and to a degree empowered by their families when they were young. Robyn Chidley balanced it nicely: I didn’t have a lot of time for that Germaine Greer stuff: a little bit of chivalry is nice! My parents valued daughters as much as sons. I was disgusted when I met relatives who thought it a waste of money to

educate girls. Women should have every opportunity and equal pay! For Mary Ball, the feminist movement was a confirming event. ‘I was brought up to believe that I could do anything that I wanted to.’ Jill Burgess, who (continued)

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mixed family and work in a small business throughout her adult life, was pretty sceptical: ‘I’m a fairly strong person anyway.’ Yet she went on to recognise that: ‘Women are women: they needed to exert themselves more—I regret not becoming a law clerk, which I could have been.’ Chris Lawrie, who found her metier as a mathematician quite late in life, put it this way:

Oh, I could have provided a lot of the content of The Female Eunuch myself! I was so annoyed when I worked in the bank that there were no promotion positions for women. It [feminism] was a desperately needed change. Some of the younger women don’t realise just what we went through.

I was brought up to be a feminist, in a small and special way. I was irritated a great deal by the inequalities in things like pay, and women not being allowed to open a bank account without their husband’s approval—that sort of thing.

Deirdrie Harrison was as positive about the need but more sombre about the achievements:

Some regretted an initial decision not to go to university (as did a number of the men); several saw the inequalities that existed between men and women as sufficient reason for a women’s movement, even if aspects of the movement did not attract them. And for some, like Phyllis Mace, it was just what had to be:

WEL awoke the hope that things could change, but nothing really changed. I believed in merit selection, but it doesn’t really happen still . . . We’re going back to the 1950s again. Nola Nealon provided useful summary:

a

I thought WEL was a bit over–the–top sometimes, but women were treated as second-class citizens, and anything that would change that was a good thing.

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It would have to be said that in co-educational Armidale High School the girls in Fourth and Fifth Year were no less competitive academically than the boys, and that was as true on the science side as it was in the humanities. One outcome was that the boys respected the girls as achievers, fellow students who were likely to make a mark. It would not have greatly surprised the boys to learn that Diana McGuffog [Pearce] would be one of the first women to be a principal of a school for boys as well as girls, or that Deirdrie Carroll [Harrison] would be the victor in one of the first successful anti-discrimination cases in New South Wales, or that Margery Mitchell [Murphy] would be a hospital matron while still a young woman. Why not? They were, all three, notable members of the class. The girls as a group were not butterflies; they were at least as serious about what they were doing as the boys, and almost certainly more focused than some of the boys. That women were people too was something the Fifth Year boys grew up with, and indeed their most generally admired teacher was a woman, Clare Lindsay, who taught mathematics with passion and care, and helped a number to pass the Leaving in maths, to their own astonishment. Male chauvinism of any kind was not evident in the interviews. Indeed, a few of the class were positively pro-women, like Bruce Chappell, a professor of geology for much of his working life: ‘I am a feminist. I supported my women students strongly, and fought old-fashioned chauvinism when I encountered it—and there was a lot of it about.’ On the face of it, co-education—at least in the 1950s—had some good social outcomes going for it.

The weakening of the churches The change in the status of women in Australian society accompanied, and was related to, a decline in the status of organised religion. Women made up probably two-thirds of church congregations in the 1950s, and acted as the organisers of many church functions, as well as the driving force within families to attend services and send the kids to Sunday school. The paid and 138


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powerful in all churches were men. It could hardly be otherwise then that, as women chose paid work, there would be less energy available for the churches, or that the rise of the feminist movement would in time prompt claims from women that they ought to have an equal place in church. But of course there was more to it than that. It is fair to say that European Australia has not been a deeply religious, meaning ‘spiritual’, society at any time. There are no Mayflower voyages in its history, no great fundamentalist movements, no revivals that swept the nation. A pervasive scepticism subdued for most any tendency to believe in doctrine. A pragmatic society found a pragmatic use for religion: it was there to help keep social order. Religious feeling was diverted, for a hundred years or more, into sectarian tribal boundary defences, in which—to partly caricature it—the English and Scottish Liberal and Country Party Protestant middle class kept the Irish and Catholic and Labor working class out and down. That divide was alive and powerful in Armidale in mid-century, as has been mentioned already. Over the whole country, it permeated the public services, state and federal, so that able young Catholics in the New South Wales service, for example, would be warned off the Education Department (Protestant) and steered into the Chief Secretary’s Department or (in the Commonwealth Public Service) into the Department of Customs and Excise. It greatly affected the capacity of the political parties to gain wide appeal within Australia, because only an exceptional Catholic could make headway in either the Liberal or the Country Parties, and good church-going Protestants were not conspicuous in the ALP. The sectarian division diverted the attention of the churches from more worthwhile endeavours, and it separated into different school systems children who hardly knew about one another even though they lived in the same suburbs and towns —and even next door. The three great engines of education, immigration and wealth operated here as elsewhere to greatly change things. Increasing numbers in schools put great pressure on the Catholic system, which the church tried to pass on to government. Governments 139


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—first at the Commonwealth level and then in the states—began to provide increasing amounts of public funding. The schools, once staffed solely by members of religious orders, began to hire lay teachers, at first good Catholics and finally anyone competent and qualified. The religious orders, flourishing in the 1950s (when religious rather than political issues dominated student politics in the universities), began to lose members after the church was first liberalised and then more quickly as a conservative reaction developed. Good Catholic boys and girls who had grown up within the parochial school system tended to lose their faith when they went to university, as was also the case with the much smaller proportion of good Protestants. Immigration brought to Australia hundreds of thousands of good Catholics brought up in the much more liberal Italian, Dutch, Austrian, Hungarian and Croatian churches, who encountered the very Irish Australian Roman Catholic tradition with something like amazement. The effect was a liberalisation of the Australian church rather than a reinforcement of it. The European immigrants of the postwar period found also that an elaborate public service system existed to help them, and they did not need to rely so much on the voluntary efforts of the church. Furthermore, they established their own clubs and associations whose purpose was both to help them assimilate into Australian society and to remind them of their own origins—something the church was much less able to do. The immigrants and the baby boom accelerated the growth of Australia’s population. Increased wealth, as we have seen, meant a housing boom to accommodate them all. Australia’s population increased by two and half times in the second half of the century, and Australia’s housing stock increased even more dramatically. Not only were thousands of new suburbs created, but existing buildings were pulled down to make two new ones, and suburban backyard tennis courts went (to the future peril of Australia’s tennis supremacy) to make room for dreary blocks of ‘home units’, apartments one could buy because of the new legal provision of strata title. The big cities grew outwards, as did the bigger country towns. 140


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The new subdivisions might carry a ‘Site for New Church’ sign on a weedy allotment, but before long it was clear that there was no way the churches could possibly provide the infrastructure needed. None had the money, let alone the clergy, while the potential congregations were up to their ears in mortgage repayments and hire purchase; they had no spare money either. There was often no church for Mum to go to, and no Sunday School either. Besides many of the children of the 1960s and 1970s had other things to do with their weekends than to waste time on a Sunday school far away, which points to a fourth important factor. For these large changes do not completely explain away the secularisation of Australia after 1950. To them we need to add the spirit of the times. The postwar years were those in which ‘science’ seemed to offer explanations for everything—if not immediately, then at least once adequate funding was provided. The spirit of the universities was certainly secular, and the 1960s brought to Australia—as to the Western world generally—a ‘cultural revolution’ whose message in many respects was ‘If it feels good, do it’. The cultural revolution’s anti-authoritarian and youth-focused sentiments (‘trust no one over 30!’) in time produced an accommodation in schools, with a more relaxed style, the use of first names—of teachers, not just of students—a downgrading of uniforms and other aspects of discipline, and a preparedness to involve students in consultation and even a little decision-making. New generations of parents (including many from the Class of ’53) encouraged their children to express themselves, to concentrate on becoming good at a sport or indeed any talent, and to escape from the Puritanism of their forbears, of which the parents were certainly conscious. Life was just busier: there was simply much more to do and more to see, and young people had more money to allow that free will to reign. In the 1960s ‘youth’ became a primary market for advertisers, especially in the expanding medium of television. Increasing wealth had another effect on the propensity to attend church. One strong attraction of Christianity, for hundreds of years, has been the prospect it holds out of a better life in the hereafter to compensate for the wretchedness of the here-and-now. 141


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But what if life in the present were enjoyable, and material things relatively easy to come by, and shopping a sensual and tactile pleasure? From the 1960s on, more and more Australians found solace for whatever present discontents they had in ‘retail therapy’ and the acquisition of material things. And, as the power of unions declined and working hours spread over the full 24 hours and seven days of the week, so did shopping hours—even into the oncesacred Sunday morning. The churches protested, warning of a Godless and conscience-less future. Godless it may have become but, as we will see, it is hard to show that Australia became a less honest or less trusting place. Organised religion had no answer to these diverse and serious challenges, and congregations declined. Smaller congregations meant smaller church income, and in addition the churches were attached for the most part to ‘old money’, not to the new industries and opportunities of the second half of the century. On the Roman Catholic side, waves of liberalisation and then reaction had much the same effect: a flight from the church. By the end of the century it had become impossible for the church even to support the eucharistic community, the local assembly of Catholics in good standing who met to celebrate the mass each week. There were simply not enough priests to go around all the parishes, and no prospect of attracting sufficient young men to the vocation; in 1995 the Church closed St Patrick’s in Manly, once one of the principal sources of new priests, at least for New South Wales. A feminist move to ordain women as priests made no headway at all in the Catholic Church, and only a little in the Protestant denominations. The continued refusal by Popes to countenance contraception, especially after the Pill became available, did not endear the church to the newer generations of confident, careerseeking women. The declining birthrate and the later age of first pregnancy showed what women thought of Papal interdiction of their autonomy in matters of fertility. Indeed, current birth rates in European Catholic countries are even lower than the rate in Australia. The conservatism of the churches in the face of major social changes did not help them to retain worshippers, let alone attract 142


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new ones. By the end of the century it was becoming common to see churches that had changed denomination as the original congregations had dwindled, or (especially in the country) that had been sold to serve as dwellings or for some other purpose, such as an art gallery. As with the churches, so with some other traditional social groupings. The Masonic order and its derivatives also declined, and some of these buildings also were closed or sold, to become restaurants or—in a nice twist—antique shops. The final blow was the emergence of scandals surrounding past sexual abuse by priests and clergy of children in their care. The accounts of these episodes, often surfacing twenty or 30 years after the occurrences, brought great discredit to the churches concerned, not only in Australia but also in Great Britain and the United States. The church hierarchies had been in a most difficult situation, and had chosen—or so it seemed—to forgive the erring priest or clergyman and hope that he would not sin again, sometimes also paying out large sums of money to ensure silence and the protection of the church. The number of these cases became so large that they produced an almost general embarrassment: how could Australia have been so unknowing? And they reached to the highest post in the land, causing the resignation of one GovernorGeneral, a former Anglican archbishop, because it was felt that he had been too forgiving of an erring clergyman in one particular case and not sufficiently concerned about the young woman involved. While, on the surface, Australia remains steadfastly Christian in the early twenty-first century, ‘religion is more often professed than practised’. The proportions defining themselves as ‘No Religion’ have increased at almost every census, from half a per cent in 1954 to 15.5 per cent in 2001. To them should be added another group, nearly 12 per cent in 2001, who did not state their religion or did so in an inadequate way. All told, nominal Christians made up just over two-thirds of the Australian population in 2001. Over the half-century the Anglican proportion had dwindled from over a third to a fifth, and to be smaller than the Catholic proportion (just over a quarter). But churchgoing, surely the best test of adherence to a religion, was a very different matter. Australian Catholics were 143


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always better churchgoers than the Protestants, and even in the 1960s most self-professed Anglicans were purely nominal adherents. In the early twenty-first century the Anglican Church could not support the upkeep of its churches or even of adequate staff, and congregations were perceptibly tiny. In the Catholic Church regular attendance at Mass was down to about one in six or one in seven of self-proclaimed Catholics, according to head-counts undertaken by the Church itself. And the churches had lost their clout in public life, with statements by church leaders not always achieving circulation by the mass media unless the matter was plainly political. The church could still get the numbers for a special event, like the visit of Pope Paul VI in 1970, or the visits of Pope John Paul II in 1986 and 1995. Billy Graham, the American evangelist, drew large crowds too, especially on his first visit in 1959. But then many people also gathered to see President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Australians have usually been starved for encounters with the truly famous. A more accurate testimony to the power of the Catholic Church was probably the great procession in Sydney in 1953 during the National Eucharistic Congress, when more than 25 000 took part in a procession from St Patrick’s in The Rocks to St Mary’s Cathedral. There has been no larger religious gathering since. Crowds of that size can be seen now only on the evangelical side of Protestantism, such as the Hillsong Church in Sydney’s northwestern suburbs. Fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise, and showed some remarkable political strength in the elections of 2004, despite its relatively small numerical size. Despite Armidale’s standing as a Cathedral city for both Anglicans and Catholics, and its substantial Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches, the Class of ’53 did not come from a notably devout set of families. All, of course, were Protestant—the children of good Catholic families would have been attending De La Salle College or the Ursuline Convent. Some fifteen of the class, rather more than a third, recall that their parents or the family as a whole were regular churchgoers. The most conscientious were probably the few fundamentalist Protestant families, some of whose 144


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children nevertheless managed to escape fairly early. Others rebelled at the apparent need to attend church or Sunday school when the parents were not regulars themselves, and sometimes even when they were. Phyllis Mace remembered it without pleasure: ‘They sent us to Presbyterian Sunday school—God knows why, because they were not religious in any real sense.’ Those at the hostels had no choice. Herb Higgins put his own dry spin on the issue: ‘You had to go to church on Sunday—but you could choose. So I chose the Methodists: they had the shortest service, the prettiest girls and the best singing.’ Fifty years later only six of the class were still involved in a serious way with a church, and each of them had remained connected throughout their lives. David Davidson, who became a surgeon, valued his faith, which remained strong even when he had to work every second Sunday: ‘Strong faith helps when times are tough, especially in a difficult operation.’ My parents tried to introduce us to church, but the Reverend was a Paisleyite. He harangued us about Hell so much that I decided we were going to Hell anyway, so what was the point? I only go [to church] now for weddings and funerals.

The others had come to terms with religion and made their own decisions about where they stood, as millions of other Australians have done. Their various accounts of how and why no doubt stand for many. I dropped away. I think you lose your faith a bit when you get out in the world. If you’re a good person you try to treat people well. You don’t have to sit in a church every week.

To me the Bible is only a historical document written by people in different civilisations and is mainly myths and legends. Christ was a very influential philosopher of his time, but to me nothing more.

I’m a Christian—that is, I believe in Christian principles, but I’m not a Biblebasher.

(continued)

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When I was at the Hostel you had to go to church, rain, hail or shine. I decided I would make up my own mind, and I’m a bit sceptical about it all.

I was never an atheist, yet I never felt comfortable in church either. To me God means intelligence. I’m a Christian. There was a good man called Jesus— that’s the heart of it. I’m not seriously worried either way.

Those who lived in the country had a respect for the social role that churches played there. Herb Higgins again: Religion is a useful binding process for a community. It sets the moral values and limits. But there are more rogues, charlatans and sexual abuse than you can poke a stick at. So I like to be involved—and I can keep my eye on it all, too.

Diana Pearce, who grew up as a Presbyterian in the same part of New England as Herb Higgins, used to ride her pony to Sunday school. When she came back to teach in her town: The church was simply part of social life, and I went to the Anglican Church because it was just better connected to everything. My father was horrified: he thought the Anglicans were the next thing to Catholics!

Of all the class, one member stayed true to the religion of her youth even as the rest of the world, and her own original church, became more liberal. Shirley Willey was brought up as

a Strict Baptist, not permitted by the edicts of her church to go to the cinema, to wear shorts or sundresses or trousers. She gained a pass in every subject in her Leaving Certificate, enrolled (continued)

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as a nurse and eventually moved to Ipswich where she has practised for many years as a domiciliary nurse. There she attended Ipswich Baptist Church until 1980, when her church changed, adopted new versions of the Bible and liberalised its doctrine—all in the name of keeping the congregation. Shirley moved first to the Independent Baptist Church, which adhered to the old rules, and more recently began to worship as a Methodist with a

few other older people who hold to the old ways. She and her fellow worshippers shake their heads at those who, it seems to them, will do anything to keep people coming to church despite the fact that they are departing from the strict teaching. A grandmother who has a close relationship with her children and grandchildren, her sunny approach to life is supported by her faith: ‘I love God more than when I started. You can’t have too much of the things of God.’

Spirituality remains a pervasive human trait. It is certainly the case that the pragmatic tradition of European life in Australia subdued that need, but the spiritual instinct in human beings seems always able to search for fulfilment when there is a need. Win Holmes commented that as she grew older, ‘I found or felt a spirituality that I always knew was within me but that didn’t fit with organised religion . . . I’ve come to have a much broader view of human nature and everything else.’ There are, of course, still congregations in the churches of Australia, and they are probably on average older than was the case in 1951. The churches have dropped a great deal of their old interdenominational antagonism in the face of an apparent loss of faith in the general community. In 2004 thirteen churches, including the largest, signed up to a covenant that recognised common interests and envisaged a sharing of resources—even, in some cases, those of clergy. Some of the Australian Catholic University’s theology courses are taken by students from every Christian faith, partly because there are few alternatives. Attendances are rising in some fundamentalist Protestant churches, as well as in the 147


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Buddhist and Islamic religions, whose striking new buildings are evidence that they, at least, have resources. And, as always, there is the reliance on more distant alternatives, like Gaia, or pyramids, or crystals, or the occult generally. Those exposed to Christian evangelists in the 1950s were sometimes told that one could not live a good life without Christ—that it was not enough just to act well towards others. It was the general reluctance to challenge this dogma that gave churches the high position they occupied even in a professedly secular society. But, in practical terms, the necessity for the link between faith and behaviour was not self-evident in the 1950s, and is no more obviously true now. To make the point again, the decline in organised religion did not, as church leaders warned, lead to a decline in good behaviour. The 50 years that followed have shown something that one would know from a study of history: civilised human societies all rest on a shared commonsense belief in the Golden Rule—that you should behave towards others as you would want them to behave to you. It is this ethic that is the basis of trust between people, of reciprocity, of mutual respect, of the special care of children and of the old. In many respects some of these values arguably improved in the second half of the century. They did so at a time when the power of the churches was manifestly declining.

Health and the postponement of death One of the most striking changes in the condition of Australians in the second half of the twentieth century was the increase in life expectancy. The Class of ’53 would probably not have planned for a reunion in 2003 had they thought about it in 1953. Born in 1936 and 1937, many of the girls might have been there, with a life expectancy at birth of about 67. But, for the boys, life expectancy at birth was only 63, so more than half would have been expected to receive the toast to ‘absent friends’. In fact, as we have seen, only six of the class had died by the end of 2003, and nearly all those who attended the reunion were in good, or at least reasonable, 148


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health. ‘There’s a bit of kick in me left,’ one of them commented. Their life expectancy at the end of 2003 was now 82 for the men and 86 for the women. Their new grandchildren had an even higher life expectancy, with one projection asserting that one in three females born in 2003 will live to be 100. The increase in life expectancy is the consequence of a number of changes in Australian life, in which wealth and education have once again been important factors. The changes did not begin in the second half of the twentieth century: they have a much older history. The understanding and communication of the importance of hygiene, fresh food, clean air and exercise during the nineteenth century contributed to the first great decline in infant mortality, among whose beneficiaries were the grandparents of the Class of ’53. The grandparents’ generation were all likely to survive childhood—in marked contrast to earlier generations. The twentieth century’s medical discoveries, mass immunisation and further improvements in living conditions reduced the mortality produced by infectious diseases. Infant mortality, at 24 per thousand in the 1950–55 period, had shrunk to five per thousand by the end of the century, among the lowest rates in the world. The same factors that assisted babies to survive their first year also assisted them to live longer lives. Better shelter, more and better food and clothing, improved protection from heat and cold, more doctors and nurses and hospital care, and further growth in medical knowledge (especially in the area of antibiotics) all played a part. So did better education, which enabled people to understand that to a large degree they had control of their own wellbeing. Three powerful examples of the role of education in public health were Australians’ success in quitting smoking, in practising safe sex and thus avoiding the onset of HIV-AIDS, and in wearing seatbelts and thereby reducing mortality and morbidity in road accidents. The consequences of each of these changes in behaviour could be seen in lower rates of incidence and of mortality in each area. The outcomes have been dramatic. Just over 78 000 Australians died in 1950, compared with just over 128 000 in 2001, although 149


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the total population in the latter year was, as we have seen, some two and half times larger. What do Australians now die of ? Cancer is the final cause of death of 29 per cent, compared with 13 per cent in 1950, but heart disease now accounts for 20 per cent rather than the 32 per cent of 1950. Pneumonia and influenza are apparently more severe than they were (4 per cent compared with 2 per cent), but this is because they are common causes of death for the very old. Accidents used to kill 6 per cent; the contemporary figure is 4 per cent, and within that total the role of transport accidents has become less important. Better diagnosis has also sharpened confidence in the specific causes of death today. Australians are living to older ages before they die so, like other Western countries, Australia has become a society whose welfare focus has shifted from the young to the old, a pattern that will continue for some time even if birth rates and death rates change. In 1951 only 8 per cent of the population was over 65, and the same proportion was true of the 1971 population. But in 2002 it was 13 per cent, and is projected to grow to 19 per cent in 2021 and 27 per cent in 2051. Because health costs are greatest in the last year or two of life, these increases foreshadow some significant spending. As an illustration of the climb in costs, in 1986 the Commonwealth spent $800 million on aged care, and ten times as much, $8 billion, in 2004. Yet the improvements to life and living have been accompanied by some corresponding deficits or perplexities. Like other Western countries, Australians are prone to suffer from the diseases of affluence. Australian deaths through motor vehicle accidents did indeed decline from 30 per 100 000 persons in 1970 to nine per 100 000 in 2002, and 97 per cent of Australians now routinely use seatbelts. But the 2002 figure had been more or less constant for the previous decade. What would produce a further substantial reduction? There is no great agreement among the experts. A greater interest in a healthy lifestyle now coexists in Australia with the worst levels of obesity in the world outside the United States. The cheapness and availability of foods of all kinds, the use of motor vehicles and other transport forms to go anywhere and the ready adoption of a 150


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multitude of labour-saving devices means that sports-loving Australia has high levels of inactivity within its population. Despite official and widespread social disapproval of smoking, and high taxes on cigarettes, one in every four adult Australians smokes. And although the incidence of smoking is greater among the least advantaged in socio-economic terms, it is perplexing that any members of a well-educated society would engage in something so likely to injure them and shorten their life. One in every six deaths in Australia can be directly attributed to smoking. There was no obesity in the 1950s among the students of Armidale High School, or anywhere else in Australia. Food was reasonably plentiful, and many families ran their own kitchen gardens and fowl runs. Other than fish and chips, fast food hardly existed. The Chelsea Coffee Lounge sold the only hamburger one could buy in Armidale, and that was a classic Australian concoction that included tomatoes and beetroot but no mayo. Food was still governed by a culture of husbanding generated by depression and war. Serving sizes were small, and if one wanted more one had to ask politely for a second helping. No one had much money, so shop-made sweets, cakes and biscuits were rare treats rather than routine fare. A fair comparison with present-day Australia can be seen in the many paintings in the Australian War Memorial which show, as in Stella Bowen’s doomed Lancaster crew, lean men rather underfed by today’s standards. Deprived of sugar during and after the war, members of the Class of ’53 all liked sweet things when sugar was removed from rationing, to the ruin of their teeth. But eating was not such an accepted social event, and life was active. For all the fuss made about ‘health’ at election times, contemporary Australian society does not show a keen interest in the details of health policy. Today public attention focuses on the availability of hospital beds for elective surgery. While health care may consume 9 per cent of GDP, the point of that health care—as in other areas of Australian life—often seems lost in a battle between the Commonwealth and the states about which level of government is actually responsible for a given problem. The Constitution 151


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gave the Commonwealth no role in the health area other than the power to make laws about quarantine. In 1947, through a favourable vote at a referendum the previous year (one of the very few ever granted by a suspicious Australian electorate), it gained the power to provide pharmaceutical benefits to Australians. Half a century later, it had acquired, in the words of the 2004 Year Book Australia, ‘significant financial and policy responsibility for health services, including hospitals, public health and mental health’, while the state and territory governments engaged in the direct provision of these services. Throughout the Western world, governments grappled with how to finance and provide adequate health services, in the context often of low tax regimes, lower birth rates and an ageing population. It can be said confidently that in most respects Australia was not leading the way. In particular, Australia’s success in developing public education campaigns that have been demonstrably effective in reducing illness and postponing death did not seem to have struck a chord with governments, even though the campaigns have been astonishingly cost-effective. Australia has a powerful medical research lobby, and indeed competitive publicly funded expenditure on medical research may be as great as on all other forms of research combined. Medical research is almost entirely about ‘curative’ medicine—better ways to treat those who are already ill. In contrast, preventative medicine— how to help people avoid becoming ill in the first place—receives a tiny proportion of the funds. Twenty-five years ago, Ralph Hunt, then the Minister for Health, said that he was convinced that concentrating on curative medicine could ‘add little to improving the nation’s health status’, and that he saw the future in ‘motivating individuals to take a responsible attitude for their own personal health care’. His several successors have from time to time said similar things, but we still await the day when our governments make Hunt’s outlook the basis for their health policies. The Health Department’s secretary noted in 2004 that the health sector is more dependent on expensive technology than it was when Hunt spoke. The emphasis on curative, rather than preventative, medicine has, if anything, increased. 152


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6 CREATIVE 1 CHAPTER DIVERSITY TITLE

It's great to be part of a music society—a tenor's always in demand! (John Hamel).

Education, wealth and immigration together produced another fundamental change in the style of life that now characterises Australia. For most people in 1950, arts and crafts had a pragmatic bent. Many mothers made clothes for their children and for themselves; they knitted pullovers, darned socks and embroidered tablecloths. Men made and repaired bookshelves, chairs and tables. Families kept vegetable gardens, fruit-trees and fowls, and sang together around the piano, if they had one. Money was tight, and you learned to do things yourselves rather than buy them readymade. There was artistry and creativity in all of this, but its focus was the product or the process, not the art. There were Australian painters of consequence, and musicians, landscape gardeners, novelists, fine cooks and architects. But they were a tiny minority. Wartime scarcity and the bad years of the Depression kept the general gaze on surviving and making do. Yet, from the 1950s on, Australians became steadily more interested in expressing themselves and their creative capacities, in art, pottery, sculpture, 153


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dance, music, craft of all kinds, poetry, theatre, novels, film—and, of course, in sport. Sport had been there before: it was the common denominator of Australian male life long before the Second World War. Not only that, everyone knew it was good for you. Teachers were not alone in thinking that a sound mind in a healthy body was a condition everyone should aspire to, and sport was seen as a certain way to produce the healthy body. In the second half of the century ever larger numbers of women began to see sport as an arena in which they too could achieve an identity, bodily health and some fame. In all of this, a further crucial element has been the Australian urge to compete: against themselves, as in golf, against one another, against other towns or states, against other countries and against the world, in events like the Olympic Games or the World Cup in soccer or Rugby Union. Why Australians care so much about such competition is a matter touched on again in a later chapter, in the context of the issue of national identity. Here it is enough to make the point that in all these areas of creative expression, Australians increasingly began to see themselves as operating in the world, not simply in a local or parochial setting. Available time and money are the necessary preconditions of any continuing focus on things other than work and household maintenance—those activities we generically call ‘pastimes’ which enable us, literally, to pass the time pleasantly. Another precondition, or perhaps facilitator, is education and training: we usually need to be shown how to do something that requires skill, and to learn how to develop these skills within ourselves. This rule applies whether we are talking about house renovation (a favourite way to spend money in the early years of the twenty-first century) or playing the oboe, or gardening. Creative activities serve several useful purposes. They bring us into contact with one another, since most of them have a social setting. They enable us to construct more meaning to our lives, because each of them offers advances in knowledge, competence and self-understanding. In an increasingly secular world, each of us comes sooner or later to wonder about the meaning of life in general, and of our own life in partic154


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ular. More than one of the Class of ’53 pointed to this issue in considering their own lives, like Win Holmes, the Girls’ Captain in 1953, who said, somewhat pensively: ‘I regret that I have never known what I was put on earth for.’ But her interests—among them acupuncture, organic gardening and a grassroots trading scheme in her city of Newcastle—keep her occupied and cheerfully positive. Creativity, put simply, is good for us. We can make almost any activity genuinely creative, but this chapter gives special attention to music, literature and art because these forms of creative expression are almost universal in human societies and enable visitors to understand something more of the local culture. Work itself, as set out in an earlier chapter, has become more interesting and creative for many Australians, especially those in the professions, who find their own work a satisfying form of self-expression no less than do musicians, painters or poets. It would be easy enough to concentrate in what follows on the famous names and the international stars, but the focus here is much more on the ways in which Australians everywhere took the opportunities available to them—and made their own opportunities in some cases—to develop their own creativity. Creative activities are often passed by, as though they are economically trivial, and thus not really important. But the Australian ‘culture sector’ is by no means unimportant, economically or to government. At the end of the twentieth century, cultural activities were worth $19 billion annually, and the role of public funding was increasing, not declining. In real terms, the public purse contributed $30 a head in 1991/9 and $37 per head nearly ten years later. There is more to creativity than personal enjoyment or economic activity. It is bound up with Australia’s sense of itself as a society, an understanding that grew quickly in the second half of the twentieth century. It was generated in part, as we shall see, by the development of Australian publishing as a vehicle for the new discoveries about the country, its people and its environment being made in university research. But we begin with music, and with what is commonly called ‘classical’ music. 155


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Music Even in the nineteenth century, Australia had been the producer of some memorable voices, of which the best known was that of Dame Nellie Melba. Many homes had a piano, and many families sang around it; some played the violin or the accordion. The piano was widespread enough for an overseas visitor in 1888 to comment on its prevalence, ‘exceptional even by European standards’. Occasional pianists, singers or violinists would be called ‘outstanding’ and encouraged to develop their talents. That could really only be done overseas. Before the advent of the jet aeroplane, the obvious place to go, if you were thought to be any good, was London—an easier undertaking by far than to organise a tour around the Australian colonies. In any case, to have the reputation that would ensure a successful colonial tour, you had to have acquired it overseas. Even well into the twentieth century travelling examiners from the schools of music in London represented ‘standards’. Australian composers like Arthur Benjamin and Malcolm Williamson spent their working lives in England, and Melbourneborn Percy Grainger started his international career in London, though he later became an American citizen and lived for much of his life in the United States. Up until the 1920s, popular music had been built around the folk music brought to Australia by convicts and free settlers and then burnished in the new environment. In the twenty-first century folk music is still important: annual national folk music festivals in Canberra and Woodford in Queensland, supported by thousands of volunteers, attract even more thousands of poets, musicians, dancers and instrument makers to hundreds of performances and workshops. The outcome is hugely cross-cultural, reflecting the sheer diversity of music-making in the peoples who have come to Australia, but it does include both bush ballads and the Australian version of country music. That last endeavour has its own even more successful annual festival in Tamworth. Influences first from Britain and then from the United States, embodied in records and radio programs, provided Australians with a 156


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new idea of easily accessible music from the 1920s onwards. The Class of ’53 knew what was on the ‘Hit Parade’ on radio 2AD, and knew something of the favourite songs of the 1920s and 1930s, the stuff played by Gordon Black and his band at the school socials and also known, of course, to their parents. They knew the familiar hymns sung in their church, and a few even studied an instrument. They knew what the New South Wales Department of Education thought was good music for them—songs like ‘Ho-ro, My Nut Brown Maiden’ and ‘Sad Am I Without Thee’. Music lessons were mostly occupied in singing them. Some of the class listened to the weekly program Favourite Tenors on the ABC. Classical music—especially orchestral music—was barely known, although the Sydney Symphony Orchestra had made a visit to Armidale and given a schools concert in 1950, when the Class of ’53 was in Second Year. Armidale High did possess a small record player, and in 1953 the class began to hear some Grieg, notably ‘Morning’ and ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from the Peer Gynt Suite. One afternoon after school, Mrs Lewis, the music teacher, played the whole of the Grieg Piano Concerto for a small group of interested students. For most it was the first large-scale work in the classical repertoire that they had ever heard. In that year the new long-playing records became readily available in Australia, along with the 33 1/3 rpm turntables on which to play them and the sapphire needles fine enough to track the microgrooves containing the sound. A year later, one of the class— then a university student—bought his first LP, a recording of the Grieg Piano Concerto played by Clifford Curzon; it was the Decca Company’s third long-playing record. So began a passionate interest in classical music, and an ever-expanding collection of records and now compact discs (CDs). The same discovery came to other members of the class, and to tens of thousands of other Australians, and of course to their counterparts in the other developed countries. The music of the Western classical tradition slowly became part of general life, helped after 1975 by the availability of FM radio, which delivered distortion-free sound, by its growing use in film and television, and by the declining cost of records and, even more dramatically from the 1990s, of the CD. 157


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By the end of the twentieth century, record companies had recorded virtually everything known to have been composed by the mainstream composers of the tradition—the main works dozens and dozens of times. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for many the central work in Western classical music, had been recorded over 170 times. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a set of concertos depicting the seasons, virtually unknown before the advent of the LP, is now as well known as Beethoven’s Fifth, and as exhaustively recorded. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and the other great composers would all be very wealthy from royalties were they alive today. Indeed, music is simply inescapable in twenty-first century Australia. It is in shops and shopping centres, lifts, cars and broadcast at public events. Many radio stations broadcast nothing else, choosing their music to fit the presumed tastes of their presumed listeners. So pervasive is music that it has become a kind of aural wallpaper, and those concerned about quality worry that Australians are so used to hearing music that they are no longer listening to it. For all that, there were a number in the Class of ’53 who put the availability of good music at the top of their sense of why contemporary Australia is such an enjoyable place in which to live. ‘It’s just wonderful,’ enthused John Bennett. ‘I was not musical as a kid, but now it’s really important to me.’ Herb Higgins also thought music was important, ‘especially after a day on the tractor!’ For Win Holmes, music was essential: ‘Without it, you may as well die!’ As Australians became musically informed, so did the orchestras grow in number and quality, and in the size of their audiences. The three great engines of postwar change were quickly and powerfully at work in music. Immigration brought to Australia composers like Felix Werder, George Dreyfus and Larry Sitsky, and the musical entrepreneur Richard Goldner, who established Musica Viva—one of the largest chamber music organisations in the world. The push into education was not confined to purely academic pursuits. Indeed, what was most dramatic in this period was the early growth in the number and scale of musical performance schools. By 2004 The Orchestras of Australia Network, a collaborative body of those interested in orchestras as well as the music they play, numbered 158


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more than 170 orchestras in its membership, which was not comprehensive. Brass bands are not included in this number, and there are more than a hundred of them. Add to these choirs, of which the Australian National Choral Association has over 500 as members. In the same way, new generations of composers, among them Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Carl Vine and Graham Koehne, emerged to provide new music for new performers and audiences. Others, like George Dreyfus, Jim Cotter and Alan John, concentrated on writing for theatre, film and television. Australia had generated women composers such as Miriam Hyde, Margaret Sutherland and Peggy Glanville-Hicks before the Second World War, and they had their successors in Ann Boyd, Ann Carr-Boyd and Elena KatsChernin. Until the 1970s there were no formal classes in composition available in an Australian conservatorium, and most of the first teachers appointed had not themselves been trained in composition in an academic setting. Such classes are now part of the mainstream offering in all conservatoriums; the Australian Music Centre has 400 composers on its books, and new compositions by Australian composers are frequently performed by Australian orchestras, ensembles and soloists. Australian composers are of course part of the Western tradition, but whether or not they are developing a discernible ‘Australian’ sound remains uncertain. As in other aspects of creative life in Australia, there has been no strong Australian tradition that a young composer could either follow or rebel against. That has been a cause of liberation, allowing composers to explore to advantage other traditions, including those from Indigenous musical life, as several—Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale and Larry Sitsky among them—have done. Musicians need somewhere to play, and the traditional venues were town halls, as in Armidale. From the 1960s, governments everywhere invested in new venues for musical and theatrical audiences. The first, the Canberra Theatre, opened its doors in 1965. Within ten years or so, every Australian capital city had a new performing arts centre, the most famous of them—and the most controversial—the Sydney Opera House complex. The growth of venues, performers and composers had excellent outcomes. By the 159


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end of the century, Australia possessed perhaps the world’s best small orchestra in the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) and another, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, whose partisans would concede nothing in quality to the ACO. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra is another fine small ensemble, which has effectively concentrated on recording rather than touring, given Tasmania’s relatively small size and population. The Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras have begun to tour Europe, North America and Asia to respectful and enthusiastic response. Opera Australia is the third-busiest opera company in the world, after the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna State Opera. The Australian Ballet, a smaller organisation than Opera Australia, is nonetheless comparable in standing, and not much less busy. Australian musicians trained in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide can be found in fine orchestras all over the world. Australian singers are everywhere, the most famous of them in the second half of the past century being Dame Joan Sutherland. To concentrate on the very top is to overlook the sheer scale of the musical endeavour. The performance schools in the capital cities have turned out much larger numbers than just those performers who found their way into the major orchestras. Welltrained orchestral musicians look for opportunities to use their skill as violinists, wind-players and trumpeters, even when they are teaching or doing something else altogether. So the numbers of orchestras has increased, as we have seen. Perhaps they make only two public appearances a year; perhaps they were established to give the young an opportunity to play together; perhaps they are not going to attract a contract from EMI—but there they are. Canberra’s Youth Music Society numbers several hundred in its membership, and has five levels of orchestral performance. Its senior symphony orchestra performs at a high standard, as do the other major youth orchestras in Australia. The Australian Youth Orchestra has performed overseas several times, notably at the BBC Proms in 2004. The Northern Rivers Symphony Orchestra based in Murwillumbah, New South Wales has had enough confidence to hire the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane 160


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to show off its talents. In all, the number of orchestras increased some twenty times over the second half of the twentieth century. The large numbers of musicians towards the end of the 20th century, and their interest in all aspects of performance, have led to a small but important industrial genre in musical instrumentmaking. There were pianos made in Australia from the early nineteenth century, but that endeavour is best seen as import substitution. In the early twenty-first century, the Stuart grand piano, made by Newcastle craftsman Wayne Stuart, embodies new principles and a new design that gives his piano ‘state of the art’ standing. As recordings have made obvious, it is eminently suitable for the performance of the classical repertoire. Other craftspeople in other places produce violins and other orchestral stringed instruments, viols and lutes of the baroque period, flutes and recorders, guitars and harpsichords. Their work is of the highest quality in world terms, and the instruments are bought as often by overseas performers as by Australians. Classical music has been important in the building of a confident contemporary national identity because Australian success and involvement in what is a core element of Western high culture demonstrates that we can excel in anything; there is no need to wait for a few hundred years. But the sales of classical CDs at best represent 5 per cent of all sales. Most of the balance has been the much more ephemeral pop, rock, country and western, rap, metal—each category itself is a domain—the quickly passing content of hit parades and their later equivalents, the ‘Top 40’. Our ears become quickly attuned to music when it is available all the time, and some songs or pieces remain forever in our mind—they are there in the soundtrack of our lives, an apt metaphor. Popular music appeals most powerfully and instantly to us when young. We then develop wider tastes as we grow older, while retaining a fondness for the songs and styles of our youth. Australian musicians in the popular field took quickly to the electric guitar when it became available in the 1950s. Its portability, versatility, relative cheapness and easily amplified sound transformed the domain, which had been built around the piano and drums. Small groups found that they could practise in garages 161


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before gaining an entry into the pub and club venues. While American models and accents remained powerful, the best songs grew out of the lived experience of Australian working-class suburbs, port and steel cities and rural life. Good bands attracted audiences from the same environments, and built national audiences of the same kind as well. Popular music serves both to link and distinguish people, since bands and genres—and increasingly the clothing and memorabilia associated with them—arouse enthusiastic support and partisans. Television and radio programs, the record and the CD, the capacity of singers to travel and more recently the abundance of music available technologically through the Internet, the iPod and the MP3 player, have all meant that popular music became and remains a global industry. From the mid 1950s, with Elvis Presley, and the 1960s, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the best-known performers have been as popular in Australia as in their own countries. Yet Australian music has managed to build its own place in the market. Sales figures collected by the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) show that in 2004 more than 30 per cent of the albums and 25 per cent of the best-selling singles represented Australian repertoire, while four of the Top 5 chart albums for that year were by Australian artists. ‘Country and western’ is now simply another genre in the large domain of Australian popular music, and it draws its musical heritage as much from rock and roll as from Slim Dusty or ‘The Pub With No Beer’. Given that Australia holds only about 2 per cent of the population of the world’s developed countries, the fact that Australian popular music has survived at all might be thought remarkable. But no less impressive has been the international success of Australian musicians. Perhaps the earliest and the best known group was a vocal quartet from Melbourne called the Seekers, two of whose songs reached the No. 1 position on the British and American charts in the 1960s. From then on there would usually be an Australian group or band prominent in performance or on the charts in one part or other of the Northern Hemisphere, the best 162


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known of them the Bee Gees, the Little River Band, AC/DC, Midnight Oil, INXS, Silverchair and Kylie Minogue. Peter Allen, a highly regarded cabaret singer and songwriter in the 1970s and 1980s, who was born in Tenterfield but grew up in Armidale, had his first paid gig in Armidale with a small band formed by one of the Class of ’53. Tatts was run by Cyril Fitzgerald and his wife, and one night Mrs Fitz bustled up to me and said that she wanted us to provide a spot for a talented young man, Peter Woolnough, who was going to Sydney to seek fame and fortune. We were mucking about then with Dave Brubeck and West Coast jazz. What would we have to do for him? He turned out to be 15-years old, and absurdly talented. He could do anything we could do, and do it much better. Fortunately he brought his own records to dance to and a backing record for a couple of songs. I was just glad that he didn’t want to take over the piano as well. Twenty years later I was doing some regular political commentary on Sydney morning television and got to know Roger Climpson, who was the host of This is Your Life . He mentioned in passing that his next victim

Peter Allen was born Peter Woolnough in Tenterfield in 1944, and was also a student at Armidale High, though he was too young to have coincided at all with the Class of ’53. He is nonetheless remembered clearly and fondly by Nola Nealon, who attended Highland dancing classes conducted by his mother. ‘He was just a little kid, always wanting to join in the exercises, or do his own dance, or song. He liked performing.’ Nola often went to the pictures on Saturday afternoon with Jill Martin, whose father, the projectionist at Hoyts, opened the cinema on Saturday afternoons in order to set up the screening. Peter Woolnough would often be there, sitting on the step waiting. ‘He was fascinated by the movies, and would sit in the front row.’ The girls befriended him. In 1959 Don Aitkin had a piano, bass and drums band which played on Friday and Saturday nights at Tattersall’s Hotel, the only real approach to a night-spot in town.

(continued)

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Don Aitkin and his Trio— featuring Peter Woolnough’. I nearly fell off my chair, because I probably hadn’t even seen the ad. The next time I saw Roger I asked him: ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were going to use that ad about Peter Allen’s first paid performance with my band?’ ‘Your band!’ he replied. ‘It never occurred to me that would be you.’ Such is musical fame.

was going to be Peter Allen, who was back in Australia, and I knew that Peter Allen was the Peter Woolnough of Armidale days. So I watched the program. To my astonishment Roger, taking him through his early life, said ‘And then you had your first paid performance . . . and on the screen flashed for a second or two a promo from The Armidale Express that advertised the Saturday dinner dance at Tatts ‘with

The competence and success of these groups was built on the frenetic musical life of young people, itself built on the easy availability of overseas (and later) domestic examples, the desire to achieve fame and of course the relative cheapness of instruments and gear. Pubs and clubs everywhere provided venues, and overseas groups found Australia to be a profitable country to tour. The largest audience ever assembled in Australia for such a performance, around 200 000 people in Melbourne, was not for the Beatles or any other international group, but for the Seekers. Music has played a part in developing symbols of Australian nationhood. The feeling that Australia needed its own anthem, rather than ‘God Save the Queen’, can be dated first to the 1820s, and was raised seriously both during the Second World War and the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. The search for a true national anthem, in two separate polls in 1974 and 1977, found the majority on both occasions supporting ‘Advance Australia Fair’, an anthem with (to some at least) awkward lyrics and uninspiring music. The song Australians most like to sing when they are abroad is ‘Waltzing Matilda’, an attractive ballad that celebrates sheepstealing and suicide, to the mystification of foreigners who ask 164


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what it is about. The sheer boredom of the chosen alternative has led to some imaginative work in the popular music domain, of which one song, ‘We Are Australian’, written by Bruce Woodley, one of the Seekers, and country musician Dobe Newton, has an uncanny capacity to arouse large audiences. The other, Peter Allen’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, is a song whose popularity in part reflects the numbers of Australians who now live and work overseas, a matter discussed at the end of this chapter.

Books, publishing and newspapers Australians seem from an early time to have been fond of reading books. Distance was part of the explanation, as was loneliness, as was the early provision of school education. The boundary rider who could quote large sections of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of verse, or display some similar literary feat, was a common figure in travellers’ tales a hundred years ago. Bob Hawke, one of the Class of ’53, encountered an Aboriginal stockman in the 1970s who seemed to know the entire works of Shakespeare. Newspapers were first established in the early nineteenth century, and the longest-lived magazine, The Bulletin, in 1880. But although the first book published in Australia (New South Wales General Standing Orders) was snapped up by an eager readership in 1802, most books came from overseas, notably from Britain. Indeed, Australia attracted some 25 per cent of British book exports. The development of a nationalist sentiment in the late nineteenth century prompted the establishment of Australian presses publishing Australian material, of which Angus & Robertson, the Bulletin Publishing Company, the Lothian Publishing Company, and the New South Wales Bookstall Company were the largest. Until their arrival, Australian writers needed to find publishers in London, and many continued to do so. While critical interest focuses on the authors who have achieved some fame, by far the largest number of Australian books published until the end of the Second World War were what some of the parents of the Class of ’53 referred to 165


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as ‘penny dreadfuls’—romances, westerns, thrillers and space opera. Even then, Australians wrote only about 15 per cent of all books sold. The great expansion of education in the postwar world fundamentally changed all that, in terms both of supply and demand. The new breed of postgraduate students in the humanities and social sciences of the expanding universities found that there was a strong demand for the content of their theses. Those who began their research in the 1950s and 1960s had to work almost entirely from primary sources: there was very little published on Australia’s history, politics, society or economy. That quickly changed, aided by the institution of a book bounty in 1969 intended to encourage the printing of books in Australia. The production of theses that could be turned into books led to the establishment of university presses and new commercial publishers. They were joined by the branch offices of British and American publishers who saw that they would need to be on the ground in Australia to take advantage of the new market. That market included university students in the new subjects on Australian themes and an ever better-educated society interested to learn about itself. Before long the new knowledge was adapted for school textbooks, as the high schools moved from a preoccupation with the imperial origins of Australian society to an understanding of its history and present condition. The growth of an interest in who we are and how we came to be that way had its fictional counterpart: Australian novelists found that a London base was no longer necessary for them to reach an Australian readership, which continued to be interested in what they wrote. From 15 per cent in 1945, the proportion of Australianpublished books sold rose to 25 per cent in 1960, 37 per cent in 1980 and 60 per cent in 2000. In the following year 228 firms in Australia each derived an income of $2 million or more from publishing; they sold 130 million books for a little more than $1.3 billion, a figure that included export sales of $160 million. Some 8000 new titles are published in Australia every year, of which perhaps 6500 have Australian content or an Australian 166


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reference. Plainly, Australians have remained great readers, despite the impact of radio, television and the computer. In 2000, seven Australians in ten claimed to read books for pleasure, and comparative figures suggest that this is a higher proportion than that found in either Britain or the United States. In the late 1970s, certainly, book sales per head of population in Australia ran at about twice the British and American rates. Educational books were the largest single Australian category (40 per cent by value), and that demonstrates the importance of books in schools, universities and TAFE institutes. Non-fiction (31 per cent) comfortably outpaced fiction (18 per cent), and nearly all the remainder constituted a flourishing children’s market. Of the thousand bookshops in Australia today, around 200 are specialist stores focusing on areas like chess, bridge, horses, trains, art, design and so on. All the Class of ’53 were good readers—one could not have got to Fifth Year without that skill being present in some abundance. And virtually all welcomed the opening up of reading produced by the decline in censorship, the Commonwealth abandoning the use of the customs power for that purpose in 1967, and the states relaxing their own use of police powers at much the same time (though there is some variation across the states, with Queensland being the most punitive still). ‘Why should anyone tell me what I can or can’t read?’ most wondered. Neil Conn’s ‘It’s futile to try and censor—much better to try and defuse it’ summarised another common view. John Vickery added an important gloss: Ah, the Sunday subterfuges have gone! Let everything in and let people make their own decisions. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras only got to be big because [the Rev.] Fred Nile wanted to ban it.

But he and many others were concerned about the amount of pornography on the Internet, and some felt that many parents had no idea what their children were seeing. John Knoff was one of several class members who thought that our concern to protect people against sex but not against violence was misplaced: ‘Film 167


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censorship is odd, because it focuses on what is below the navel. But there’s no censorship of violence. Anyway, adults can censor themselves!’ By 2004 writing had become yet another industry. Writers have their own professional organisation, the Australian Society of Authors, with nearly 3000 members. Some Australian authors have achieved international recognition, the most notable of course being Patrick White, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. More recently, both Peter Carey (1985, 1988 and 2001) and Tom Keneally (1982) have won the Booker Prize, while Tim Winton, David Malouf and Tom Keneally (again) have received in all seven nominations for that award. Australia should probably not claim the 2003 Booker prize-winner, Peter Finlay, who as DBC Pierre wrote Vernon God Little; Finlay, though born in Australia, lived in Mexico during most of his youth. A number of public and private institutions support writers and their work. The Literature Board of the Australia Council (itself established in 1973) supports both the professional development of writers and individual writers themselves. All those who publish can benefit from the legislative establishment of rights to some income from the use of their work in libraries and universities. Publishing remains a lively industry, with firms arriving, leaving and being acquired with a notable frequency. But its impact on the selfconfidence and knowledge of Australian society over the second half of the twentieth century has been enormous. An essential ingredient in the development of an Australian self-consciousness must be a degree of shared knowledge about the society itself. That did not exist at Federation, and it barely existed in 1950. But in the twenty-first century that knowledge is large and widespread. It underpins much film and television, and is an indispensable context to the great improvement in Australian newspapers. Moreover, because Australians read a lot of books that originate overseas, they are, at least on the face of it, able to set their knowledge of Australia in the context of a wider world. The balance in publishing may be skewed in that, for example, Australia imports many more books from the United States than it exports there, but 168


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one gain may be a higher and broader level of cultural literacy in Australia. Australian newspapers in 1951 were not of any great moment in world terms, or considered highly by Australians who had lived overseas. The much greater levels of education among contemporary Australians, however, have had a major effect on the quality newspapers, which are now written for a well-educated readership. Moreover, Australia’s communications with the rest of the world are now so good that there is no reason for the content and immediacy of Australian newspapers to be inferior to that anywhere else in the world. Comparisons must be matters of taste, at least in part, but the following opinion comes from a good deal of experience over 40 years in Britain, Canada and the United States: the best Australian newspapers are now of the same general quality as the best in those countries. In Britain, you will learn certainly more about Africa, which is on the whole not well reported in Australia. In the United States, you will learn more about Central and South America, a domain in which Australia is again deficient. In Australia you will learn more about Asia, especially Southeast Asia. All newspapers are properly parochial, since the doings of the parish are what many people are interested in. But the balance between the parochial and the global is well judged in the best Australian newspapers. In Australia, as in the other Anglophone countries, a large part of the editorial content of all daily newspapers, and especially those published on Friday and Saturday, is devoted to what are now called ‘lifestyle’ matters. That too is done well, and bears comparison for quality with what is done in magazines with the same interests. Some who feel that politics and weighty matters are the only proper content of newspapers criticise the current attention to how people should organise their lives, their time and their money; 50 years ago, virtually none of that existed (apart from the ‘women’s page’ or columns), but newspapers did devote an inordinate amount of space to the minutiae of horse-racing. Newspaper circulations, in Australia as in much of the rest of the developed world, have declined since the advent of television, 169


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and are at half the level of 1970. It is largely true, to make the point again, that people obtain their immediate news from television and radio, but opinion, evaluation and context from newspapers and news magazines. Although circulation has declined, it is entirely likely, because of much higher educational levels, that more people read a single copy of a newspaper than used to be the case. In 2001, at any rate, nine in ten people over the age of 18 claimed to have read a newspaper in the previous week. And the Australian newsagency, at least in the larger suburban shopping centres, provides an astonishing array of national, local and ethnic newspapers and magazines to cover every conceivable aspect of contemporary human life. Any decently large newsagency in a major shopping centre will carry more than a thousand magazine titles. The wealth of the offering is astounding. Paradoxically, Australia’s relatively flourishing newspapers exist in a state of much less press freedom than used to be the case here, and presently exists elsewhere. A Paris-based survey of press freedom in 2004 placed Australia 41st in the world in terms of freedom of the press, because of restrictions of press access to refugees in detention and attempts by organisations to impede reporters in the carrying out of their work. New Zealand was placed ninth, the United States 22nd. Australia is also characterised by the world’s highest concentration of newspaper ownership, with 88 per cent of daily newspapers sold being produced by just two corporations, both anxious to obtain greater shares and to combine their press power with control of television as well. Puzzlingly, at least for some, concentration in the mass media does not seem to worry the majority of Australians.

Arts and crafts, theatre and film Which activity should count as an ‘art’ and which as a ‘craft’ is a matter of dispute, but all are examples of creativity important to this account of change. Yet the scale of the endeavours involved is defeating in a book of this size. What can be said about music and 170


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writing can be said very generally about the arts and crafts, and for essentially the same reasons. Education, wealth and immigration have been no less important in these domains, and the roles of government and public funding have also been important. New performance venues were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, but so were major new art galleries. Melbourne opened its new gallery in 1968, Perth did so in 1979, Canberra and Brisbane both followed in 1982. Major extensions to existing premises appeared in Sydney in 1972 and in Adelaide first in 1962 and again in 1979. Just as in the 1960s and 1970s all country towns of any size looked forward to being the home of a college or better still a university so—if rather later—they also set about ensuring that they had a ‘regional’ or city art gallery. There are now dozens of good ones, and even larger numbers of ‘museums’, many of them very small and the outcome of an individual’s passion for collecting. The number of galleries and museums in Australia, 56 in 1933, is now very large: Australian Museums and Galleries On Line (AMOL) lists over 1500, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (which speaks of a ‘museums industry’) found nearly 2100 in 1999/2000. More than 500 commercial art galleries, not included in either the AMOL or ABS lists, operate throughout the nation. Galleries imply production, and production of consequence. The outcomes of arts awards, like the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes, are now thought important enough to rate inclusion in television news programs, and the deaths of artists like Arthur Boyd or Brett Whiteley are likewise seen as events worthy of national notice. In part that is because some artists, like Patrick White in literature, have become nationally prominent because of their international standing—Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, for example—and partly because art has become yet another industry. In the early twenty-first century Sotheby’s was indicating that major Nolan and Boyd paintings were worth half a million dollars and more, while the best works of earlier periods in Australian art history are hardly less expensive. Indigenous art has achieved international recognition as well. Disposable income and an interest in art (for which art teachers in schools are partly 171


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responsible) have made the collecting of original artworks—not simply paintings but sculpture of all kinds, glass, wood and fabric—something that Australians now do. Houses that 50 years ago would have had no paintings of any kind on their walls, or at best a reproduction of ‘The Stag at Bay’ or a copy of a painting from the country from which the family once came, now will have their share of artworks. How many people are involved in creating their own artworks is impossible to say, as is indeed the case for 1950. Contemporary estimates range from one-third to three-quarters of the population. What can be said is that very many tertiary education institutions, as an adult education service, run classes of some kind in these areas, as do the University of the Third Age (U3A), church groups, social clubs, trade unions and municipal bodies. And most such bodies host exhibitions of their students’ work, sometimes to support the work of a charity. The Class of ’53 were not offered ‘art’ as a subject in senior high school because it was not then a matriculation subject. Mary Ball, unable to continue her study in art when she arrived at Armidale High, switched to music as a Leaving subject, an excellent beginning for someone who would one day be the conductor of the Australian Welsh Choir. But most high schools now offer art as straightforwardly as anything else. Fine art and its counterparts are common degree courses in universities. ABS surveys suggest that between a quarter and a fifth of the adult population visit an art gallery at least once a year, and the same proportion applies to museum visitation. The capital cities of the Australian colonies all developed live theatre, and impressive buildings to stage the productions, well before Federation. As happened elsewhere in the developed world, the arrival of cinema provided an alternative for audiences, and what had been a great presence in live theatre diminished sharply. The move from silent films to ‘talkies’ in the 1930s combined with the Depression to keep live theatre somnolent. After the war, however, as with so many other aspects of Australian life, new people and new energy brought theatre back to life. The Arts Council of Australia, established in 1946, started bringing theatre, 172


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ballet and music to country towns, and in 1954 the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, set up with government support, developed higher standards for local productions. By 1970—again through government support—the main cities each had a permanent professional theatre company, and Australian playwrights such as Ray Lawler, Jack Hibberd and David Williamson were writing plays which enjoyed instant success with Australian audiences. Swift air travel and increasingly cheap air fares, important in so many aspects of change, enabled foreign companies to tour in Australia, so that Australians were able to judge whether or not local productions were up to scratch. Lawler’s play The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was successful in London, which made it easier for Australian themes, writers and actors to gain international acceptance. At the end of the twentieth century, Australian productions of shows like The Phantom of the Opera proved to be of the same quality as those in London or New York. Television, which began transmission in 1956, provided additional employment for those working in live theatre and some of the stimulus that would lead to a revival of Australian film, which was also assisted by government support. Australian television productions would become staple fare in other countries, not least in the United Kingdom. Australian films and Australian television have been instrumental in developing a widespread Australian sense of identity, partly because their reach is completely national. Important in this change has been the presence of educational and training institutions, of which the two most important are the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), which has been producing actors, designers and producers since 1958, and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) (1973), whose focus is more directly on the media listed in its title. Both have been instrumental in lifting the quality of performance in theatre, film, radio and television, and their graduates have given Australia a high status in the international media world. Simply to list names is to gain some idea of the reach of these two educational institutions. NIDA graduates include Mel Gibson, Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Colin Friels, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo 173


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Weaving, Wendy Hughes, Kate Fitzpatrick, Baz Luhrman and Miranda Otto. The Design School at NIDA has won three Oscars. In consequence, NIDA is a target for the ambitious and proficient: some 2500 applicants seek a spot in the 60 new places available each year, while 2000 alone apply for the 25 places reserved for acting. AFTRS graduates have won more than 400 awards, and from six nominations secured two Academy Awards. By 2004, AFTRS’s graduates include Jane Campion, Phillip Noyce, P.J. Hogan and Gillian Armstrong. There is comparable intensity among those applying for places. Film and television have not been easy domains in which ordinary people can participate other than as audience members, but the relative cheapness of digital cameras has caused a good deal of activity in schools and tertiary institutions that has resulted in the emergence of competitions for young film-makers. That can only increase the quality and quantity of Australian creativity in these areas. The central point is that Australia retains an openness and an egalitarian spirit in which ambition tied to talent and hard work are still the major keys to entry and success. A completely different but compelling example in another cultural medium is Australia’s success in mathematics. The Australian Mathematics Trust, a voluntary body consisting largely of mathematics teachers at all levels, runs an annual Australian Mathematics Competition (AMC) that attracts around half a million entrants, mostly from Australia but from 29 other countries as well. The AMC is the largest event in Australia that is not a federal or state election, and is the largest event in Australia for which a fee is charged. The most successful young people in the competition are likely to become, or already are, members of the Australian team that competes in the annual International Mathematics Olympiad. Australia does quite well in these events, which are dominated by students from countries in which an elite of young mathematical talent is selected for years of education in special schools. In Australia, by contrast, the competition goes into two of every three high schools, and students are not selected for any special talent: they themselves decide whether or not to enter 174


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the competition. One outcome is that mathematics competence is widely distributed in Australia, to our national good.

Sport It is almost certainly true that, internationally, Australia is known most widely for its interest and performance in sport. The encouraging weather, the culture of competition and the relatively high standard of living have been the main contributing factors to a preoccupation that is now very old. The first swimming championships were held in Sydney in 1846, and ‘Australian’ rowers, cricketers, swimmers and footballers were making their mark in Europe well before the Commonwealth of Australia had formally been established. Australians, like Americans, invented another code of football, and are interested in excelling in all forms of sport as they encounter them. For Australians sport has been an important form of self-expression, one that principally involves what Howard Gardner has called our ‘bodily-kinesthetic’ intelligence. Gardner’s proposition that we all have his proposed intelligences or capacities is illustrated as easily by the huge numbers who play sport of some kind as it is by the 3.5 million who have gained a university degree or the millions interested in music or painting. If there is sufficient motivation, preparation and encouragement, anybody can be competent in a sport. The prowess of Australians in sports of all kinds is not especially the focus of this section. Australia did very well in the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne and comparably well in the very much larger Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000. By 2000 sport had become important across the world, as countries of all kinds realised its importance in building national pride and finding beneficial activities for young men and women to engage in. By then, also, an old English distinction between ‘amateur’ (gentlemen) and ‘professional’ (working class) sportspeople had disappeared from tennis, cricket and athletics, and sport had become an important and lucrative industry. 175


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For the Class of ’53, sport at school was almost unavoidable, and offered a relief from the constant pressure in the classroom. Male team sports, like football and cricket, had a higher status than individual sports like swimming or tennis, and that emphasis was characteristic of the time. The individual sports were organised into inter-school or inter-house competitions, so that some team element prevailed. All school sport was highly competitive, and the most successful students received ‘blues’ for outstanding performance. ‘Honours blues’, rarely awarded, went to those outstanding in a number of sports. The notion of physical activity as an enjoyable pursuit in itself or as a form of social engagement was almost unknown within the school. Social tennis, for example, was derided as ‘hit and giggle’; it had to be the real thing or nothing. Although Armidale was an inland town with (because of its altitude) a relatively short swimming season, Armidale High did produce in Norma Cooper, a girl from an earlier year, the Australian Junior Girls’ Diving champion of 1951, and in John Monkton a silver medallist in backstroke at the 1956 Olympic Games. Sport could mean real fame. Sport at school had a restricted range: Rugby Union, cricket, basketball, tennis, swimming, athletics and hockey. Hockey was for the girls only, and the ‘basketball’ available for the girls was akin to the sport known today as netball. In these offerings, the school reflected Armidale itself, which could have added only rifle shooting, golf and lawn bowls, though the rival football code of Rugby League flourished at the weekend, and many high school boys found their way into town teams. Australian Rules was foreign. The new sport of squash racquets, in which Australia quickly provided some world champions, did not start in Armidale until the end of the 1950s. Early habits are hard to break. The great majority of the class had played sport at school, and continued to do so afterwards until the challenges of career restrictions and family-building took away the needed time. George Edwards, who began his working life as an accountant, kept on playing football until he discovered that his employer would not provide paid sick leave if football caused the absence. He took up golf. Rex Chidley, a tall man with 176


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a fondness for basketball, kept playing the sport until he wondered, one day, about who would run his pharmacy if he were injured. He gave up contact sport too. A small group managed to avoid active sport during school and saw no need to take it up in adult life. One of its number, Phyllis Mace, nonetheless found herself on the beach in summer for years, cheering her sons on in surf carnivals, astonished at her own transformation. As a girl she had little time for after-school pursuits, as it was her job to get the cows in. A rather larger group moved through the sports, taking up golf, or skiing, or bushwalking, or bowls, or tennis as circumstances suggested, and making that a continuing part of their life. As overseas visitors often find to their great surprise, playing sport in Australia does not have to be an expensive activity. A few of the class moved into sporting administration, or served as referees or coaches. As in the case of music, the domain of sport increased very greatly in scale in the second half of the twentieth century. New sports, or new variations of old sports, kept arriving, first taking players and supporters from the old and then generating their own. American passions in baseball and football have been taken up although, unlike basketball, neither has managed to gain more than a foothold. A sporting Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in 1951 and awoke in 2001 would not perhaps be surprised at Australia’s continuing success in sport. But he would be astonished at some of the sports recognised in the 2004 Olympic Games—including synchronised swimming, tae kwon do and beach volleyball. He would be even more astonished at some that are knocking at the door, like extreme frisbee and footbag. He would be fascinated to learn that there is an additional subsequent Olympic Games, on the same site, for disabled people, and that Australians take quite seriously the performance of their own ‘paralympians’ in these Games. He would wonder at the very existence of the Australian Sports Commission (an outcome of Australia’s poor performance at the 1974 Olympic Games in Montreal) and its recognition of 125 sporting organisations, 75 of which receive financial help of some kind. It is, he would think, a far cry from the days of Don Bradman and Frank Sedgman. 177


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More than 7000 organisations are involved in the provision of sporting and physical recreation activities in Australia, of which 750 or so actually administer sports. All told, they earn around $10 billion and employ 100 000 people, with twice that number acting as volunteers. Public funding provides about 20 per cent of the income. About six in every ten Australians over 18 years of age play sport of some kind, although ‘walking for exercise’ counts as a sport, and that is the sport with the highest level of participation, especially for women. ‘Masters’ sport caters for those of mature age, and the Australian Masters Games held every second year attract more than 10 000 participants, competing in 60 or more sports.

Spending money A society with a market economy and an abundance of discretionary income provides many opportunities for spending. It would be easy to see such spending as inherently wasteful, especially if the money is spent conspicuously. Yet those who visit Europe come to marvel at examples of the conspicuous expenditure of past wealthy and powerful people, like the Medici in Florence, the Popes in Rome, the Bourbons in France, and so on. The urge to build well, to adorn one’s dwellings with beauty, to create fine garden settings for one’s domestic life, to own beautiful paintings and sculpture—this yearning, if not truly universal, is nonetheless a marked characteristic of European life—and after all, Australia is in large part, a transplanted European society. Wealth provides opportunities to develop style through purchases that reflect one’s developing aesthetic sense. Late twentieth century Australia saw a shift from the utilitarian to the beautiful, as more and more people decided to use their money to achieve their own sense of beauty and style. That involved designers of all kinds, painters, sculptors and craftspeople. All of them—or nearly all, as we have seen—are now trained in universities or technical institutes. The outcome has been a rapid improvement in design. New Australian houses, most of them utilitarian boxes in the 1950s, began to improve in 178


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quality and variety from the 1960s. A modern Australian vernacular style of domestic architecture, with small but significant variations by state, has begun to appear. Apparently following a version of Parkinson’s Law, Australian domestic houses have increased in size while the families occupying them have become much smaller. Public buildings have become more adventurous in style, and are no longer simply local gestures towards foreign models. Some Australian architects—Glenn Murcutt perhaps the most notable among them because of his 2002 Pritzker Prize (architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel) have become internationally celebrated. Australian design other than architecture—interior design, graphic design, industrial design, fashion—has become more confident. Australian clothes with Australian labels from Australian designers sell overseas, and ‘Australian style’ is no longer an oxymoron. In similar fashion, Australians have moved from beer drunk quickly and in quantity to Australian wines that are for moments of celebration and drunk with meals. Beer formed 74 per cent of Australia’s alcohol intake in 1961, and wine 12 per cent; in 1999, wine had risen to 33 per cent and beer had declined to 50 per cent. Public drunkenness is much less evident than it was in the early 1950s. Again, a wide distribution of discretionary income lies under this change, as does available land for grape-growing, the general availability of science education (many pioneering wine-makers have been doctors and scientists), the urge to create something of quality and a social culture in which dining has become something more than the ingestion of fuel. That change could have occurred without an accompanying change in the generally preferred version of alcohol, but the immigration of millions of people for whom wine was an important beverage plainly had an effect. The quality and variety of Australian beers have also risen a great deal, and imported beers are now widely available. The place of food and wine in Australia has materially altered, overwhelmingly for the better. For a century, the focus of virtually all Australian foodstuff producers was quantity, not quality. Food was cheap, and good, and plentiful. But potatoes, for example, were spuds, without adjectival descriptors other than ‘new’. Onions 179


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were brown or white. The emergence of specialist growers of excellent fruit and vegetables, and of a market that would buy their produce, is connected with the emergence of restaurateurs like Gay Bilson and Stephanie Alexander and some of those who ran the best hotel dining rooms, who would seek out the best growers and sign them up. It is also connected to the growth of televised cooking programs and to the emergence of a widespread culture of critique of food and wine. One of the largest sections in any bookshop or magazine rack is that devoted to food and wine, and Australia has produced its own writers of distinction. Without them and the restaurateurs, the quality of Australian food today would not be as good. Tropical fruits other than pineapples, specialty cheeses, smoked meats, farmed salmon and prawns, terrines and pates, fresh herbs, spices, Australian teas and coffees—these goods, now taken for granted, are the outcome of a growth in discrimination and enjoyment in food and wine. Wealth, immigration and education underpin these changes just as much as they do the other social changes discussed earlier. It is fair to say that in the other Western developed countries a similar metamorphosis occurred in the second half of the twentieth century—even in England, whose cuisine needed even greater rejuvenation. But in Australia, while some of the stimulus came from the immigrants, the final product consumed is overwhelmingly local, and generally of very high quality. Lacking a strong existing food tradition to overcome, Australia has been able to develop its own contemporary cuisine, often described as ‘modern Australian’ or ‘fusion’ in restaurants. Its key qualities are a readiness to link elements of other cuisines in the one dish, a concentration on high-quality ingredients, and a lightness of touch to accompany the best ingredients. Cherry Ripe, an authority on food in Australia, argues strongly that the ‘East meets West’ cuisine shift occurred in Australia five years earlier than it did in the United States, and that modern Australian cuisine is in no sense a copy of what has occurred elsewhere. Robert Carrier, an English enthusiast, places Australian chefs at the top of those creating the new cuisine. Gay Bilson, a famous chef herself, is less sure; she feels Australia has 180


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simply joined the set of countries that have some feeling for food as an art. The best Australian restaurants are without doubt of world class, and a good deal cheaper than their counterparts in the food cities of the world. The Class of ’53 grew up with an evening meal that most remember, along with Neil Conn, as ‘meat and three veg: bland, unexciting, satisfying and monotonous’, and a few have stayed happily in that comfortable and filling cuisine. No one starved in the 1950s, because kitchen gardens, chooks and fruit trees were commonplace, but the diet was rather boring, at the least. The gastronomic exceptions were John Knoff, who ate Norwegian, Peter Comino, who ate Greek, and Robyn Chidley, blessed with a mother who was adventurous and highly competent in the kitchen. But whatever their memories of the 1950s, most have moved into experimenting with Italian,

Chinese, Vietnamese and other exotic fare. ‘I’ll try anything!’ said Mary Ball enthusiastically. Three in four of the class drink wine with their meals, though none of their parents did, at least with any frequency. Bruce Chappell described the revolution in food and wine as ‘one of the most magnificent changes to our country’ and rated eating in good restaurants as one of his favourite things. Several of the men are now cooks in their own houses and, since other old habits also die hard, a favourite comfort meal for many is still the traditional roast leg of lamb with all the trimmings.

In one field of spending, often referred to as ‘the largest purchase you will ever make’, costs finally outran the increase in discretionary outcome, especially for those entering the market. House ownership was central to the older notion of the good Australia, and the Class of ’53 nearly all got into home ownership quickly, as their parents had done with much more difficulty. But houses became increasingly expensive to buy, not so much because the cost of building, but because the price of land rose in an extraordinary fashion. In the 1950s and 1960s, state governments, the Commonwealth government in Canberra and municipal councils which had land sought to 181


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encourage people to build houses by selling land cheaply. Between 1975 and 2004, however, while the cost of an average house, at current prices, increased sevenfold, the cost of land increased 70 fold! State and local governments were now acting in the fashion of private-sector developers, releasing land slowly and expecting a high return quickly. They had begun to see land sales and stamp duty (which also increased) as important alternative sources of revenue. As land prices rose, so did state government revenues. Two consequences flowed from these changes. First, children began to stay at home much longer than had been the case in the past, long after they had become adults. Houses and rent are now more expensive than ever, so why would someone leave a wellequipped house with a swimming pool, computers and Internet connection (not to mention laundry services of high quality) for an expensive and not especially attractive flat in an outer suburb? So many thousands of young Australians seem to have reasoned. In time they will form a partnership and turn two incomes into a much more attractive rented apartment. But second, to break into the property market themselves, they will need a good deal of parental support in a fashion that was not the case for their own parents. Much of the apparent wealth of Australians flows from real property, as has been said already, and there has been a delay in the inter-generational transfer of equity.

Gambling Although gambling is not on the face of it a highly creative activity, horse-racing is regarded as a ‘sport’—indeed, the sport of kings. It is fair to say, however, that most people who go to the races, and all those who bet off the course, do so because they enjoy gambling. Something has therefore to be said about that pastime, the quickest way to disburse one’s discretionary income. In the 1950s gambling centred on horse-racing, lotteries and ‘art unions’, mostly run by the Catholic Church or associated charities, which had houses, cars or boats as the major prizes. Theoretically, one had to 182


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attend a racecourse to bet on the races, especially those occurring elsewhere, but the helpful assistants of the illegal Starting Price (SP) bookmakers were everywhere at hand. Betting on horse races has stayed pretty constant, but lotteries and lotto, together with the ubiquitous poker machine and the casino have taken most of the newly available money. The illegal SP bookmaker has been replaced by the much less exciting but entirely legal office of the TAB (Totalisator Agency Board), owned by state or territory governments. Australians currently spend (it would be more accurate to say ‘lose’) around $13 billion a year in gambling, which is more than the value of Tasmania’s gross domestic product, and much more than is spent each year on higher education. On average, the gambling quantum has increased since the early 1990s by about 10 per cent per annum. Governments do well out of it, because it is taxed, as do all those who don’t gamble, because they receive the benefits of the money received by government. Addictive gambling is a curse for those affected by it, and for those who depend upon them. The acceptance and legalisation of poker machines in New South Wales in the 1950s provides a neat example of the pros and cons. Only licensed clubs (golf, bowls, soldiers and citizens, and the like) were allowed to possess the machines, for which they paid a tax. The revenue from the poker machines went into improved facilities for members. Very quickly, the wonderful facilities meant that men preferred to drink in the clubs rather than the hotels, many of which closed their doors (they also faced competition in providing accommodation from the new motels). Because the clubs could and did provide excellent cheap meals, the restaurants and cafes nearby also faced great competition, and many closed. Ultimately, it would seem, many clubs now depend entirely on gambling as their raison d’etre, whatever the actual name or purport of the club.

Modelling a new city form One domain in which there was not a great deal of creativity over the last 50 years was in politics—or at least the political process. 183


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Australia’s creative impetus politically lay in the 50 years between 1880 and 1930, when much of what we see today as the distinctive characteristics of our political system were generated. This general comment applies in part to a creative activity of considerable moment, both nationally and internationally: the building of a unique national capital city which, by the early twenty-first century, was approaching its own centenary. Canberra, named and proclaimed in 1913, was another early victim of the twentieth century’s wars and depressions. The Great War stopped nearly all work, and the new Parliament House was not opened until 1927. By 1951 Canberra’s population was only 25 000, with temporary buildings already disfiguring the original concept. The Menzies government determined in 1956 that the central departments of the Commonwealth government should join their ministers and the parliamentarians, who had been in Canberra since 1927. Because the scope and scale of government grew in the first postwar decades, Canberra grew as a consequence. When successive Australian governments reduced the size of the public service in the 1990s, the effect was to transfer work and workers from the public to the private sector rather than to diminish the city. In 2004, the Canberra region (which included the neighbouring city of Queanbeyan across the border in New South Wales) had a population exceeding 350 000. Canberra is distinctive for a number of reasons. It is the city (with the possible exception of Darwin) most populated by people from somewhere else in Australia, and for that reason—and also because it is the national capital—it is the least parochial of the capital cities. Only in Canberra can one get a serious discussion about something happening across the whole country or in a state far away. Its effective planning, publicly owned land, integration of the built and the natural landscape and avoidance of large-scale advertising make it look different at once. That difference worries some Australians, who think cities ought naturally to be noisy, badly planned and chaotic because that is what they know. And the placement of the national government there has made ‘Canberra’ a synonym for politics and bureaucracy, a word almost never used 184


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affectionately in news telecasts. The parliamentarians understandably rarely like it, especially those who live far away. But outside Australia our capital city is well known as an exemplar of the human capacity to plan an enjoyable and effective urban environment, and the city receives about a hundred delegations or official visits a year from people in other countries intent on finding out how it works and why. Canberra-like urban settings can be found in Malaysia and Indonesia, to name only countries close at hand. By 2020, it is estimated that more than two billion people will move from the world’s rural areas into cities, and some of those cities, like Putrajaya in Malaysia, will be new entities, planned from the beginning like Canberra. By then Canberra will be more than a century old. It will have to accept its ambivalent status in the land, just as Ottawa and Washington—capital cities of other new federations—have done. But, like them, it is receiving more visits from ordinary citizens and their families from across the country who want to see what their own national capital is like. On the whole, Australians admire what they find, even if they see no need to live there. Canberra is no longer ‘seven suburbs in search of a city’, but a lively and highly educated city with a strong sporting reputation to match its cultural endeavours, themselves supported by the presence of the country’s national cultural depositories. The National Library, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Archives, the National Museum of Australia and the Australian War Memorial, the latter much more one of the world’s most important museums of war than its name implies, are themselves becoming older and more notable in the international cultural world. The capital city, like its country, has grown up, and is a credit to those who created and have maintained it.

Australians abroad This chapter finishes with a brief consideration of the Australian diaspora. At the beginning of the twenty-first century approximately a million Australians and their families lived and worked 185


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overseas. Virtually all of them have high-level and desirable skills, and in the most diverse fashion. So there are technicians in Saudi Arabia, musicians and professors in Europe, engineers in Japan, journalists in London, actors in Hollywood, chefs in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, designers in Canada. They have not gone away in disgust or because there is no work. Far from it—they are simply in demand. Those encountered are proud of their nationality and intend to come back, especially to raise a family. In London, Australians seeking temporary work are assisted by a general reputation that Australians have a high work ethic and a pleasant manner, quite apart from high skill and educational levels. This is something of a contrast from the 1970s, when Australians overseas—especially in England—were seen frequently as noisy uncultured louts. One estimate is that there are six million Americans living and working overseas, or about 2 per cent of the US population. If that is correct, the Australian proportion is about twice as high, being close to 5 per cent. The world of the twentyfirst century, we are constantly told, is a global world. On the evidence, Australians seem able to prosper in it. Creativity is an important element in the recent story of Australia, because 50 years ago the notion that Australians would be celebrated internationally for painting, music, literature, film and theatre, as well as sport, would have raised eyebrows at home as well as abroad. It is important in another way as well. Recognising that we are all creative, and that by and large we can develop whatever capacities most interest us, has been a general discovery for two generations of Australians now. Unhampered by elitist traditions that elsewhere close off avenues of expression to most people, Australians have explored their own talents to great advantage. Peter Comino spoke for the class when he said, of anyone’s desire to achieve in any area, ‘Go and do your thing! The culture is supportive.’ The outcome is a society much more generally and broadly cultured than was its mid-twentieth century counterpart, much more interested in and curious about the world. It is not simply interested in doing new things. As we have seen in a variety of domains, it is also keen to show that traditional art forms can be 186


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taken up in Australia at the highest standards. Such a society is, on the face of it, more tolerant, less envious, more harmonious and more productive than its predecessors. Quite simply, creativity, which is good for us as individuals, is crucial for our country’s future.

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7 FROM ‘WE’ TO ‘ME’

I don’t like what we’re doing now to these refugees. I’m for people who are in trouble—isn’t that what Australia has been about? Refugees are a problem for the whole world! (Chris Lawrie)

The sheer exuberance of the creative expression in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century points to the central issue in this chapter: the shift from a society where we were very conscious about what others thought and what was ‘correct’, to one in which the individual is supreme. The former Australia was ‘solidary’, meaning that it was marked by a community of interest and values. Contemporary Australia, on the other hand, is marked by a great diversity in interests and values. Mid-twentieth century Australia conformed; early twenty-first century Australia expresses individuality. Of course, while these are contrasting perspectives, we are all conformist to some degree and individualist to some degree. It can hardly be otherwise, because individualists need a society in which and against which to express themselves, while any society needs differences so that social life is interesting. It is the balance between these two perspectives that has changed. In similar fashion, the notion that individuals have ‘rights’ implies a society which recognises those rights. 188


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From ‘we’ to ‘me’

Since the emergence of the modern party system in 1910, Australian politics can be viewed historically as a battle between these two perspectives, in contrasting accounts of the role of the citizen. Liberals place the freedom of the individual at the centre of the their belief system, while for Labor ‘the society’ and its values and interacting obligations have been the primary focus. By the end of the twentieth century, liberalism had emerged triumphant. Individualism—the notion that one ought to be able to do what one wants provided that it does not prevent others from following the same course—along with the notion of individual ‘rights’ which the state is expected to defend, and the notion that one should look after oneself, rather than be cared for by the state, have all become much more powerful. A good deal of support can be found in contemporary Australia for the view that the nation needs a ‘Bill of Rights’. Very little support can be found for its neglected sibling, a corresponding ‘Bill of Responsibilities’. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s celebrated dictum that there is no such thing as society—only individuals and families—while not repeated by the Howard government, is certainly in line with its ideology and many of its actions. The Class of ’53 belonged to a generation in which decorous behaviour in public was expected. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself, dear’ was a common maternal injunction. Another was: ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all!’ Decorous behaviour extended to wearing ‘proper’ clothes for each activity, having one’s hair cut short and being clean-shaven (for young men), and wearing hats and gloves (for young women). Parents had strong cultural support in determining the patterns of behaviour of their children, and they wanted no hostages to fortune. None of the Class of ’53 rebelled in any dramatic way, and those who went to the hostels were subject to a further, and in some cases more rigorous, extension of parental discipline. Why was there such attention to a code of behaviour? Perhaps it was a mixture of forces. One reason must have been the long history of insecurity and uncertainty that the parents and grandparents had experienced. A settled and peaceful order of things was their dream, and you won 189


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your way into that order by determination, hard work and staying out of trouble. Another may have been the long-standing division in Australian society between Protestants and Catholics, with the resulting tension accommodated through politeness and avoidance of conflict. A third may have been a strongly felt need to rely on others if things were bad—a feeling intensified by war and economic depression. A pervading culture of the common man, whose virtues were clear, ruled throughout Australia. One of the claimed virtues, as we have seen, was a lack of pretension, an antipathy to rising above the herd. In the army, both in the Second World War and the period of national service that came with the Korean War, it was not the done thing to seek either non-commissioned or commissioned rank. If it was done in the field, that was one thing. But to seek it was to mark a man out as someone too big for his boots. The view that ‘tall poppies’ ought to be cut down to size—again, a cultural norm of this time—was an adjunct. Its tendrils ran everywhere. At school and later at university, the pronoun ‘I’ was forbidden in essays. School provided few opportunities for oral presentation by students, who were often tongue-tied and shy on the few occasions they spoke in public. In this they shared a nationwide awkwardness. Australian sporting heroes, like the Davis Cup team, were as bad as the rest—providing a great contrast to the articulate Americans when they spoke after the contest. Much of this was to change. Fifty years later the first-person pronoun is widely used throughout Australian society, and personal advancement is explicitly the goal for very many Australians, women as well as men. Australians are much more articulate in public than they once were, a result of a greater emphasis on oral forms in schooling and probably also of the ubiquity of television and its emphasis on talk. Diversity in dress, hobbies, food and ‘lifestyle’ marked the Australia of 2004, just as conformity in all these elements of life marked the early 1950s. White gloves, school uniforms, even what one wears on a tennis court, are now largely matters of personal choice. If a woman were to wear gloves while on a shopping expedition, no one would point or laugh. First, no 190


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one much would notice. Second, she might be making a personal fashion statement. All that can be stated with confidence is that, in general, older generations are more concerned with niceties of dress than younger ones. Swearing in public, once an absolute nono for those in public life, has become relatively common. Nothing is shocking any more: 40 years of television news, the aesthetic chaos of the Internet, the end to censorship and the assertion that we all have a right to see and hear what we like, whatever anyone else feels about it, have meant a certain deadening of the senses. How did it all happen?

Chicken and egg in social change The engines of change were in part the ones we have already considered: education, wealth and immigration. Some of the change could have been discussed as part of Chapter 2, for it is connected to the shift from Keynes to Friedman, to the shift from a common agreement that full employment is necessary to a similar agreement that the market should be interfered with as little as possible. The push for personal freedom and autonomy is plainly part of that shift, and we do not need to decide which came first. The discipline and conformity necessary during war would inevitably have had a reaction in peacetime. In addition, the Four Freedoms that President Roosevelt spoke of in January 1941— freedom of speech, of worship, from want and from fear—freedoms that became bound up in what we were fighting for (once victory rather than defeat was in sight) were all freedoms for individuals. When the war was over the resurgent Liberal Party picked up the objections to rationing, red tape and rules that the demands of a nation at war had kept suppressed. One of the more radical feminist groups a decade later called itself ‘Women’s Liberation’, an explicit call for freedom. These sentiments were intensified by the continuing arrival of immigrants. Almost without exception, they were economic refugees seeking a new life, arriving with nothing and prepared to 191


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work very hard for themselves and their families. They would make their own future. Their tendency was very largely individualistic: many of them had come from Central Europe and further East, and they were anti-collectivist. Up to the early 1970s the individualistic and freedom-seeking notions had to wrestle with a confident government seeking to provide infrastructure and to regulate. After the OPEC price increases, however, governments lost confidence, and the individualistic ethic gained much more strength. By then, also, Australian society was a good deal richer and more material goods were available. People wanted to be able to buy and do what they wanted, because the possibilities were growing and there was disposable income waiting to be spent. The view that services like health and education should be expressions of individual choice rather than a general provision was being put forward—tentatively at first—in the 1960s. At the same time, there began the slow weakening of the rules and institutions supporting the collective side, such as unions, arbitration and regulatory policies like those governing the rural industries. As governments vacated spaces in the social domain—in ending much regulation of primary industry, for example, and in declining to tell universities what they could teach—self-interest and competition appeared to fill the void. In much the same fashion, the end to the status quo marked by the floating of the Australian dollar left the economic field much more open to competition and greed. No one much seemed to be thinking about the public good or the national interest. As we have seen in other domains, the question of which is the chicken and which the egg is a hard one to answer, since so many aspects of social life are interconnected. In the communityoriented Australia of the 1950s, for example, churchgoing was widespread on Sundays, and protected through laws and cultural habits about Sunday observance as well as through the opposition of unions to any extension of paid work after 12.30 p.m. on Saturday. Over time, the possibilities for other activities on Sunday increased, as did the need for at least some shops to be open; the power of the Shop Assistants’ Union declined; the power of 192


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the churches weakened, and fewer people went to church anyway; trading hours were liberalised; and Sunday observance became old-fashioned, a thing of the past. Sunday thus became much more like any other day. It retained a role as ‘family day’ for those with families, but shopping and recreation, rather than church, provided the focus of family activity. Institutions and organisations, as this example shows, help to support cultural practices and values. The institutional supporting beams of the solidary Australia of the 1950s were the churches, the public services, trade unions, industrial associations—both of the city (like the ‘British’ Medical Association) and the bush (like the Graziers’ Association)—the service clubs, the single-income family, and the well-established firms, like Myers, the Bank of New South Wales, Burns Philp, CSR, and so on. All of these beams have been either removed or substantially reshaped and replaced. The strength of individualist Australia is enhanced by the absence or weakness of those organisations. Its ruling notions and practices are individual ‘rights’, mobility and short tenure in employment, minimal restrictions on retail activity, weak unions and churches, and a diversity of realms in which to achieve notice and fame. A striking example of the change would include the now regular exposure of those involved in sexual and other abuse of children in the past. As some of these awful stories unfold, we can see the shift between two conceptions of the greater good. Today we live in a society in which the rights of the individual are most important. It became clear that, in some of these abusive episodes, it was the church that was initially protected. More than once the church made a monetary compensation on condition that there was no public airing of the issue. And people put up with it then, because they were persuaded that the reputation of the institution was more important, all things considered, than what had happened to themselves or their family. That seems no longer to be the case, not only because individual rights are now seen as paramount, but also because the churches have lost status. Another example is the increasing tendency over time for people to blame others for an adverse circumstance occurring to them—for 193


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example, suing a municipal council for the consequences of a fall occasioned in part by a broken footpath. In modern Australia, the notion that one is entitled somehow to lead a life that has no dark side to it at all seems to be quite widely shared. Such a view would have been seen as unreal in 1950, where the prevailing notion was that one ought to accept, with a minimum of complaint, accidents and ‘acts of God’. The advance of scientific understanding over the last 50 years has led to a popular counter-view: that everything is finally explicable and that in consequence all events have a cause. So there are now no accidents of birth or possibilities of death under general anaesthesia; there are only examples of negligence on the part of somebody, like the doctor or the municipal council. In the very recent past there has been a tendency on the part of the courts to place more of the responsibility for some of these incidents on to the individual and less on to the shoulders of the hapless council. And that shift is at least consistent with another aspect of individualism—that fundamentally we all ought to be responsible for ourselves. We will return to this subject at the end of the chapter.

The quest for status ‘New’ nations like Australia lack deeply entrenched social structures, and although immigrants bring with them habits and conventions about such structures, these do not by themselves recreate the structures in the new setting. Such structures— religion, a nobility into which one is born, or a caste, or a class —open up or close off life opportunities, especially for children. Immigrants from Britain did not bring to Australia an aristocracy, an established church or an industrial class structure, although all three were well entrenched in Britain. Australian society soon had one deep division—between Catholics and Protestants—and a racial division between whites and blacks, though since the blacks were not numerous and usually not present in the towns, this division hardly affected white society at all. Aboriginal people 194


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trying to make their way inside white society, such as the family of the writer Sally Morgan, sometimes found it useful to let it be known that they were Indian. Immigrants from other cultures, as we have seen, were admitted relatively easily; there has been much subsequent intermarriage, and much of the religious division has faded away. In the absence of cleavages over class, caste, religion or ethnicity, how do individuals find their place in society and learn to distinguish themselves from one another? The Australian answer is that they compete for status. From the traditional story of Australia’s founding came the notion of our having acquired the best bits of Britishness—the rule of law, representative government, personal freedom—but to have tempered them with egalitarianism, an absence of old-world injustices and snobberies and pretensions. So we were quick to cut down tall poppies. Nonetheless, status mattered at once. Was your family convict-born or ‘free’? The young Donald Horne, growing up in Muswellbrook in New South Wales before the Second World War, discovered a country town with clearly marked social status divisions that were also present in Armidale a decade or so later. Contemporary democratic egalitarian Australia has three classes of air travel and three classes of airline waiting rooms. Melbourne University undergraduates appear to come overwhelmingly from a small set of private schools. Australian suburbia has more strongly marked status lines than it had 50 years ago. Australians compete for status, to be the best or among the best. They do so, first of all and most obviously, for attention or fame. Sport is the universal example, but the existence of television shows like Australian Idol, whose final in 2003 attracted four million viewers, suggests that the urge to be ‘somebody’ and attract favourable notice for something is widespread among the young, as is the opportunity to affect outcomes by voting for one’s preferred would-be idol. In the nineteenth century, you could—like the explorer Ernest Giles—seek fame by being an explorer and winning a medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Today it seems that almost anyone can achieve his or her fifteen minutes of fame by attempting new ‘deeds’ for inclusion in the Guinness Book of 195


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Records—trying to pack even more human bodies into a small car, or assembling an even larger number of scuba divers on the ocean floor to engage in Extreme Underwater Ironing, or cooking the world’s largest rice dish (7000 kilograms of pea and saffron risotto prepared at Darling Harbour in Sydney). There is an engaging egalitarianism in all this individualistic activity, and such quests are presumably undertaken with a sense of humour. But it is hard to imagine any such endeavour being attempted in 1950, and there would have been no great book in which to record the outcome, since the Guinness Book of Records was first published in 1954. Of course there were efforts to do something notorious in the early 1950s, such as students taking an absent academic’s small car to pieces and reassembling it on the third floor of his building, but that incident was seen as ‘outrageous’ and inconsiderate in the extreme, not as something that the community might applaud. Students were then a tiny proportion of society, and rather disliked. Status considerations affect many areas of Australian life, such as the choice of schools, universities, suburbs in which to live, occupations to follow—even the selection of a husband or wife. It can be seen in the freer yet oddly more constrained life of children and adolescents. In the 1950s there was little money, a lot of sport, the pictures on Saturday arvo, bikes, radio, wide open spaces, unlocked houses and relatively open acceptance in them. Today there is ‘stranger danger’, the need to be driven everywhere, much more money, mobile phones, lessons in everything, parents trapped by weekend sport for which they are the chauffeurs, TV, electronic games, computers, the Internet, and much more homework for more kids. Then follows part-time work fairly quickly, if it’s available, personal autonomy, a car, junk food, the risk of obesity. It is hard to be sure, but adolescent life seems to be a more serious business than it was, and much more stratified by location and social status. Reflecting on the contrast, John Gilmour judged that ‘our lives seemed less cluttered’. Most of the Class would agree with him. Some private schools have been known to insist (in the nicest possible way, of course) that their top students must do medicine 196


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at university, whatever the students’ own preferences, because medicine has the highest entry requirement in most universities, and is the highest-status profession. After years of struggle, dentists won the right to style themselves ‘doctor’. Several Australian universities claim to be ‘leading’ Australian universities as well as ‘international leaders’ in something, although universities do not ‘lead’ one another (though they all copy). Scientific groups make weekly announcements about ‘breakthroughs’. There is nothing especially new in all this, of course, since it is connected to the highly competitive strain that runs through Australian society. But the much greater choice available in almost every domain in contemporary Australia compared with that available in 1950, and the much greater national coverage available, mean that considerations of relative status have a much wider remit than they once did. What else could take its place?

The changing Australian community It follows that something has plainly happened to the notion of ‘community’. Australian communities in the 1950s had a strong spatial definition. Armidale was a community, with its own newspaper and radio station. It was involved in a contest for power and status, not to mention sporting success, with Tamworth, a rather larger city to the south. At a more general level, one of the important sporting contests in the annual calendar was the Rugby Union match between City and Country, while for tennis players there was Country Week in Sydney in January. ‘Country’ was another community, again defined spatially in opposition to the ‘City’. In politics there was a Country Party that articulated these differences. In the cities the suburban communities were also strong, embodying nineteenth century memories and immigration patterns. Football teams in all three major codes (soccer was yet to be established in any serious way) were the champions and emblems of these settlements. Because distances were large, and transport relatively difficult and expensive, community activity had 197


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a local focus. Service clubs, churches, sporting clubs and local government bodies were the building blocks of that activity. Half a century later wealth and communications changes have altered that local focus. All Australian settlements are part of national television and radio systems, and most Australians have access to the Internet and email. Telephone calls are very much cheaper than they once were. Improved roads, much better cars and frequent air services have allowed Australians to meet one another easily and frequently, no matter where they live. Australians inhabit a much more mobile society than the one their parents and grandparents knew. Local government boundaries have been changed many times and there are not nearly so many local government bodies. The Class of ’53 brought up their children largely without the help or the presence of their own parents, simply because most of them were far away from their former homes when they married and began to raise their families. But, now mobile themselves, they are much more connected to their own children and their families. It may be true that the extended family of the nineteenth century is returning, in a different guise, in the twenty-first century. In the 1950s voluntary community service organisations grew quickly in both number and size. Rotary, Lions, Apex, the Junior Chamber of Commerce—all were important in developing social networks in new suburbs and expanding towns. They were important also in the building of parks and swimming pools, in the provision of vehicles to caring organisations and to schools, and in providing a platform for visiting speakers who could link the community to the wider world. Fifty years later, these organisations are waning, with ageing memberships and difficulties in recruitment. One explanation is that life is busier, work is more demanding, there are new forms of volunteering, like emergency services and fire-fighting, and new organisations to belong to, like Landcare and Clean Up Australia. Many other opportunities offer themselves for involvement with other people, as we saw in the areas of music and the arts. Moreover, life does not have to be either local or ‘organised’. Surf Lifesaving Clubs, popular in the 1950s, lost a 198


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lot of their appeal as surfboards became cheaper and prompted the new cult of board surfing, a quintessentially individualistic sport, in contrast to surf lifesaving, which is all about teamwork. At the same time, non-profit organisations with an explicitly charitable purpose, such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul, the Salvation Army and the Smith Family, have become important as both the institutional replacements for and the partners of a declining public service. They have achieved this status because they are seen to be closer than governments to the disadvantaged people who need their assistance, and therefore better able to service them. About two thirds of their income seems to come from governments at all levels. But they are national organisations, not local bodies. Rotary and the other service clubs are rarely funded by governments to carry out their activities. It would be easy to assume, as some do, that ‘the community’ is breaking down, and that we are becoming a nation of isolates, alienated from one another and distrustful. Once upon a time, as the Class of ’53 can all recall, houses were rarely locked (some were in practical terms unlockable), and a car stopped on the side of the road was a signal that someone was in trouble and one should and did stop and give assistance. While neither instance is generally true now, there are simple explanations that help to understand why such a change has occurred. In the case of the motorist, modern cars are much less likely to break down, average speeds are much higher, there are emergency telephones on freeways and some other main roads and many people carry mobile telephones anyway. If an accident has occurred, many people still stop to find out whether help is needed. In the case of the unlocked house, there was not much to steal in many of the houses of the 1950s. Modern houses, with their computers and entertainment systems, are much more of a target, especially for drug addicts—a matter we will consider again shortly. Yet such explanations do not explain away contemporary fears about a rise in serious crime, ‘stranger danger’ and personal safety. Much of the rest of this chapter is devoted to what evidence can be assembled to test the view that an accompaniment to the changes we have been 199


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considering in this and the previous chapters has been what is sometimes called ‘the rise in lawlessness’ and a loss of community spirit. It is entirely human to want to have one’s cake and also eat it. So the Class of ’53, glad to have escaped the constriction of the solidary society of the 1950s, often regrets the loss of community and its replacement by what more than one saw as ‘naked self-interest’. John Mills began an account of his journey through life with a summary which many of his classmates would have agreed with. I was born into a very conservative middle-class Presbyterian family where Sundays were spent firstly in Sunday School followed by Church, and if you weren’t a member or at least voted for the Country Party, you were suspected of having Communistic tendencies . . . Such was Armidale and the vast majority of country towns throughout Australia in those years. He was 16-years old and in Fifth Year when he told his parents firmly that he was no longer going to church—for him an act of rebellion. Phyllis Mace saw herself as ‘a young person brought up in a very poor home

with conservative values towards King and Country’. For so many, leaving Armidale, finding a job, a spouse and a role in life at a relatively early age were, as two of her classmates separately put it, ‘a form of liberation’. Yet just as many strongly disliked the materialistic tone of the 1980s, a tone they see as having continued to the present. ‘Wealth creation’, wrote Phyllis, ‘seems to be the only key phrase.’ John Gilmour lamented ‘the decline in moral and ethical standards in politics, law and accounting—and in the corporate world. Greed has been allowed to dominate, while misinformation, deception and downright lying are accepted norms of behaviour.’ For Nola Nealon, ‘honesty and integrity no longer seem to be important in public life. Nationally we have witnessed multi-national corporations coming, going and collapsing; the “big end of town” wheeling, dealing and cheating; entrepreneurs absconding with the loot; and corruption on a large scale . . . The government is constantly manipulating and lying to the public.’ (continued)

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multi-cultural society and she’s right, mate with greed is good, me first, profit before people, I’ll sue you, and anyone not a white European—go home!

Keith McIntyre saw part of the cause as the strong and undue influence of the United States, which has corrupted many of the great things this country once stood for. They are replacing a fair go for all, help your mates, a tolerant

Complacent they are not.

Three recent events can serve as apparent contrary examples to this perception of loss of community. The most obvious is the Australian response to the tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004. The preparedness of Australians to give and to help was dramatic and far-reaching. Within weeks Red Cross raised A$80 million and World Vision nearly A$70 million, while other organisations were arranging benefit concerts, sporting events and similar occasions, even a few months later, to raise funds to help the rebuilding process. A second example occurred in Canada. On 11 September 2001, when the author was on a small mail boat off the coast of Labrador, Canada, hijackers crashed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. All flights into the United States were diverted, those from Europe into Canada. Into Halifax, the capital of the province of Nova Scotia, a city about the size of Canberra, came a few hundred international flights, to be held there indefinitely. The hotels filled at once, and the citizens opened their houses for several days to 5000 complete strangers who would otherwise have been without a bed. No one was left outside the community’s assistance. In Australia in January 2003, a bushfire travelled 30 kilometres in a few minutes to settle on several Canberra neighbourhoods, where four people were killed and several hundred houses were destroyed in a couple of hours. Canberra citizens donated millions of dollars within a few days and 201


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ensured that no one was without accommodation. These examples show that major crises can still bring out an altruistic community spirit in at least these two Western democracies, despite the apparent loss of community solidarity. The much greater technological connectedness of people can make the response to crises and disasters more effective than would once have been the case.

Crime and punishment Crime, like death and taxes, seems always to be with us, but its nature and texture change. Comparisons over time, therefore, are difficult to undertake in any precise way. Crime is difficult to measure, because some of it is not reported, some reported crime is not followed up, and accurate information about other crime, such as the traffic in illegal narcotics, is by its nature unavailable. What is regarded as crime, moreover, also changes over time, and technological and social changes continue to provide new opportunities for criminals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, public drunkenness represented more than half the cases that came to the Magistrate’s Courts, and nude bathing was a criminal matter. Child abuse, on the other hand, was much more likely to be perceived as a private matter. Those matters have changed a great deal. The shape of a society’s population also has an effect on the rate of crime. Most crime is carried out by young people. It is not widely understood that 15 is the peak age for a person’s being apprehended or being given a warning by police, and that the peak age for violent behaviour is 18. Other things being equal, a society with a large adolescent population, as Australia’s was in the 1960s and 1970s, is more likely to experience crime than one with a substantially older population. The changes in workforce and wealth that we have been considering have also contributed to increased possibilities for crime. In 1950 virtually all houses would have had someone present for much of the day, since most women were housewives and most children were under general scrutiny. When both partners go out 202


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to work, as was very much the case in 2004, not only are many houses empty for much of the day, but also many adolescents are unsupervised for at least a couple of hours after school, while many cars are unattended in large carparks. There is simply a greater possibility for theft and for what is known as ‘unauthorised entry with intent’. The gains to us from electronic banking, credit cards and the like also come with new possibilities for fraud, theft and impersonation. If our focus is simply on the present, and on Australia in comparative perspective, then it is plain from the Tiffen and Gittins’ study How Australia Compares that Australia seems to have a relatively high rate of crime, and that it tops the seventeen countries they list in terms of the proportion of people who say they have been the victims of crime in the past twelve months. But in terms of their perception of the likelihood of crime occurring to them, Australians paradoxically come in the middle, not the top, of the group of seventeen. Australians are not much given to homicide, but they are more prone than the people of the other countries to use illegal drugs (in Australia, cannabis and amphetamines). We do not by any means live in a police state, given that the number of police officers is well below the mean for the seventeen countries considered, but for every policeman employed in Australia there are two security personnel privately employed as well. Yet if our concern is with trends in Australia over time, then the picture changes, and is confused. On the one hand, the cost to the Australian public purse of the criminal justice system runs at $7 billion a year, and is increasing rather faster than inflation. Homicide rates, on the other hand, are much what they were in 1950, are less than the rates at the beginning of the twentieth century, and are less than they were ten years ago. The use of firearms in homicides appears to be declining. As far as we can tell, armed robbery is declining, as is unauthorised entry with intent. The rate of motor vehicle theft is also declining. Neither assault nor sexual assault appears to be diminishing in frequency, however. None of these changes in rates of incidence is dramatic, and in fact any snapshot of these offences over a five-year period will show 203


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rises and falls for which there are no obvious explanations. On the whole, the large proportion of people in the younger age-groups 30 years ago does seem to offer a clue to the increases in certain sorts of crime in the 1970s. But it does not seem to be the case that Australia in the second half of the twentieth century experienced a ‘crime wave’ or anything like it. Not a single member of the Class of ’53 referred to it, or anything like it. Why, then, has there been a perception of an increase in lawlessness? The increased risk of burglary, damage and loss is undoubted, and it has led to the rise of security firms, the advertisement, sale and use of burglar alarms and security doors, selfdefence classes for women, the establishment of Neighbourhood Watch in the early 1980s, and a generally heightened sense of danger compared with the past. Crime is a favourite topic for television news, as it offers dramatic visual content, and it is an issue on which it is most tempting for oppositions to attack governments. Finally, and without question, it is related to the traffic in illegal drugs, which was not a major problem in 1950. The story of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920s suggests strongly that prohibiting the sale of substances that many people are happy to pay for, or making illegal the offering of activities which many people want to engage in, is unlikely to be effective. The undesired outcomes tend to include the corruption of the police force, a much higher price for the goods or the activities than would be the case were they legal, the encouragement of highly organised crime, and the making of large profits by criminals. The preferred illegal drug in Australia, as in the rest of the developed world, is cannabis. Around 60 per cent of Australians between 20 and 29 appear to have used the drug at some time, and more than 55 000 arrests were made or infringement notices given in 2001/02 for possession of the drug. A third of all Australians appear to have used cannabis at one time or another. In contrast, the most feared of the narcotics—heroin—has been tried by less than 2 per cent of the population, and its regular use is the problem of a tiny proportion. Amphetamines and party drugs like ecstasy form a middle group in terms of usage. Because these desired drugs 204


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are illegal and expensive, and can easily become addictive, the need for the drug combined with a lack of money soon leads to theft in one form or another. One addict alone can be responsible for a dozen or more break-ins. How to deal with illegal drugs is a question that divides people both inside and outside governments, and Australia does not lead the world in experimenting with different approaches. What can be said with some confidence, however, is that if these drugs were not illegal, their price would be very much less, and there would not be nearly so many break-ins. The incidence of theft and unauthorised entry, then, is to a considerable degree a function of the way we deal with addictive drugs. There might well be other undesirable consequences if these drugs were decriminalised, of course, but we will not know what they are until we see what happens. It is fairly safe to predict that burglaries would decline. Another indicator sometimes used as a measure of quality of life is that of suicide, which is arguably responsible for four to five times as many deaths as homicide and was once categorised as a crime. The incidence of ‘youth suicide’ has caused much discussion in Australia over the past twenty years, especially of its likely causes. The number and proportion of suicides vary over time and of course across countries. And in discussing statistics we need to remember that the data on suicides are no less suspect than the data on crime. It is not always clear whether or not a suicide has in fact occurred, especially among the old or in the case of single-vehicle road accidents. In Catholic countries, where suicide is treated by the church and by the culture as a mortal sin, families may wish to conceal the circumstances of the death. With those warnings in mind, we can observe that the comparative data across countries suggest that Australia is not remarkable for the proportion of suicides occurring among either men or women. In all countries, men are more likely to kill themselves than are women—in Australia, five times more likely. In Australia, also, the age-group with the highest incidence of suicide is that between 25 and 34. Over time, however, the general suicide rate is, at 12.4 per 100 000 people, much as it was in 1960 (11.3 per 100 000), although the greater incidence for males 205


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is clear (20.2 compared with 16.4). The good news is that youth suicide rates over the past few years seem to be declining.

Trust In recent years, in the context of worries about individualism and social cohesion, there has been considerable discussion of the importance—and, for some, the decline—of ‘trust’. This important but hard-to-define quality is sometimes seen as the key component of another hard-to-define concept, ‘social capital’. Once again, nostalgic memories of the days when no one locked their houses need to be qualified by the recognition that valuable possessions were then in short supply, and that houses were generally occupied throughout the day. The ruling value here may not have been ‘trust’ at all. Those interested in social capital talk of its having both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Vertically, the issue is how much we trust those in charge of us; horizontally, the issue is how much we trust our neighbours and our fellow citizens. An earlier chapter suggested that there is much more scepticism now than there once was about the good faith and altruism of Australia’s political leaders, but that may be a consequence simply of the rise in the numbers of well-educated people who have a greater understanding of the reality of politics. Whatever the cause, survey evidence points in the direction of decline, not of increase. A long-term question series conducted by the Roy Morgan polling organisation, seeking opinions about the honesty and ethical standards of various professions, shows a steady decline from 1976 to 2000 in the standing of both federal and state politicians. What about horizontal trust? The wide diversity of the contemporary Australian population ought to mean that people are not so sure of one another as they once were. Immigration alone, given its scale over the last half-century, could have made Australians rather wary of one another. The evidence is inconclusive. In comparative terms, Australians once again fall into the middle of the group of seventeen nations, with 40 per cent agreeing that people can be 206


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trusted, compared with the outliers, Norway (65 per cent) and France (23 per cent). Australians are rather tougher than the average in their desire to exclude heavy drinkers, for example, or people with AIDS or political extremists (whoever they may be!) as neighbours. They are, on the other hand, much more generous in their preparedness to have as their neighbours immigrants or people of a different race than their own. Asked whether or not most people could be trusted, 49 per cent of Australians thought so in 1983, but only 40 per cent were of that opinion in 1995. Another possible proxy for trust could be our propensity to take one another to court. Some refer to a breakdown of the court system because of increased litigiousness, and a few of the Class of ’53 did talk regretfully about a greater willingness today than in the past to take one another to court. As with crime and suicide, the data are open to more than one interpretation, because it may be cost, or the availability of legal aid, which is the crucial factor in deciding whether or not to go to court to solve a disagreement. On the whole, the evidence seems to be against the theory of an increase in litigiousness. If the focus is on civil suits, excluding the Family Court, then legal action declined by an average of 4 per cent in 1999 and 2000. It is true that the availability of legal aid has declined, and strong disincentives operate in the area of costs if one is unsuccessful. The civil court system of New South Wales does not show an increase in litigiousness over the past 30 years; indeed, there may have been a small decrease. An inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission into the federal court system found no evidence of an explosion of litigation, or that contingency fees, representative actions or commercialisation of legal services had led to significant adverse effects.

Compassion One of the issues raised by several of the Class of ’53 was what they perceived as a decline in compassion in Australia—or, alternatively, an increase in selfishness. The examples they gave included 207


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the treatment of refugees, the poorer funding of public schools, the treatment of Aboriginal people and the neglect of the poor and disadvantaged by the successful. In part, of course, they and the many in the wider community who would agree with them are pointing to a shift in the whole texture of society from solidary to individualistic, from ‘we’ to ‘me’. In an ideal world we would all regard it as our personal task to care for ourselves, develop our talents and ensure that we were not a charge on other people unless some catastrophe befell us beyond our capacity to cope. But this is not an ideal world, even if it is a good deal better than its counterpart in 1950, and even if a substantial proportion of Australians do their best to act in this ideal way. What happens now? What ought to happen? Once again, we need to recognise that the ruling assumptions of 1950 included the view that structural matters were the principal cause of social outcomes. Fix them, and you would dramatically improve society. Government was the key, control of government was therefore essential, and the changes would be devised and implemented by government. Very generally, the period up to the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 saw many attempts to bring about change using government as the tool. The great expansion of education at all levels, the decision to count Aboriginal people and treat them as citizens, and the publicly stimulated developments in art, music, drama and literature are all examples. After 1975, those in power and those seeking power were increasingly affected by an opposite and less confident view—that government could not achieve everything, that to a much larger degree people had to play a larger role in determining their own life outcomes. Another driving factor was that the country was getting wealthier, so that the cost of things diminished relatively, which was a help to everyone, especially those with little money. By 2001, while the range of publicly funded social welfare was very much wider than it had been in 1951, the Australian government had to a considerable degree reduced the extent to which it provided help directly. As we have seen, voluntary and charitable work was filling the gaps. For every protracted and difficult disease, 208


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a voluntary organisation would come into existence, lobby for government recognition and support, conduct appeals and attract volunteers. The big welfare providers, like the Salvation Army, are becoming hybrids, partners of government, associates of corporations, deliverers of services on a fee-for-service basis, and conductors of appeals. In 1999 the Salvation Army spent a quarter of a billion dollars, with 83 per cent coming from government, client contributions and corporate assistance, and 17 per cent coming from appeals. Who contributes to such appeals? As we have seen, a dramatic event, like bush fires or the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, seems likely to produce a quick and generous response from the Australian community. In 2000, more than ten million Australians aged 18 years and older made donations to organisations of all kinds. A smaller sub-set of these donors made and claimed taxdeductible donations to charities and other organisations, like schools, universities, orchestras and medical research foundations, eligible to receive tax-deductible gifts. The total amount claimed is presently around $1 billion, and on average the donations represent $250 per claim. Do donations on this scale demonstrate that Australians are compassionate? Voluntary work is another form of donation, and in 2000, according to the ABS, almost 4.4 million volunteers aged 18 and over—about one in every three of that section of the population—contributed over 700 million hours of unpaid work to organisations they were connected with. The higher the socio-economic status of the people, the more likely they were to offer unpaid work. The four major areas receiving such voluntary work were community or welfare work, sport, youth and religion. What do these data tell us about compassion and community? The Class of ’53 divides now into ‘joiners’ and ‘loners’. A quarter of them see themselves as ‘loners’ now and always. The rest have been joiners throughout, or are people taking a rest from what was once a busy and active community life. What would be an expected figure for the whole population? Why would we expect it? The basic measurement problem is that comparative figures for 1950 hardly exist. Although the Salvation Army and the Society of 209


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St Vincent de Paul began in Australia in the nineteenth century and the Smith Family in 1922, their work in 2004 and the networks they had established had become much larger. We do not know whether voluntary work is more or less characteristic now than it was. We do know that, within the seventeen countries included in How Australia Compares, Australians are at the very top in voluntary participation, both in total and in every field other than religion and political party membership, where Americans dominate. We do not know much about donations in the past—partly because our preparedness to donate is a function, among other things, of taxation rules, and these have been changed recently. Much the same problems surround any comparative discussion of ‘philanthropy’, which is a word increasingly used to refer to donations from the rich. We do know that, for every dollar given in philanthropy in Australia on a per capita basis, nearly $6 is given in the United States, nearly $2 in Britain and $1.50 in Canada. Are Australians mean, or Americans generous? The answer comes in two parts. The philanthropy of rich people is based on fortunes so large that philanthropy is painless as well as gratifying. British and American fortunes of that scale were made in the nineteenth century and earlier. In Australia the large fortunes of the nineteenth century were made to a large degree on the land, and were passed on to subsequent generations, not given away. There were no nineteenth century Australian fortunes made in railwaybuilding, petroleum, steel, manufacturing or banking—Australia simply did not have that kind of economic history. In the second half of the twentieth century, a considerable number of fortunes have been made, and they have led to a new interest in philanthropy. An organisation called Philanthropy Australia has come into existence to act as a medium between the philanthropists and those seeking their support. It publishes a journal and a directory. In 1999 the taxation rules were changed to encourage the wealthy to set up their own private philanthropic foundations, which received $250 million very quickly. The Howard government has been keen to encourage philanthropy, perhaps to be able to demonstrate that a self-sufficient community does not need a ‘nanny 210


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state’ to provide everything. One outcome is that the philanthropists have a good deal of scope to decide what activities should thrive, because their gifts have a leverage effect on the preparedness of governments and other citizens to contribute. All in all, one is compelled to say that we do not know enough about ‘trust’ or ‘compassion’ to tell whether or not they have declined over time. Indeed, if we consider all the domains of this chapter—the shift from the communal to the individual, the urge to achieve high status, the changing pattern of crime, and the equivocal evidence about trust and compassion—what emerges most strongly is that Australian communities are not what they were in the past. It is simply a different world. The cities and towns are still there, and people reside in them as they once did. The older churches are still there, but their congregations are much smaller, and they can no longer look after their flocks as they might once have done. Australians interact with one another in new ways, and they are not as restricted as they once were by distance or difficulties of communication. Modern Australians have a much greater capacity as individuals to help create the communities they wish to inhabit. They still do this by choosing to live in a specific location, but in addition they can maintain membership of several other communities at the same time because of the much greater power of modern communications technology. They can offer their own work and money to help the causes or organisations they support. In short, the notion of ‘community’ has changed. The greater autonomy of choice possessed by the Australians of 2004 compared with their predecessors in 1954 comes with some costs, such as a greater incidence of break-in and theft, that the earlier generation did not have to face. Those costs do not amount to a decline of community, but one cannot escape an uneasy feeling that most of the voluntary activity and the philanthropic money goes to activities that improve the existence of those who already have interesting and comfortable lives. Fifty years ago, it was generally agreed that the poor were always with us, but that it was not really their fault. We ourselves 211


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might have been there; perhaps our ancestors, or even we ourselves, had been there. In any case, there was some sort of remedy, and government provided it. In contemporary Australia, it is generally agreed that the poor are still with us, but that it is largely their own fault. They could get out of it if they really wanted to. After all, comes the self-justifying thought, we did.

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8 WHO ARE WE, AND WHAT 1 CHAPTER TITLE ARE WE BECOMING? I have seen Aboriginal welfare develop from the kerosene-tin humpy fringe-dwellers to where it is today. We have made progress, but we have made too many errors—and we’re too slow. The difficulty is convincing the young Aborigines to take up the challenge. (John Gilmour)

When political leaders, historians and other writers begin to talk about ‘the nation’, they are engaging in a special kind of collective storytelling that sets out to raise and answer some important questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? How are we special? Why do we matter? There is usually an important social purpose behind such talk, because it helps to unite us and to differentiate us from other nations. An abundance of nations characterises the modern world—191 of them were recognised as members of the United Nations in 2003. That is a recent phenomenon, however— and indeed, the nation-state emerged clearly as the model only in the nineteenth century. It remains a hugely important structure, despite all the talk of globalisation, because so far the nation-state has been the most effective context in which to provide a good life for a very large number of people. To make people think of themselves as nationals rather than, in contrast, as tribal people or city-dwellers or Catholics or carpenters, the storytellers of the nation search for common, uniting elements, such as a shared 213


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history, shared origins, shared ethnic or religious backgrounds, shared allegiance to certain values, and so on. We Australians have always had a muted sense of ourselves as a nation, at least in comparison to two other countries important to us: the United Kingdom and the United States. For much of the first 200 years of European settlement, Australia was part of the British Empire and then of the British Commonwealth, which made the notion of an independent Australian nation at least ambiguous. Australians had no glorious past to dwell on, had no revolution to sanctify the new nation, and witnessed no stirring meeting of great minds to chart the vision of the new nation. Indeed, Australia’s history, as taught to us in school, was mostly about explorers finding that the inland was very dry. Those of the Class of ’53 studying modern history for the Leaving Certificate found that the syllabus stopped at the causes of the First World War, and that the syllabus included little about Australia. Australia’s leaders have been careful and modest in talking about their nation to its citizens. ‘Australia’ simply grew as a national entity in the century after its formal establishment at Federation in 1901. It is not at all clear whether Australians have ever yearned for some kind of universal national myth to aid them in their understanding of who they are. It is certain that we do not possess one and, as has been argued already, our favourite national song—about a sheep-stealer who killed himself—is almost untranslatable to foreigners. How much does national identity matter, especially in what is being called the global century? And what will it consist of ?

The decline of Britishness In 1947, according to the census of that year, only 9 per cent of Australians had been born elsewhere in the world. In terms of ancestry, Australians were overwhelmingly British and Irish, and they saw themselves—though the Irish less so than the British—as ‘Australian Britons’. Not all of them, by any means—indeed, perhaps only a small minority of them—saw Britain as ‘home’. Irish 214


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Who are we, and what are we becoming?

immigration to Australia had practically ceased once the United States gave Ireland special status as a source of immigrants in 1923, which weakened the Irish link to Australia. Despite the Irish, a kind of transplanted ‘Britishness’ characterised much of Australian social life in the middle of the century. It was emphasised and romanticised by the Royal Visit in 1954, when the young Queen and her handsome husband outdid Hollywood in glamour, and millions of Australians stood and waited for a glimpse of a real monarch as she travelled widely around the country. That was the high point; thereafter, Britishness simply declined until it was akin to a relic. The stimulus to decline came as much from the United Kingdom as it did from Australia, and the two sources of change reinforced each other. First, the Second World War and the move to decolonisation that followed it greatly reduced British power and prestige. The British Empire soon became the British Commonwealth of Nations. India, Pakistan and Ceylon, the first big portions of empire to separate, chose to be republics yet remained part of the new formation, which rattled those who thought allegiance to the monarchy was central to the Commonwealth. The choice of Maralinga in South Australia as a site for British nuclear testing in 1956 and 1957 caused major protests within Australia, while the question of which country was responsible for the consequences of the tests is still a live issue in the twenty-first century. The British economy took longer to recover from the effects of the war than did that of Australia, and in 1962 the United Kingdom applied to join the European Economic Community (EEC), which effectively signalled the end of Australia’s position as a favoured exporter to the United Kingdom. Before long, Britain reduced and then withdrew its military forces east of Suez, which was interpreted as another kind of betrayal by many Australians who felt the importance of the tie. The mystique of the monarchy could not overcome these fundamental economic and military changes. Second, partly in response to what political leaders saw as British indifference and partly for regional economic reasons, Australia intensified its links with Asia and the United States, 215


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assisting the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s, when the United Kingdom remained outside the conflict. The Menzies government established a most important trade treaty with emerging Japan in 1957, well before British overtures to the EEC, and was already seeing Asia as the future target area for Australian exports, a forecast quickly proved right. Empire Day became Commonwealth Day in 1958, and later still became simply the Queen’s Birthday (in another month) and the occasion for another long weekend. The Holt government abolished appeals to the Privy Council, and removed the term ‘British subject’ from Australian passports, which had ceased to be ‘British’ passports in 1949. The Gorton government undertook a range of actively nationalist endeavours such as establishing the Australian Council for the Arts (later to become the Australia Council) and the Australian Film and Television School, used the Australian Industries Development Corporation to prevent foreign takeovers of major Australian companies, and revived the Australian film industry. The last of the Menzies-era Coalition governments, that of William McMahon, transferred the responsibility for Australia House in London from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to that of External Affairs, a transfer indicating that relations with Britain were no longer, as they had been since the Commonwealth of Australia had been born in 1901, a matter requiring the attention of the Australian Prime Minister. All these changes had been made by a government whose members valued the link with Britain. By the time Labor regained power in 1972, the national origins of the Australian population had become much more diverse. In 1953 the class knew that they were Australian, and that was good. They knew also that they were in some sense British, and that was good too. More importantly, that was just the way it was. It was a given, and you

couldn’t do anything about it, like everything else in the bigger world. The fact that there was a British monarch was acceptable and accepted; it was not felt to be odd or strange. None of the class had ever been to Britain— (continued)

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save Rodney Rich, the Queen’s Scout selected to go to the Coronation in the Leaving year—and no one called it ‘home’. Their Britishness was very distant, and almost all knew much more about it from the cinema than from any family tradition. In fact, the class for the most part consisted of third- or fourthgeneration Australian boys and girls. Their forbears, overwhelmingly working-class and poor, had arrived in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, mostly from England and Scotland. One had come in the First Fleet. About half of the families had found their way to the Armidale area at least a generation earlier, often in the nineteenth century. The Class of ’53, then, were authentic products of the old Australian tradition, save that they were all Protestant; the few with Irish antecedents were Presbyterians, descendants of those Scots settled in Ireland from the 16th century on. Understandably enough, none of the class became enthusiastically pro-British thereafter. Their en-

counter with the real United Kingdom, which took place for many of them in the 1960s and 1970s, reinforced their pride in being Australian. I saw where they [ancestors] had come from, and I thought ‘No wonder!’ It opened my eyes a great deal. You could see the very poor and the very rich. Australia was much more prosperous. There was more opportunity to advance, in whatever you wanted to do in a career. Our standard of living was much higher. The lifestyle and the weather were much better too. There [Edinburgh] children went to school and came home in the dark. When I was in Scotland I understood that I was Scottish, not English, and realised how historical my roots were—yet how much of my ancestry I didn’t know.

The Class of ’53’s coming to adulthood in the 1950s coincided with the start of the decline of Britishness in Australia. As young people of the 1950s saw it, Britain produced old-fashioned cars like 217


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the Ford Anglia, was a cold, wet, gloomy and dirty country, and had no glamour at all. We in Australia had a future; Britain only had a past. Why did that set of attitudes not lead quickly to a republican constitution? There are many reasons. From Lord Casey on, all Governors-General have been Australian, so the head of state is now always an Australian. The Queen had some other vague and distant status and was more akin to a movie star than a monarch— as indeed she was in the United States. Her connection with Australia was neither burdensome nor costly. In any case, Australia was an independent country and acted as one, so that the link with the monarch had no functional impediment to Australian autonomy. The establishment of Australian honours in the 1970s seemed a good idea and was generally supported. Apart from a fringe republican movement that had little standing within the major parties, no one was seriously proposing a republic until the 1990s. It was, in sum, simply not an important issue to most people. Rod Rich’s summary would probably have gained an assenting nod from many of his former classmates, only one or two of whom had any feeling for the link with the monarch in 2004: At heart I guess I’m a republican. I’ve got nothing against the Queen—she’s had a rough few years—but we’re past the stage where we need a monarch.

Fay Thomson’s self-perception is very similar: I would love to have seen the Queen in 1954, but now to get rid of the monarchy seems a good thing.

A recognition that Australia was an independent nation combined with an indifference to the Constitutional change needed to exemplify that independence may well have been widespread. Constitutional change might have waited for another era had not Paul Keating, Prime Minister in the early 1990s, decided to make the republic an issue that had relevance for the centenary of the Australian Federation at the end of the decade. He found 218


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some support on both sides of politics, but his replacement by John Howard after the election of 1996 took some of the force out of the movement. When a referendum was finally held in 1999, the ‘No’ vote won comfortably—not because Australians were opposed to the notion of a republic in principle, but because the question proved to be much more complex than had been anticipated and the alternatives could not be debated properly. It is probably true that the politically interested wanted a minimal change, while the majority, if there were to be a republic, wanted a more decisive change, but could not agree on what it should be. Few of the Class of ’53 raised the issue of a republic themselves, and those who did were divided about its importance. The real recognition that Australia had changed and was becoming ‘multicultural’ rather than British began in the period of the Whitlam government. In his 1977 Australia Day speech, Malcolm Fraser talked about ‘ethnic cultures [adding] a new dimension of diversity and richness . . . What is emerging from this is a distinctive Australian culture.’ He used the ‘multicultural’ adjective for the first time four years later, and it quickly stuck. In retrospect there could hardly have been any other outcome, given that to the seven million Australians of 1945 there had, by 2002, been added six million immigrants, and intermarriage had been very common. Most Australians accepted the new rhetoric readily enough, although there were some who saw in immigration the weakening of the ‘real’ Australia. Geoffrey Blainey, a prominent historian, disturbed the affability of the new arrangements by a forcefully expressed speech in Warrnambool in 1984 which was a strong reaction to the idea of multiculturalism, though his target was Bob Hawke rather than Malcolm Fraser. He argued that new waves of immigration were eroding the idea of the Australian nation. In 1988 he referred to Hawke as ‘the leader of a nation of tribes’ who had no sense of what a nation was. He had aroused ethnic loyalties in a minority while ‘shunning the national pride of the great majority’. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, which emerged in 1996, built some of its values around the supposed losses suffered by ‘real Australians’, but One Nation lost ground 219


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almost as quickly as it had gained it. The term ‘multicultural’ will probably recede in time, but a country that celebrates a TurkishAustralian girl’s telling her class that her ancestors had fought at Gallipoli under Kemal Ataturk, and a Vietnamese-Australian student who went to celebrate Anzac Day at Gallipoli, has moved a long way since monocultural 1951.

The emergence of Aboriginal Australians Throughout Australia’s history as a New World society, the treatment of its original inhabitants by the new arrivals has been a painful theme rarely dealt with by the white people for very long. No one knows how many Aboriginal people there were in 1788, but one authoritative estimate is 300 000. Diseases brought by the convicts and soldiers were almost certainly the major factor in the quick decline in Aboriginal numbers, but killings, expulsion from traditional lands and a consequent hopelessness were all important. In the early twentieth century, a widely accepted view saw the Aboriginal race—‘Stone Age man’—dying out; in consequence, there was no need to worry about the surviving members. Half-caste children should be brought up as whites, and assimilated. These views contributed to policies of forcible separation of half-caste children from their Aboriginal mothers and, in time, to a major inquiry into ‘the stolen generations’. In the Armidale of 1953, local Aborigines lived near the town dump, in shelters made from beaten-out cans and lumps of wood. A few of the Aboriginal children went to primary school, but few—if any—made it past First Year at Armidale High. The fact that Aboriginal men had fought in the Australian Army during the Second World War, and some had been decorated, was a sign that this complacent view had some problems, however. The Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1960s pointed to the strange lack of a similar protest in Australia, which suffered a good deal of criticism overseas as a consequence. The Constitution gave the Commonwealth no role to make laws about Aboriginal 220


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people save within the borders of its territories, and provided that Abori-ginal people were not to be counted in the Census of the Australian people. These two provisions worried many Commonwealth parliamentarians, and the Commonwealth did what it could by conferring the right to vote on Aboriginal people in 1962. Three years later, Aboriginal workers, in an important industrial relations decision, gained the right to receive equal pay for equal work. In the same year, the Holt government held a referendum designed in part to allow the Commonwealth to make laws for Aborigines everywhere and to include Aboriginal people in the census. It is some measure of the change in general feeling about Aboriginal people which had occurred by the mid-1960s both that the ‘No’ case for the referendum lacked any kind of sponsor, and that 91 per cent of the electors voting supported the government’s proposals. By common consent, the 1965 referendum marks the turning point in the treatment of the original inhabitants by those who had come from elsewhere. The Indigenous people were now officially ‘Australians’. Laws, or the capacity to make them, do not by themselves change behaviour. It was the Whitlam government which moved to give Aboriginal people land rights to traditional areas in the Northern Territory, and the subsequent Fraser government which made Aboriginal affairs a straightforward part of the Commonwealth’s political responsibilities. Thereafter the pace of legislative change was slow, but in truth no activity could have been fast enough to satisfy those pressing for true equality and recognition. It was not until the 1990s that the High Court’s Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) judgments formally made clear, first, that Australia’s Indigenous people were actually here before the Europeans arrived, and second, that their traditional title to land could therefore coexist with land title conferred under British and subsequently Australian law. In the meantime, a great deal had changed. First, the actual numbers of Aboriginal Australians grew rapidly, from a little over 80 000 in 1966 to 485 000 in 2001, when they formed 2.4 per cent of the whole population. Although a conventional picture of their location has most of them in the Northern Territory, in fact only 221


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one in eight Indigenous people lives in the Territory, while just under a third live in New South Wales. In all, some 70 per cent live in towns and cities. The older are more likely to live in the remote areas, the younger in the cities, and the age distribution of the Indigenous population is quite unlike that of the non-Indigenous, being weighted towards the young rather than the old: Aboriginal women have their babies at a younger age and have more of them, and on average Aboriginal people die much younger. Higher fertility explains much of the rapid increase in the Aboriginal population, but another factor is a greater preparedness of people to define themselves as Aboriginal in the census. Second, the Commonwealth, and more slowly and reluctantly the states, busied themselves in trying to provide Indigenous Australians with comparable services and opportunities to those enjoyed by the non-Indigenous. This objective proved hard to achieve for many reasons, the principal one being that services and facilities developed for city-dwelling non-Indigenous people need to be re-thought altogether if they are to work for their target population. It took some time for this simple truth to become evident, and even longer before it was generally realised that the Indigenous people would not be content to become ‘ordinary’ Australians until there was some official recognition of what had happened to their ancestors in the settlement of the island continent by waves of Europeans and then of settlers from everywhere. The unwillingness of Prime Minister Howard to add his voice to those saying ‘Sorry’ at the end of the twentieth century plainly slowed the process of reconciliation that had been started under the Keating government. The Howard government’s decision in 2004 to abolish the major self-governing Indigenous institution, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), and its lack of interest in thinking about a treaty or any alternative form of legal resolution of what Aboriginal leaders could now unselfconsciously describe as the ‘invasion’ of their country, further cooled relations between Aboriginal leaders and the Commonwealth. Although treaty-like agreements have not led to excellent and harmonious outcomes in the United States, Canada or New Zealand, Australians are 222


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inventive enough to learn from experience elsewhere, and thereby to forge their own compact that will establish the basis for a better future for Indigenous people. It will happen. A scorecard of the situation of the Indigenous in the early years of the twenty-first century shows some major achievements and some striking blemishes. Many thousands of Indigenous children are in school, nearly 9000 at university, and more than 60 000 in TAFE institutes. Their success rate may be notably lower than that of the non-Indigenous, but they are there, and more of them are succeeding. About half of the marriages contracted by Aboriginal people ally them to non-Indigenous partners, and roughly the same proportions of both populations claim to be Christian. Aboriginal art and culture are now known worldwide and form a vital part of Australia’s national heritage, a standing confirmed by the important role of Aboriginal art in a new Paris museum of the world’s indigenous art to be opened in 2006. Aboriginal art represents the main business of more than 30 commercial art galleries, with more than 1000 Aboriginal Australians working as artists of one kind or another. Almost as many work in the field of sport, while Cathy Freeman, an Aboriginal athlete, was Australia’s most admired performer in the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Evonne Goolagong, no less admired in her time, was the first Aboriginal athlete to achieve national and international recognition when she won the Wimbledon singles championship in 1971 and then again in 1980. Writers like Sally Morgan, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Hilda Jarman Muir and Jackie Huggins now appear on school reading lists, while excellent Aboriginal actors—Deborah Mailman, among others—have appeared in films dealing with Aboriginal perspectives on Australian life. Mailman featured in Bell Shakespeare’s King Lear, the first Indigenous actor to appear in a non-Indigenous part in the commercial theatre. The frequency with which women’s names appear in these lists is significant, and it can be argued that Indigenous women, like Lowitja (Lois) O’Donoghue, have been more important in claiming proper status for Indigenous people than the men. Aboriginal people and Aboriginal 223


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issues are now firmly part of contemporary Australian life and culture; their salience will only increase over the next generation. The improvement in the standing of Aboriginal people since the 1960s makes even more poignant the ways in which they stand out on the negative side of the ledger. As already mentioned, Aboriginal people have a much lower life expectancy than nonIndigenous Australians (about twenty years less), and they are much less likely to have a job—about 20 per cent less if you take age into account in the comparisons. It follows that three in four Aboriginal people in the labour force have incomes in the bottom 40 per cent. Given all that, it is even less surprising to learn that they are notably less healthy than the non-Indigenous. And they are twice as likely to suffer death due to injuries; assault and motor vehicle accidents are the two major causes. The demon drink, which ravaged the working class in colonial Australia, is no less devastating in some Aboriginal communities, especially where it is acquired through welfare payments. Most telling of all, Indigenous people, who make up only 2.4 per cent of the population, account for 20 per cent of Australians in prison. Their rate of incarceration is fifteen times higher than that of the non-Indigenous population, and the rate is climbing. Deaths of Indigenous people in custody—the impetus for a Royal Commission in 1991—are now not very different in proportion to deaths in custody of non-Indigenous prisoners, but there are much larger proportions of very young Indigenous offenders in prison. Any study of the annual National Prisoner Census will raise great doubts about the relative justice available to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia. That improvements can be achieved quite quickly can be shown in the case of Western Australia, where in 2002 a marked reduction occurred in the numbers of Indigenous offenders committed to prison: more were acquitted or the charges dismissed; courts used community service orders more frequently; and fewer offenders breached their earlyrelease orders. It is hard to suppress the thought that a much older culture of neglect and suppression still operates in parts of the criminal justice and corrective services systems. 224


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To balance it, we must take into account the hundreds of thousands of non-Indigenous who marched in support of reconciliation in 2000, the plain fact that governments in all spheres are concerned about how to bring Indigenous people up to the material standards available to everyone else, and the successes that Aboriginal people have enjoyed in the past half-century. As more and more Aboriginal people benefit from education and from the resulting access to interesting and well-paid jobs, their health and wealth will increase. A substantial section of the Australian population is on their side. That section includes the Class of ’53, who expressed much the same supportive and tolerant view of Aboriginal people as they did of immigrants. What has produced this tolerance? In part, people who are enjoying their own fulfilment in life tend not to be particularly envious of or hostile to others. In part, as with immigrants, it was simply meeting different people and discovering the similarities— the shared human inheritance.

John Gilmour, who grew up in Guyra, was one who encountered Aboriginal people from the beginning:

people. That experience maintained his view that they were people like everyone else: In recent times there’s been progress in housing and employment, and now you get the militants and the sophisticated. They all have different backgrounds to Anglos, and a great sense of humour as well. Some of them are superb, and others no-hopers. You can say the same about us.

The Aboriginal kids who went to school in Guyra were fringe-dwellers. It was the same in Tingha [a nearby township]: some were magnificent, some were not. In the northwest of New South Wales, where he spent his senior career in high schools and worked in employment assistance schemes after retirement, John met many Aboriginal

Neil Conn, another Guyra boy, spent sixteen years of an (continued)

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administrative career in the Northern Territory, the last four as Administrator:

He had little doubt about why the reversal of Aboriginal degradation was taking so long:

The dark spot in this [improvement in society] is the Aborigine, whose future is being destroyed as much by those who care as those who don’t . . . given one swipe with [a] magic wand, that’s where I would use it. Bob Hawke’s role as a bank manager in Goodooga, in the far northwest of New South Wales, brought him into a town and district with a relatively large Aboriginal population: I had a lot of contact with them, which enlightened me and broadened my life. I served as a JP as well, and found myself doing a lot of paperwork for them. I got to appreciate the way they lived—there were lots of fine people among them. I met one who’d been a veteran from the First World War, and an Aboriginal stockman who knew the complete works of Shakespeare.

We’ve stuffed it up. We gave the educational money to the parents, not the kids, and that meant it was simply pissed up against the wall. We did silly things—I mean we provided carpet for the schools but no air-conditioning! Keith McIntyre was one who met an Aboriginal leader—in his case, Neville Bonner—and adopted the cause. Margery Murphy joined the Emergency Nursing Service in Western Australia, which took her to Broome, Derby and Wyndham. She met Aboriginal men and women during her service, and ‘found them to be wonderful people’. Others encountered aspiring Aboriginal children as students at high school or at university, and saw their struggles as akin to episodes in their own family histories.

The Class of ’53’s generation found it relatively easy to say ‘Sorry’, not because they felt any personal responsibility for what had happened more than 200 years ago, but because they recognised that there had been no serious attempt until their own time to redress the 226


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wrongs, and to bring Aboriginal Australians into full and respected membership of the dominant society. But at least a strong start has been made. By 2050, very many Australians with Aboriginal ancestry will not be noticeably different from ‘whites’ in what will very likely be a wonderfully intermixed society. It is very likely that, for future generations, Aboriginal ancestry could be a matter of pride, not one of anger and bitterness, as has become the case for those with convict ancestry. For that to occur, however, a prior condition is a rethinking of ‘white’ policies about ‘black’ Australia whose outcome is self-confident and effective Aboriginal communities. The Aboriginal families of Armidale had been outcasts in an almost literal sense: they lived on the outskirts of town, some of them at the edge of the town rubbish dump, in what was referred to as Silver City. In the 1960s the move for inclusion prompted some white activists to bring Aboriginal families into the town proper, and into proper housing. By the end of the century Armidale had become a gathering place for Indigenous people, as had been the case before European settlement. Now they congregated in the pedestrian mall both during the day and (the younger ones) in the evening. Not everyone approved of these changes by any means. Indeed, what could be said about the Indigenous experience in Australia could, by and large, be said about Armidale.

The city had doubled its population since 1950, and the University of New England was now by far the major economic influence, with annual expenditure of more than $150 million and a student population of 17 000, of whom 4500 were in residence in the city. The university provided courses dealing with Indigenous issues, such as its Diploma in Aboriginal Family and Community Counselling. The city was the centre of regional medical and legal services for the Indigenous people, and the university sought to increase its Indigenous student numbers, as did the much larger Armidale High School. As elsewhere, there was partial success: a great deal could be seen to have been done since 1951, but there was no great satisfaction anywhere about either the present or the future.

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Australia in the world By the end of the twentieth century, Australia was a good deal more visible in the world than had been the case in 1950, when only 60 countries were members of the United Nations. Australia was just a little too small as an economy to have been a member of the group of the richest nations (originally the G6, then the G7, now the G8) when it was formed in 1975, and successive Australian governments found that none of their best efforts could get Australia admitted to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). In the latter case, the reason was not economic insignificance but a reasonably widespread (and perfectly accurate) feeling within ASEAN that Australia was not in any real sense ‘Asian’. But Australia is a member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), its troops have fought in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention serving as peacekeepers in a wide variety of settings, it is the third most desired setting for higher education on the part of international students (after the United States and the United Kingdom), and in world terms it now has standing and a reputation or, more accurately, several reputations. The well-travelled Class of ’53 divided quite sharply about whether or not Australia mattered in the rest of the world. Many discovered that, once they were abroad, Australia simply disappeared from view; nothing about it was reported in the world media except shark attacks and bushfires. Of course, Australians are not alone in this, since national media the world over are all notably parochial, and for good reason: it is the locals for whom

the papers are written and it is the locals who buy them. Australia, on the whole a success story, rarely generates the sort of news that captures instant attention anywhere. But media exposure and importance are not the same thing, and people simply disagreed about the latter. To a frequent comment like this one: We’ve grown—we’re an important country now. In the UK and the US we’re known. (continued)

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There’s been an appalling shift to a slavish proAmericanism.

We’re a sort of junior America, but doing it better. . . There were contrary viewpoints like the following: We’ve got to be a bit humble about all this. Australia really doesn’t figure much, though we think we do. Yes, our influence is benign, and we punch way above our weight. But the media exaggerate our importance. All felt that the country had grown up, and become independent:

Our ties with the US look a bit close at times. We are too close to America. Let Australia get on with being Australia rather than being a lap-dog to the US. John Knoff, who can see Australia from his Norwegian as well as his adopted perspective, put it this way: In some respects Australia in the 1950s was an extremely narrow-minded country . . . introverted and isolationist, clinging to the long extended nipple of Great Britain. We seem to be going back to that again, even if the nipple now belongs to America.

We’ve made massive steps ahead, and we’re now thinking and acting on our own behalf. However, that sentiment sat a little uneasily with a widely shared uneasiness about Australia’s new closeness to the United States:

Competition As we have seen, running through all the endeavours of the second half of the twentieth century in Australia is the thread of competition. Australians are a highly competitive people, and have been for a long time. Indeed, as we have seen, people from the colonies competed internationally as ‘Australians’ even before the 229


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colonies federated. It is customary to see this thread in the cloth of sport, and certainly there can be no denying that Australians care a great deal about the performance of their national sporting teams and sporting heroes. Such has been its interest in sport and so great its capacity to organise sporting contests, that Australia hosted two of the fourteen postwar Olympic Games, in Melbourne (1956) and Sydney (2000). Both were great successes, not simply in terms of the medal tally won by the host nation, but as professionally organised and widely enjoyed events. If the British were conceded to be the great masters of state ceremonial events, then Australia knew how to run the largest sporting events. By the end of the century, Australia was noted internationally for its general competence in matters sporting. There is virtually no widespread sporting domain in which Australians have not shown world-class performance at some time. But the same urge to compete—to show others that we were as good as them, if not better—has extended into all areas of creativity. While it is not commonly seen as an example of ‘competition’, an overseas tour of an Australian symphony orchestra or of the Australian Chamber Orchestra creates critical reviews in London and New York, inspected at home to see whether or not the Australian product matches up. In similar fashion, the performance of Australian film actors in the annual Academy Awards, or of Australian wines in the leading American and British wine magazines, or of Australian authors in the Booker Prize, or of Australian singers at Covent Garden—these moments of apparently individual significance became transmuted into readings of the national endeavour. Why is it so? Several possibilities offer themselves in partexplanation. Australia has no near neighbours and no common borders, a short history as a nation, and no long-established international persona. There is, perhaps, room to create one, and in doing so to explain to ourselves who we are and why we are special. The nation began as a colony, and that would explain why contests with ‘the mother country’ and her approval are of particular importance. Perhaps more importantly, Australia began as a penal colony, 230


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harbouring petty criminals from England and Ireland. That would help to explain why the urge to show the British that Australians are just as good as they are—and indeed, usually better—brings a special satisfaction. It could also be argued that Australia has, until quite recently, been a country dominated by men and male values, among which ‘the game’ is supremely important as a metaphor for life. It seems likely that urges of this kind reach into society in powerful ways, providing a reason why people should compete, while the diversity of the population provides abundant arenas in which to do so. Whatever the reasons, the competitive culture and the urge to be famous are at least as alive and well in 2004 as they were at Armidale High School and the Australia of the 1950s.

What is Australia for? From time to time ‘Australia’ looks like the team you belong to or the team you support, rather than an easily defined political society of which you are a citizen or a potential citizen. Not all immigrants want to become citizens. Australia has 900 000 permanent residents who are yet to seek naturalisation. But, as we have seen, it also has about the same number of citizens who live and work in other countries but who don’t, so far as we know, seek to become citizens of those countries. It is plain that the world is becoming more global, in the sense that people from all countries who have portable and precious skills find that they can move to another country and work. International travel is a way of life for millions around the world; many Australians now are affluent enough to consider the annual overseas holiday as simply part of their ordinary expenditure. The skilled young find they can move around the world, improving their history and geography while earning a decent living. Citizenship is nonetheless a nagging matter for the Australian government. Over the past twenty years, a good deal of money has been spent in endeavouring to explain to adults and to school pupils why being a citizen is simply better and more honourable than just 231


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being a resident. The website of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs proclaims, in the language of a car salesman, that: ‘There has never been a better time to become an Australian citizen’. Yet if citizenship involves taking an active interest in the affairs of the nation, then it is uncomfortably true that Australian citizens, as we have seen, seem to have opted out of a lot of that. Less then 2 per cent belong to political parties; in the 1970s, the comparable figure was closer to 4 per cent. Australian party membership figures are lower than those ruling in other democracies, mostly because compulsory voting removes the need for large teams of party workers to get the reluctant out of their houses on polling day. It is worth noting, at the same time, that of the seventeen countries considered in How Australia Compares, all but Japan showed the same decline over time: on average, party membership has halved over the past 30 years. Active citizenship everywhere is much less obvious than it used to be. The negotiation of a free trade agreement with the United States in 2004 exemplified the issue. Given that the American population is fifteen times larger than the Australian, and the disparity between the economies is even greater, a complete free trade agreement between the two countries might be thought to be something that could raise issues of nationhood for the smaller country. And indeed it appeared to, right up to the elections in October, when exit polls suggest, on the contrary, that it finally hadn’t mattered at all. In any case, to repeat an earlier theme, the terms of the agreement were complex, transparency was dim, and the issue was one that a reasonable and interested citizen might think was simply too hard. Ultimately, both sides of politics were in favour, and that reduced the likelihood of partisan dispute. Yet the indifference of the bulk of the electorate before and after the election was somewhat puzzling. Citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as rights. Perhaps this is not a time when externally derived responsibilities are attractive to most people. As John Gilmour put it, ‘people are not as involved as they used to be and are often quite opposed to becoming involved in community affairs’. Perhaps, as our society 232


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grows more technologically and socially complex, the important issues in public policy simply become too difficult for people to comprehend unless they are prepared to devote a very great deal of time to them. But it seems that, for many people—perhaps the majority—living and working in Australia have become disconnected from the notion of the country itself and its future, disconnected from the notion of nation-building. There is certainly an urge to understand about Australia and its history. The rediscovery of Anzac Day, especially by the young, says something about a felt need to find valid symbols of nationhood and belonging. More than 10 000 people (some of them New Zealanders) gathered on 25 April at the Gallipoli battlefield in 2005 to remember the landing and its aftermath. The celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade at the end of 2004, the controversy over what ought to be the themes of the displays in the new National Museum of Australia, the widespread interest in local history throughout regional Australia—these are all indications that a new sense of being Australian is developing. Australians may still not know who they are, but they now know a great deal about who they were and how they have changed. From the 1960s publishers have discovered and developed a book-buying public anxious to know about Australia in every way. Tens of thousands of books have been published, and the flow continues. Indeed, the most powerful outcome of the research conducted by academics in Australia—more powerful by far than anything done in medicine, technology or the sciences—has been the transformation of the knowledge of Australians, their society and their environment. What was initially academic work has been transmuted into school syllabus material, into newspaper stories, into radio and television series, into films, into more books still. Australians are today vastly better educated about themselves than was the case in 1951. Defining ourselves positively is a problem, because comparisons are automatically involved. It is still much easier to say who we are not, and then to emphasise what we are for. If Australia is to be more than just the place we live in, it needs a future as well 233


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as a present and a past. The Australian project has always been straightforwardly comparative: to build a better society than the one the immigrant left. In the final chapter, we look at whether or not that project still has relevance.

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9 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO 1 CHAPTER TITLE THE DREAM? I enjoyed watching Australia grow up, and participating in that process. (Bruce Chappell)

The election of the Howard Coalition government in 1996 and its subsequent re-election in 1998, 2001 and 2004 have led to a growing perplexity in some sections of Australian public life. There were, of course, any number of events that might have triggered some concern within parts of the electorate. In 1996, the new government discovered a previously unknown ‘black hole’ in the budget of some $8 billion, which caused it to cut costs and services, to reduce funding to the universities (the first time this had ever occurred) and to announce that more would be expected of people in terms of personal responsibility, a theme played steadily thereafter. The muddy handling of the referendum on the republic issue, the stringent treatment of ‘boat people’, the Prime Minister’s steadfast refusal, on behalf of the mass of the population, to say ‘Sorry’ to the Indigenous people for what had happened to them over the past two centuries and more, Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq, the failure to discover in that country any weapons of mass destruction, the ‘children 235


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overboard’ incident—all of these events would have been big issues at any time. But the unhappiness went deeper, and could be resolved into a single issue: somehow, despite the fact that all these things had happened, the Howard government kept being re-elected.

Millennial dissatisfaction For those who felt strongly on any, most or all of these issues— those, broadly speaking, on what passes for the ‘left’ in Australian politics—the explanation had to lie in a kind of moral failing within the rest of the Australian electorate. What was perhaps worse for them was the failure of the Australian Labor Party to act as a moral alternative to the government. It was the ALP in government, after all, which had started the dismantling of the Australian Settlement, exposed hundreds of thousands of Australians to job losses and job uncertainty, and established the first detention centres. In opposition, it apparently agreed with the harsh treatment of people seen as ‘refugees’ by those concerned with their plight. Where could the concerned turn? For some of them, the outstanding figure in Australian politics was Senator Bob Brown, but he was a Green, with no chance whatever of attaining power. The choice in December 2003 of Mark Latham as the Leader of the Labor Party and thus of the opposition, gave them heart. But Latham was no more successful in 2004 than Kim Beazley had been in 2001, was under attack from within his party as soon as the election was over, and resigned from the leadership and from Parliament for health reasons early in 2005. For those who supported the government, the continuance in office of the Coalition was proof, if any were needed, that its critics were people of the past. Since the critics included in their ranks a lot of writers and commentators, they could be pictured as ‘the chattering classes’ or ‘urban elites out of touch with the mood of the Australian people’ or ‘publicly funded hacks longing for the return of the old days’. The old days would not return, said the 236


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Whatever happened to the dream?

supporters—and a good thing too. Australia had grown up. It did not need a ‘nanny state’, for Australians could look after themselves, as was obvious. The less government meddled in people’s affairs, the better. Some of this controversy assumed a much more fundamental shift in party preferences than had actually occurred. Most people still gave their effective preference either to one of the Coalition parties or to Labor. The summary of that ‘two-party preferred vote’ over time shows evenness and stability, not radical change. From 1987 to 2004, Labor’s percentage share of the two-party preferred vote was as follows: 51, 50, 51, 46, 51, 49 and 46. Its 51 per cent of the vote in 1998 did not secure its return to government because it did not win enough marginal seats—a frequent problem for Labor since Federation. We do not know what Labor would have done, had it won power in 1998 or 2001, in areas like the treatment of boat people or entry into the war in Iraq, but its actions would almost certainly not have been identical to those of the Coalition. It is also important to note that, in 2004, the Liberal and National Parties together won only 46 per cent of first preferences—in fact, one voter in every six supported a candidate from outside the major parties. This was no ringing endorsement of the Howard government by the people of Australia. Nevertheless, once John Howard had won a fourth successive election victory, and without much difficulty, the ALP and those who supported it were mystified. Why didn’t the electorate listen? Why did it still prefer a government that was on the wrong foot on so many issues—at least as Labor people saw it? Mark Latham was careful to reiterate that he and his party accepted the outcome, and that the electorate had given its judgment. But where should the party go? Lindsay Tanner, one of the party’s more reflective thinkers and a member of the front bench between 2001 and 2004, articulated well the puzzlement of so many Labor people shortly after the election: ‘We’ve actually got to decide who we are . . . I think that’s our core problem. We haven’t yet really worked out where we stand on a whole range of fault lines in national political life.’ 237


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It is not hard to see a parallel between the secular slide in Australia after 1960 and the slide of the ALP after 1990. What does a social democratic party stand for when most people are well off, and the old cleavage lines within society have become increasingly irrelevant? When the ALP was at its most powerful, in the 1940s, a substantial section of Australian society was not at all comfortably off, the whole country had gone through a long cycle of depression and war, and the party stood for an ideal of equality of opportunity that was attractive to many more than its own core supporters. In 2004, the ALP found it hard—or so it seemed—to adjust its perspective to a world it was instrumental in bringing about—a world in which individualism is central, ‘choice’ is a key word, protection for the weak and the poor is a relatively low priority, and the institutional strength of the public sector is much reduced. What, then, explains the passion? And there is no mistaking it. Here is one of the Class of ’53, a good Christian and a welleducated member of the Australian middle class, neither a Labor partisan nor a unionist, in 2003: Ah, how to transform Australia? Let’s rid ourselves of that horrible little man who purports to be our PM and represents us. What a distasteful, devious man! But then, whom would I trust to be our leader? Simon [Crean]? Hardly! I’m afraid that I have very little faith in our current crop of federal political leaders . . . The Hanson factor has exposed that a significant proportion of Australians accept a crude form of politics.

It would be simple in some quarters to picture Prime Minister Howard as the most hated politician of the last half-century. But those with any memory will recall that Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser were also targets of a great deal of dislike, as was Robert Menzies in the early 1950s. All four also had vociferous supporters, and all four were re-elected at least once. For the Class of ’53, taken as a whole, John Howard is no favourite, as the extract above suggests. In fact, the Class of ’53 238


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seem in this matter to be representative of their age group in their animosity towards the Liberal leader. It is in practice difficult to find many enthusiastic admirers of the Prime Minister who are Australian born and of his generation, even among Liberal voters. John Mills, a pharmacist who had worked in Europe and Papua New Guinea as well as in Australia, sought for balance in his own assessment: ‘I can admire what he has done—some of it, anyway—but I don’t like him.’ It is reasonable to ask why people have this ambivalence, given that his government has been reelected three times without great difficulty. There is a view that he reminds many men too much of the less admirable side of their fathers. Setting that aside, he is knowledgeable and extraordinarily hard working, and he has an excellent memory and great qualities of drive and persistence. The Parliament has no more experienced an MP. But three factors seem to work against him. He is of the same generation as the class, but he comes across as a man of small imagination and limited generosity; he has a way of constructing his language that, though he is careful not to tell untruths, exposes him to the charge of lying; and his view of the world and of Australia seems backward-looking, when the class wants to look forward confidently. In summary, many of those born in the 1930s in Australia have been part of the story of the transformation of their country. But they do not think the story has come to an end. They want to see a creative and positive vision for 2050. They do not find it in the words or deeds of the Prime Minister, whom they find boring and reactionary. The same class member who criticised the Prime Minister had other passionate concerns. One of them was the burgeoning of the private school system, which he also largely blamed on the Howard government. I pointed out to my Bishop [that] we are establishing a society based on a form of social, spiritual and educational apartheid where those who can, make choices. For most the choice is simply not there; ‘choice’ is simply elitist. [Because of background and skills] I had been invited to chair the 239


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Diocese School Board, which I had accepted because the initiative was to establish schools in areas that had very little or nothing in the form of physical and social infrastructure (new suburbs in particular). I was asked to resign when I questioned the policy and direction of the Diocese to towns that were well served.

Another was unemployment, and the displacement of people from their work and life through decisions made elsewhere without knowledge of local circumstances. He found himself giving seminars for those about to retire, whether or not the retirement was voluntary: I will never forget one of my seminars where employees had been made redundant from a major industrial complex, and the bitterness that existed in that room . . . The core social (and possibly economic) problem for Australia is that of unemployment in all its forms. This problem is further highlighted for me because in my Church parishioners run several community outreach programs . . . I now believe that all unemployed should be managed at the local government level and that purposeful work and or training provided through the local community. The nexus between personal self-esteem and community expectations would be largely overcome.

In these extracts from a long letter one can detect the elements of the end-of-century frustration and anger that has been marked in the past few years. The fact that we are at the beginning of a new century—indeed, of a new millennium—somehow makes things worse for people like him. Where is the further transformation of Australia? Where is the needed political leadership? Where is the old belief in egalitarianism? Where is compassion for the unfortunate? What has happened to the dream of a just and fair society under the stars of the Southern Cross?

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The need for a new dream That there are answers to these questions will not in any way diminish their force in our present politics, for they reach down to our emotions and our sense of self as well as of nation—what Australia and Australians should be like. But there are answers, and they need some consideration. One of them is that the dream has to some degree been displaced. The egalitarian element of the dream assumed that goods should be shared more or less equally, because there weren’t all that many goods anyway. But what happens when there are plenty of goods, most people are well housed, clothed and fed, and poverty is measured in a relative way? There are many forms of poverty, the traditional one being linked to the amount of money available to you. But as wealth has increased so has the notion of poverty expanded, to include poverty of time, poverty of access, poverty of information, and poverty of communication. As with income, all of these concepts are relative, and we have little or no information about the state of affairs in 2004, let alone in 1950. We know most about financial poverty. A conventional measure sets financial poverty at an income level that is some fraction of average weekly earnings. If poverty for a household is defined as having less than, say, 50 per cent of average weekly earnings for all households, then in Australia around one household in five today is below the poverty line. If the fraction is set at 40 per cent of average weekly earnings then in Australia around one household in fourteen is below the poverty line. These proportions are rather higher than those of a number of European countries, much the same as those ruling in Canada and the United Kingdom, and rather lower than those ruling in the United States. But why 50 per cent, or 40 per cent? Some members of the Class of ’53 knew real poverty at first hand when they were young: it meant lacking adequate clothes, of eating a lot of rabbit for their animal protein, of being very cold in winter, of not being able to go out. There is a temptation to assume—the more so if one is comfortably off—that those in ‘poverty’ do not know how to manage their affairs—that these deficiencies result from 241


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personal inadequacy rather than from their inheritance, broadly speaking, or because of problems with the way our society works. Since a substantial proportion of our society is now comfortably off, it cannot be surprising that the plight of the poor and of the unemployed is much less a source of common concern than it was during the Depression. A second answer is that the dream was the dream of nineteenth century immigrants from the United Kingdom, whose descendants made up something like 95 per cent of the population at the end of the Second World War. In 2004, Australia has a very different ethnic composition, and almost half the population are either foreign born or the children of parents one of whom at least was foreign-born. Today’s newcomers were nearly all people who were seeking a fresh start, and escaping injustices and lack of opportunity in their land of birth. But they had emigrated in the second half of the twentieth century, not of the nineteenth. They arrived in a country whose wealth was much greater, and much better distributed, than had been the case a century earlier. It provided plenty of opportunities for self-advancement, provided one was prepared to work hard and had at least some quick sense of how the new country worked, which could be obtained from relatives already here or from friends made in one’s own national group. The new immigrants did not seek an over-arching governmental system such as existed in Sweden or Denmark, and many of them had left countries in Central and Eastern Europe where a much less generous version of the Scandinavian social welfare system operated. They were prepared to look after themselves and their families, and asked to be left alone to do so. The dream of a just and fair society far better for ordinary people than that ruling in nineteenth century Europe could have little relevance to them. What they found in Australia was, for many of them, incomparably better than that which they had left behind. Their over-riding interest in the federal election campaign of 2004 may well have been in a ‘steady as she goes’ economy, and no radical shifts in anything. A third, even more basic, reason is that most Australians—even the well-educated—have modest life ambitions whose focus is 242


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personal, not national. In this, they are no different from the rest of humanity. They seek interesting and decently paid work, security of person and property, a good marriage and family, freedom to do what they want to do, and an honourable place in their circle of friends, family and acquaintances. On the whole, they do not seek to change Australian society so much as to improve and secure their own place in it, and especially that of their children. It is this personal priority that causes the tension within a representative democracy like Australia. Citizens prize their right to vote, and believe that they ought to vote. But the overwhelming number of issues in the political realm, their scale and their complexity, are defeating for most people. How could they have decided whether or not Australia should join the forces invading Iraq? How could they have decided whether or not the Free Trade Agreement properly protected Australian culture? What do we mean by Australian culture anyway? What about genetically modified crops? There are at any time dozens of questions like these. Isn’t worrying about them what politicians are for? They might ask this last question in part because their own focus is more humble, more limited, more personal. Australians are quite capable of analysing policies and explanations, and they are good judges of character. But they are not, as has been argued before, Athenian democrats anxious to play a part in all the major decisions of their society. There is, in any case, no mechanism through which they could do so. Ours is a representative democracy, not a participatory one. The political parties do not seek members who want to change society, only members who will work hard in the interests of the party. The dream of building a better society in the land of the Southern Cross is a visionary metaphor that works if politicians employ it skilfully. But it has not been employed much, by either side, in the last 30 years. Moreover, the Coalition has in effect said that the better society has arrived, and that there is no need to go on searching for it. The Labor Party has, by default, agreed. Those who find this outcome frustrating have nowhere to go, and that may account for some of the apparent exasperation expressed in Australian political life since the mid-1990s. 243


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One answer to Lindsay Tanner’s question about the best future role for the Labor Party is that it needs to create a new dream, and develop policies that flow from it. Labor presented many policies in its 2004 election campaign, but they were not well linked because they lacked a wider sense of what a country is for. Neither party approached the electorate with a clear sense of building the nation, setting out what a good society is or might be, or appealing to the more generous, altruistic side of the Australian electorate. The campaign was a grubby auction of close-focus material promises. What would a new dream be about? It would have to be relevant to Australia’s new arrivals and their children as well as to those like the class, whose Australian roots go well back into the nineteenth century. It would still have the creation of a good society for all at its centre. It would recognise the great gifts that all Australians have, and the great common virtue of developing them. It would bring in some twentieth century history, and celebrate the many cultures from which Australian society has been made. It would graft these additions on to the best parts of the old story—the rule of law, the egalitarian tradition, the lack of older social cleavages. It would pay no particular respect to wealth, but would celebrate achievement. It would emphasise that the nation-state is still the best way to provide good outcomes for large numbers of people, but accept that the world’s fortunate can improve their own security by assisting the less fortunate to improve theirs. The dream would once again be about building a nation.

Nation-building For there is still a lot of nation-building to do. There always will be. Australia is not poor, and it has had a dozen or more prosperous years one after the other. It is will and imagination which are currently missing. A low-taxation regime has given a generation of Australians much greater capacity to develop themselves as they 244


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wished. Moreover, concern that Australia should look good in the eyes of the managers of the international financial system pushed both sides of politics to keep public debt levels low. By the early twenty-first century, the Commonwealth Treasurer could point happily to the Commonwealth debt’s being only 4 per cent of GDP, with the possibility of net Commonwealth debt disappearing within a few years. But these apparent virtues come with heavy costs: spending on common infrastructure has declined, to everyone’s detriment. In contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when the building of roads, bridges, dams and universities was almost frenetic, infrastructure has begun to decline in quality and in availability. The cry is that there is no money, or that the problem is someone else’s. The Commonwealth blames the states, which blame the Commonwealth. Yet tax cuts have occurred on a number of occasions, and more are foreshadowed. In 2004 public revenue from the Goods and Services Tax was much higher than had been forecast, which allowed the Commonwealth to say that the states now had the money to accomplish all sorts of good things. Australia has a fine credit rating, but that advantage only makes sense if there is a desire to borrow. There seems to be none. The shortfall in infrastructure, to take just that example, is great. The main railway line from Sydney to Melbourne crosses the Murrumbidgee River at Wagga Wagga across a bridge, now 120-years old, which is so rickety that trains have to reduce their speed to a crawl. A similar problem affects other lines as well. Only one main railway line (between Adelaide and Perth) is of adequate quality. The main highway between Sydney and Melbourne still includes 160 kilometres of two-lane road. The coastal highway between Brisbane and Sydney is much worse. The Institution of Engineers puts the infrastructure deficit in inter-capital surface transport at $20 billion. A report on environmental degradation estimates that the cost of arresting the damage to our environment is over $60 billion. These figures sound large, and of course they are not trivial. But they do need to be set in a historical context. The much-mentioned Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme was a long-term project 245


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whose construction started in 1949 and finished in 1972. It was one of the great projects of the time, and all the Class of ’53 watched its progress with admiration. Its milestones were central elements in Movietone News at the cinema. Its total cost is hard to compute, simply because of the changing value of money over those 23 years, but a conventional figure is $820 million. In 1949 Australian GDP amounted to $5.3 billion, which suggests that the capital cost of the project was of the order of 15 per cent of GDP. A comparable project today, with Australian GDP at $800 billion, would cost $120 billion and extend to 2027. There is, of course, nothing remotely of this order anywhere planned, let alone thought of. But fixing up the Australian environment would cost only half that sum, while the announced Auslink program is priced at $12 billion, only a tenth of the Snowy’s relative cost, and it is simply a projection of present trends in road and rail construction. Why aren’t these matters a national scandal? Well, they are for some. But the true reason is that our governments have lost the zest to build and to rebuild, and the electorate has accepted their perspective. Instead, the parties now believe in ‘small government’ and the efficacy of market solutions; they worry about debt and balanced budgets and the nation’s credit rating overseas—a bizarre preoccupation if one’s aim is not to borrow! They hope to provide tax cuts when the next election is near. No one at all is talking about the need to raise the level of public revenue so that some of these matters can be attended to. Why doesn’t the electorate see through such posturing? One reason is that the Labor Party, not simply the Coalition, has committed itself to the kind of fiscal responsibility that sees a magic upper level to public borrowing beyond which disaster will occur. No matter if Australia is at the bottom of the OECD table in terms of total taxation as a proportion of GDP. Both sides will argue that the Australian economy is one of the world’s best. Nothing is broke, so don’t try to fix it. The political courage that the Hawke government showed in 1983 has vanished from our politics, at least for the moment. Of course, the unmended roads and railways get worse, the soil grows saltier and the rivers die. When one or other political party finally says that 246


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enough is enough, and that we have to do something about it, the bill will be much higher.

Looking forward At the end, it is appropriate to change from the third person in which this book has been written, a mode ordained in the 1950s as the correct way to write, and also to change from the past and present tenses into the future tense. For I want to say something about the next 50 years as well. My working life has been that of a writer, a teacher and an administrator, interested in my country’s history and politics and interested, above all, in what makes it tick. Much of this book has been a comparison with the past, and I am proud of the transformation that occurred to Australia after 1950. Like a number of others in the Class of ’53, I rejected offers to work in other countries because I wanted to play a part in the shaping of my own. I am proud of Australia’s transformation in part because my generation, and that of my parents, helped to produce it. Our parents worked from the 1920s to the 1970s, and we ourselves worked from the 1950s to the wonderfully named ‘noughties’ of the new century. I do not intend any proprietorship about these generations, since over time generational boundaries disappear; my own children were born between 1960 and 1982, and as a set their children will have a wider age range still. Nonetheless, my generation’s working life is very similar to the second half of the twentieth century, and that is the period of review, in which a great deal that was new and good was done. Australians who travelled brought home not simply a conviction that they lived in the best country in the world, but also—many of them at least—a no less powerful conviction that there was a

lot that could be improved or needed defending. Isobel Corin wrote that: We now looked at Australia with different eyes. Some (continued)

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things were better done overseas, but it often seemed that we had a reluctance to learn about them. French trains were impressive, and so were the tavernas in Greece with their acceptance of families. Neil Conn, in Paris with OECD, was ‘seduced by the food, the history, the physical order and the beauty, but repulsed by the arrogance and the paramilitary police’. In the United States he encountered an academic who had his Klan robes dry-cleaned locally, while his wife was treated coolly at work once she developed a friendship with a black fellow-worker: all grist for the mill of a future senior public servant in the Northern Territory. Keith McIntyre came away from

the United States with an aversion to the way agricultural labourers were treated. Several found that they had a sharp eye for the evils of any society where a great gap between rich and poor existed, and a resulting determination that such gaps should not occur in their own country. Rex Chidley, rather like Isobel Corin, was conscious on his return that ‘the casual, lackadaisical attitudes’ that he encountered needed shifting if the improvements that he had seen overseas and were possible in Australia were actually to take place. These experiences were not only character-forming for the people concerned; they are part of the context in which the shaping of Australia has occurred.

Australia has turned out well, and because I know that human societies are subject to stagnation and decline as well as to growth, I am anxious that the great improvements of the last 50 or so years continue. High levels of education and creative energy and diversity make our society an enjoyable one, while the general tolerance and goodwill we now show towards one another are a marked improvement on the past. Those are precious characteristics and they need to be maintained, for it is easy for wedges to be driven between the people of a single country. Our capacity to work hard and see problems as capable 248


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of solution, combined with our interest in knowledge and learning, gives us a good basis for economic vitality in the future. It gives me and my Class of ’53, as well as our counterparts elsewhere in Australia, no small sense of satisfaction to see how much better Australia is today—and to think that we were part of that change. Of course, we were lucky. We were born in a period of low birth rates and entered the workforce at a time when acute under-employment was the norm. To quote John Gilmour again: ‘We went into a world of full employment, we faced few traumatic situations, and we grew up in a prosperous and orderly nation.’ Many of us had early advancement and successful careers. The absence of war on our shores was a great freedom for us, and general prosperity and economic growth facilitated change in a good direction. I want to argue strongly that these changes were not simply the work of governments. In a democracy like Australia, governments are powerful but constrained by the need for re-election. They sense what it is that can be achieved to general satisfaction, and the good ones sense also when to lead and when to follow. We, the Australians of that period, helped to shape what happened by our own dreams, attitudes, philosophies and experience. From time to time, people in power acted to achieve some of what they saw we sought. So John McEwen turned our view of Japan from wartime enemy to major trading partner; Harold Holt made sure that there was a referendum on one aspect of the Aboriginal issue; Don Chipp ended the use for censorship of the Commonwealth’s power over customs; John Gorton made sure there was a start in the national support of Australian art, music and film; Gough Whitlam gave voice to an increasingly self-confident sense of ourselves as a nation; Malcolm Fraser made ‘multiculturalism’ an important concept; Bob Hawke took away a tattered security blanket that had been there for 80 years or so; and so on. Politicians are important, and it is important that they are prepared to be brave. None of those steps was easy; all came with some risk to the politician. But we the people are important too, 249


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and it is through our preparedness to talk to one another about issues, to write letters, to stand up for what we believe—to engage in ‘the great conversation’ of Australian public life—that politicians sense what it is that their democracy is on about. Aldo Giurgola, the Italian-American architect of the new Parliament House opened in 1988, became an Australian citizen at the end of the century. Why? He explained that he enjoyed not only Australia, its lifestyle and the city of Canberra, but also the fact that Australians had ‘a life in common’, a life that he greatly valued. We are still not so large in population, or so riven by history, that our life in common is in danger. It is a precious attribute. The Australia of 2004 is an enormous improvement on what we had in 1950. That, it seems to me, is a just comparison over time. But it would be fatuous to suggest that all is well, and that nothing further needs to be done. As Deirdrie Harrison, one of the more questioning of the class, put it: ‘We didn’t turn out the way we might have.’ For her, what was at fault was the system, not the individuals within it. Many of the class shared a connected feeling that advances made at some cost in the twentieth century were being lost in the twenty-first. Even though many others of the class were prepared to say, unprompted, that ‘Australia is the best country in the world’, the rest of the world would see this as a form of antipodean chauvinism, notwithstanding that the Class of ’53 consists largely of well-travelled people. Moreover, the kinds of international comparisons set out by Tiffen and Gittins do not show Australia to be either generally ahead of the pack or likely soon to become so. At best, one can say that—along with several other countries—Australia provides a high standard of living for its people, a high standard of civic competence, a creative and generally progressive culture, and a low level of corruption. These are good and important things to have achieved, but we are not as remarkable as we sometimes like to think we are. That seems to me a just comparison across the world in the early twenty-first century. Other countries have also made good use of the last 50 years. 250


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We are almost unique in the world. Are we selfish in wanting our space? Immigrants have led to our having colour and diversity as a society. We were British to begin with: now we are Australian—mateship, backyard barbecues, footy and all. Our grandchildren should have the opportunities we had—and more. But how can we keep this and be compassionate to our neighbours? It is for better minds than mine.

To be fair to those who have the responsibility for running the country, it is much easier to criticise than to find a path through the maze of problems facing Australia at this time. Mary Ball captured some of the difficulty in a letter: I love Australia. It is always so good to come to it after being in other countries. Yet how we can preserve all this I am not so sure. We are a nation of immigrants, but if we invite everyone to our shores how can we preserve our freedom?

Much of the message of this book is that wealth, properly used, is an enormous asset to any country. On the whole, Australia has made good use both of the wealth it inherited from the past, and the wealth that it generated in the period under review. But wealth does not equate to happiness, and GDP per capita—to make the point again—is a crude indicator of welfare or satisfaction with life. Many social scientists have endeavoured to find better measures, and an Australian example is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which takes account both of the costs of material progress, such as environmental loss, as well as the benefits, and adds in values for unpaid household work. While the GDP per capita figure for the 1950–2000 period trebled, the GPI increased by only 73 per cent. It would be hard to persuade those of our generation that they were three times happier just because they were three times better off, on average, than they were 50 years ago. But they would all agree, I think, that we are better off in general. The GPI provides one measure. Other measures, developed for the World 251


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Database of Happiness, suggest that there are no great differences in life satisfaction or happiness across the seventeen developed nations used in How Australia Compares. Australians are near the bottom on financial satisfaction, middling on other measures and near the top in terms of decision-making freedom. The United Nations Development Program, and several other bodies, produce indices of various kinds of ‘progress’. Australia, though it scores well on all of them, is in no sense the international leader. There is an important respect, however, in which Australia does stand tall. The Canadians and ourselves have made a good fist of creating multicultural societies that work. We have shown that our societies are able to live with complexity and diversity—and enjoy them! We have provided the evidence that, while human beings are complex and different, they can live together and share an enjoyable life in common. We do not have to return to a 1950s conformism in which any departure from the code is a worrying and wrong thing. We do not need to move to gated communities inside which frightened and privileged people worry about the bad ones outside. In the world of the twenty-first century, that is a great lesson to have learned. So to the third kind of judgment: the comparison against an ideal. How could Australian society be improved? I need to say at once that I do not believe human beings can construct a perfect society, and I am sceptical of all millenarian theories. Human beings are driven by their egos, and their egos can be a destructive force as well as a constructive one. Civilisation implies the control of ego in the long-term interest both of the person and of the society, and we have a long way to go in controlling our egos. Despite the improvements since 1951, there is no doubt that there are areas in which Australia could do better, to use the language of our school reports long ago. Since people will instantly disagree about what these areas are, I start from what I think is my own fundamental position, that we are all born equal, and that there are no natural hierarchies in humankind. Keith McIntyre, one of the class, made the mordant observation that ‘all babies are born equal, but the equality stops when they are brought home’. Howard 252


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Gardner has shown us—and the history of the last half-century documents it—that human beings are born with essentially the same gifts, capacities or intelligences. Yes, there are gifts given in greater abundance to a few, and some babies, through birth trauma or similar handicap, start with a problem. There are other variables familiar to any parent: sibling order, energy, spirit, persistence. Children of the same parents will show many similarities, but some important differences as well. But the much more important point is that nearly all human beings start life with all they need to become highly proficient exponents of not one but many facets of their abilities. What determines their fate is not intelligence but the varying amounts of love, encouragement, motivation and preparation they will receive thereafter, especially as babies, children and young people. That is not at all a view universally agreed with. Indeed, it is still a minority view. It competes with an older established position, familiar to us in the 1950s, that only a few are really intelligent, or really good at singing, or tennis, or swimming, or business, or whatever. No matter that ‘only a few’ has become ‘thousands and thousands’. While the concentration is on who won Wimbledon, or which is the best university in Australia, or how many gold medals Australia secured in 2004, or on any activity in which the focus is on winning, rather than participation, it will be easy to miss the point about the sheer numbers of people involved, and what that means. And a great deal of our discourse is about winning. Those who have won, who occupy the leading positions in society, politics, business, sport, universities and so on, are likely to see particular sense both in the imagined rarity of real skill and the importance of winning: it justifies their own positions. Yet it is both old-fashioned and wrong. The greatest richness that every country possesses is its people. Release their talents and they are more powerful by far than minerals in the ground or wool on the sheep’s back. Singapore, Switzerland, Finland and Japan —all countries without natural resources, as we used to call them— rely on the skills of their people. All have done very well in the world—as well as or better than Australia, in fact. Australians 253


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working overseas have learned languages quickly and well, without having to go to university or school. If the motivation is there and the preparation is available, anyone can do it. Colin Slater has created large male choirs from footballers and other men who thought they were tone-deaf or had no voice. Around half of the 19year-olds in Australia and several other countries are in universities and another large proportion are engaged in technical education. You can learn anything and be proficient at it if you really want to, are prepared to stick at it and can find good training. A better Australian society would recognise all this and organise its values and institutions to make it possible for each person to in fact become self-actuating, useful, skilled and selfconfident. Such people find pleasure and reward in their own development and their own capacity to assist others; they will take good care of themselves as well as those in their care. Accordingly, they will need little regulating or policing, imprisonment, draconian rules or warnings. Developing our talents is a lifelong challenge, and we do not live nearly long enough to develop them all. But each new development gives us fresh insight into the world around us and into ourselves, fresh self-assurance, and a reinforcement of a feeling of self-worth. It makes us interested in what others do, and makes us interesting to others. It gives us a basis on which to treat others as equals. It allows us to live by the Golden Rule: treating others as we would have them treat us. It gives us a structure for our life, a series of purposes, meaning. An impossible dream? Why? Many Australians live like this now. By and large, it is a description of the Class of ’53, not because we are exceptional people—we are not—but because we have lived full lives, and been able to discover some of what we are good at. We are lucky, and we appreciate our luck. But in principle our lives are attainable by all. What prevents the rest of Australia doing all this now? There are several reasons. One is that maturity is a relatively slow process, and many of the Class of ’53 were in their forties and fifties before they came to understand both themselves and the society they lived in. Another is that some policy issues involved are sensitive 254


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and unlikely to get anything like wide community support. For example, children who start life within a loving and stable relationship where their needs have a higher weighting than those of the parents are likely to develop more quickly, have a wider range of capacities and a greater level of self-confidence than those who lack these supports. They are likely to progress quickly in education and work, and to be much more successful adults. Real ‘equality of opportunity’ would mean ensuring that all children had such a fortunate start. Now to the policy consequences. Does that mean that we should discourage parenting unless there is such a relationship in existence? Most people will argue that the decision to have a child belongs to the parents, and certainly to the mother. Does it mean that our society should support birth control and abortion unless there is such a happy relationship? There is no agreement here. Should we pay greater attention to preparation for marriage and parenthood as part of everyone’s education? Should we ensure that children are taught a great deal about sex and love so that they understand more, at least theoretically, about some of the pressures that will face them? These questions are important, and there is no agreement about their answers, at least as real policy issues. We are not nearly at the point where Australian governments could develop strong policies of this kind. Yet I see them coming, slowly and autonomously, as more and more people, well educated, sense the answers and begin to adopt them for themselves. The notion that all of us are equally intelligent and that circumstances rather than inherent ability determine life chances is profoundly egalitarian, and in accord with Australian tradition. As Neil Conn put it: ‘The “fair go” is an entrenched term in our Australian vocabulary, and most of the time we mean it.’ But the second difficulty is that, while Australia pays a good deal of lip-service to egalitarian ideals, our society is in practice rather oligarchic in its politics, and those who rule tend to see their position as a consequence of their own superior qualities rather than as the outcome of particular circumstances in their own lives and upbringing. It is easy to see a lot of current practice as being a 255


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search by people to buttress their family’s current position in society by purchasing what economists call ‘positional goods’—a home in suburbs with excellent resources, access to private schools, preparation for high-entry university courses, and so on— that are likely to push their children further up the status ladder. There is a persistent human tendency to rationalise inequality if one is the beneficiary of it, and to oppose changes to the system that would disturb one’s own position. This is especially the case when those with power operate to ensure that their own children and their own families do well out of the system. They do not need to do so crudely; it is usually enough for them to protect some of the inequalities from which they benefit by invoking apparently virtuous qualities such as ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’. By doing so, they assist their own freedom and choice but at the expense of the much more limited freedom and choice of others. Of all the tendencies in human societies, this is the one that any egalitarian democrat fears most. If our desire is to reduce systemic inequality, then the educational system is a crucial arena because educational systems will reproduce the existing social order very easily unless something is done to alter things. Reiterating that equality is the rule, and that it works, has to be the keynote of reform. Herb Higgins, along with a number of others in the class, valued both the contact with the other sex that Armidale High provided and the fact that he encountered ‘a fair range of students from the top to the bottom of the social and economic classes. We mixed with them all in the playground, the classroom, school dances and on the sportsfield.’ He contrasted that lifeenhancing experience with

what he saw as a common outcome for the sons of graziers who attended private schools—a narrowly blinkered view of the world: Some of the ones I knew, of about my age, left school with an inflated sense of their own importance, an inept and gauche attitude to girls and women, and poor understanding of finance and business. I’m (continued)

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but superior to none, so I’m neither an arrogant snob nor a subservient crawler’. It takes a lot of practice, but it’s a good way to live in our country.

glad I didn’t go there! I think my own schooling allowed the ratio of arrogance to achievement in me to improve. To borrow a line from someone I met, I hope that the outcome is that ‘I’m equal to all people

A third difficulty is that we have become used to a low-taxation regime. We think our taxation is high because in Australia a large proportion of public revenue comes through income taxation, rather than through indirect taxes. In terms of public expenditure as a proportion of GDP, however, Australia is at the bottom of the international league table, along with Switzerland, the United States, Turkey and Japan. In comparative terms, we were never a high-taxation country. Even in the 1960s, the international pecking order was much the same. The taxpayers of Sweden pay around twice as much as those in Australia, so there is considerable room to move. There has been no financial reason why, for example, university students have to pay for an increasing share of the cost of their higher education. That was an ideological position—just as, of course, was the earlier decision to provide fee-less higher education. From a nation-building perspective, however, almost the highest priority would be given to providing everybody with as much education as possible. The costs of doing so would not be trivial, but it is absurd to suggest that Australia could not afford to do it. One of the great lessons of the last 50 years is that educating everybody pays off enormously, not simply in providing a bettereducated workforce—though that is important—but in reducing the need for more expensive public provision later. To keep people in prison is in money terms the same as keeping them in a five-star hotel, though much less pleasantly for the residents. The proportion of well-educated, creatively active Australians in the wider 257


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society is large; their proportion in Australian prisons is tiny. Most such people are not driven by money or the need to accumulate material possessions. Money is simply less important to people who have an active and interesting life; money is helpful to them but not essential. A few of the Class of ’53, still working, are concerned about what their financial situation will be in retirement. But the great majority, who have retired, are relatively unconcerned about money. As Mary Ball put it: ‘There was nothing really that I wanted to do that I couldn’t do—because of money, I mean.’ Yes, a little more might be helpful in some cases, but by and large they are content. Their financial circumstances range from comfortably off to quite poor. A fourth difficulty—and perhaps, paradoxically, an asset—is that no government in democratic Australia can dragoon people into modes of behaviour that they do not accept, after consideration, for themselves. It is not enough to pass laws. People have to come to accept the virtue of the law. It took a generation before Australians automatically put on seatbelts when they entered a car. It took about the same time for the anti-smoking campaign to have its greatest effect. Feminists might agonise that women are still not equal, or Aboriginal activists that the situation of some Aboriginal people is still appalling, but large human societies will not change their customs and attitudes overnight. What has been achieved is powerful, but it takes time for present generations to come to terms with new possibilities, and even then many people will hold to their old views. But each new generation will see the now not-so-new possibilities as obvious enough, and act much more in accordance with them. Feminism has been more successful than is commonly recognised in transforming the views of young men as well as young women about the nature and texture of ‘relationships’—and indeed of one’s behaviour once the relationship has begun. The ready acceptance of very many Aboriginal people in urban society needs to be set alongside the dreadful conditions in some isolated Aboriginal rural communities. Finally, the passage of time will work for the common good, but only if we hold to the dream, and do our best to ensure that the 258


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country moves in the direction set out in the dream. That the dream may never be realised is not important: it is the direction that the dream provides which is crucial. Because I love the Australia that I have lived and worked in, and love what it has achieved since I became aware of good societies and how to create them, I want that dream to be the dream of all Australians. In particular, I want it to be the dream of the generation of the children of the Class of ’53, and of all their children. Our children started working in the 1970s and will continue until 2030 at least, while their own children—our grandchildren—will be at work well into the second half of this century. To them I say: understand where we came from and what we were able to achieve. Do even better in your turn!

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Front row: Diana Pearce, Margery Murphy, Neil Conn, Judy Tosh, John Gilmour, John Hamel. Middle row: Robyn Chidley, Jolyon Sinclair, David Davidson, Rex Chidley, Mary Ball, Nola Nealon, Don Aitkin, Deirdrie Harrison, Phyllis Mace, George Edwards, Isobel Corin. Back row: Herb Higgins, Ken Hoy, John Smith, Keith McIntyre, Peter Comino, Ron White.

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APPENDIX: 1 CHAPTER TITLE THE CLASS OF ’53

The surviving members of the Class of ’53 were interviewed in 2003 and 2004, along with a few others of that cohort who either attended the reunion in February 2003 or were encountered separately. What follows is a short summary of their lives. They are listed alphabetically, the women by married surname and then maiden surname as applicable; the town or district they lived in when they first went to Armidale High; father’s principal occupation; the member’s own occupation, with two possibilities; whether or not ever married; number of children in brackets; and city or area of current residence. Not all those listed here will be found in the Class of ’53 school photograph on page xi. Don Aitkin and John Bennett were absent when the photo was taken. Chris Lawrie was at school in Maitland for her final year. Nola Nealon and Jill Burgess were already in the workforce. Peter Shields, having repeated a year, was in Fourth Year, along with George Edwards and also Fay Thomson, who had arrived in Armidale in 1953 and was taking Latin with the Fifth Year Class because it was not available in her own year. AITKIN, Don: Armidale; school teacher’s son; academic and vicechancellor; married; (5); Canberra BALL, Mary [Hunter]: Armidale; Methodist minister’s daughter; music teacher and choral director; married; (2); Sydney 261


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BENNETT, John: Guyra; carpenter and builder’s son; army officer and businessman; married; (9); Brisbane BURGESS, Jill [Fletcher]: Armidale; railway-worker’s daughter; secretary and book-keeper; married; (5); Armidale CAMPBELL, Cass: Guyra; timber-worker’s son; salesman and businessman; married; (2); Brisbane CHAPPELL, Bruce: Arding; school teacher’s son; geologist and professor; unmarried; Canberra CHIDLEY, Rex: Walcha; shopkeeper’s son; pharmacist and businessman; married; (4); Adelaide CHIDLEY, Robyn [McRae]: Armidale; school teacher’s daughter; nurse; married; (4); Adelaide COMINO, Peter: Armidale; shopkeeper’s son; accountant; married; (4); Sydney CONN, Neil: Guyra; bank manager’s son; economist and administrator; married; (3); Sydney DAVIDSON, David: Tenterfield; woolbuyer’s son; orthopaedic surgeon; married; (2); Adelaide DOLLIN, Rex: Armidale; chef ’s son; high school teacher and deputy principal; married; (3); Karuah, NSW EDWARDS, George: Armidale; engineer’s son; company secretary and businessman; married; (3); Tamworth, NSW FAULKNER, Robin: Armidale; greengrocer’s son; high school teacher and mathematics master; married; (2); Kyogle, NSW GILMOUR, John: Guyra; farmer’s son (father killed in war); high school teacher and principal; married; (2); Alstonville, NSW HALL, Ian: Uralla; postmaster’s son; chemist and laboratory manager; unmarried; Wentworth Falls, NSW HAMEL, John: Armidale; grazier’s son; grazier; married; (3); Armidale HARRISON, Deirdrie [Carroll]: Port Macquarie; pensioner’s daughter (Great War veteran); high school teacher and TAFE college lecturer; married; (3); Sydney HAWKE, Bob: Armidale; stock and station agent’s son; bank manager and contractor; married; (3); Ourimbah, NSW

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Appendix: The Class of ’53

HIGGINS, Herbert: Nowendoc; grazier’s son; grazier; married; (3); Nowendoc, NSW HOLMES, Winifred: Guyra; farmer and grazier’s daughter; nurse; unmarried; Newcastle HOY, Ken: Armidale; motor mechanic’s son; high school teacher and inspector of schools; married; (2); Raymond Terrace, NSW KNOFF, John: Armidale; Norwegian army officer’s son; manager in private and public sectors; married; (2); Hobart LAWRIE, Christine [Capper]: Maitland; accountant’s daughter; dietician and maths teacher; married; (2); Armidale McINTYRE, Keith: Armidale; shop assistant’s son; scientist and writer; married; (1); Canberra MACE, Phyllis [Munro]: Armidale; cleaner’s daughter; teacher and librarian; married; (2); Sydney MARTIN, Jill [Burtenshaw]: Armidale; cinema projectionist’s daughter; high school teacher; married; (2); Sydney MILLS, John: Armidale; businessman’s son; pharmacist and businessman; married; (1); Nambucca Heads, NSW MURPHY, Margery [Mitchell]: Guyra; farmer and grazier’s daughter; nurse and hospital matron; married; Nelson Bay, NSW NEALON, Nola [Lewis]: Armidale; builder’s daughter; secretary, teacher’s assistant; married; (3); Taree, NSW PEARCE, Diana [McGuffog]: Walcha; farmer and grazier’s daughter; school teacher and principal; married; (1); Sydney RICH, Rodney: Armidale; contractor’s son; forester and administrator; married; (2); Hobart SHIELDS, Peter: Wee Waa; manager’s son; auctioneer and stock and station agent; married; (1); Tamworth, NSW SINCLAIR, Jolyon: Armidale; sawyer’s son; bank manager and real estate agent; married; (4); Ballina, NSW SMITH, John: Armidale; tyre shop owner’s son; high school teacher and special head teacher; married; (2); Lismore THOMSON, Fay [Baldwin]: Coffs Harbour; forester’s daughter; school teacher; married; (2); Sydney TOSH, Judy [Perrott]: Kelly’s Plains; farmer and grazier’s daughter; nurse; married; (3); Armidale 263


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VICKERY, John: Armidale; rural worker’s son; bank manager and administrator; married; (2); Sydney WHITE, Ron: Armidale; railway worker’s son; manager; married; (2); Burleigh Heads, Qld WILLEY, Shirley [Stanley]: Armidale; dairy farmer’s daughter; nurse; married; (2); Ipswich, Qld

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A 1NOTE CHAPTER ON SOURCES TITLE

The main printed sources for this book have been the publications of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, an extraordinarily important ally for anyone interested in tracking what happens in our country. In particular, I used the Official Year Books that have been produced each year since 1908. The publication of Tiffen and Gittin’s How Australia Compares in 2004 was an unexpected aid to the writing, and I have used their comparative data with great appreciation. In general, where figures are used they are taken from the appropriate official source, if not identified specifically. Because useful statistical reports are not always published in annual series, the half-century under review has become something of a moving feast, with its base year moving as far back as 1947 (for the census of that year) and its last year 2004, simply because so much useful data appeared during the time of writing. I also made good use of The Australian Encyclopaedia (Grolier Society, Sydney, 1983) and The Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne University Press, 1966– ). In 2004 I interviewed all the surviving members of the Class of ’53 and a few others who had straightforward connections to it (having been part of the cohort at some stage in their education at Armidale High School). Some had already written to me about their lives. A common interview schedule directed the same questions in the same order to all respondents (women respondents received some additional questions). In all, there were 39 265


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interviews, of which two were conducted by telephone; the rest were face-to-face. On average, the interviews lasted for an hour and a half, and produced an invaluable body of material. Its use in this book is overwhelmingly illustrative; there is no suggestion that the Class of ’53 is in any sense a random sample of Australians of their age, though of course its members share many experiences and attitudes with that wider cohort. In what follows, books and articles that were especially important in matters of detail or argument are listed by chapter. I am grateful to those who wrote about Australia over the last 50 years. I do not claim to have read everything that bears on the questions raised in this book, but I would like to think that I have kept abreast of what has been written. And I wrote a few books myself!

Introduction For a wealth of data in which Australia is compared to seventeen other developed societies, see Rodney Tiffin and Ross Gittins, How Australia Compares (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2004). The C.P. Snow reference is to The Masters (Penguin, London, 1959), Appendix, p. 309.

Chapter 1 For generations, see Hugh Mackay, Generations. Baby Boomers, Their Parents & Their Children (Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1997). For the Australian Settlement, see Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992) pp. 1–2.

Chapter 2 For the shift from public to private, see Roger Wettenhall, ‘Company Formation as a Tool of Public Administration’, Canberra 266


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A note on sources

Bulletin of Public Administration, no. 110, 2004, pp. 29–44. For the effects of the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s on middle-class Australia, see Michael Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia. The Dark Side of Economic Reform (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003); for inequality and its effects, see Fred Argy, Where to From Here? Australian Egalitarianism Under Threat (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003). For the Australian party system, see Don Aitkin, Stability and Change in Australian Politics, 2nd edn (Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1982); for convergence in the party system, see Murray Goot, ‘Party Convergence Reconsidered’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 39, no. 1, 2004; for an analysis of the importance of the role of Prime Ministers, see Ian McAllister, ‘Prime Ministers, Opposition Leaders and Government Popularity in Australia’, AJPS, vol. 38, no. 2, 2003; for disenchantment with politics and politicians, see Murray Goot, ‘Distrustful, Disenchantment and Disengaged? Public Opinion on Politics, Politicians and the Parties: An Historical Perspective’, in David Burchell and Andrew Leigh (eds), The Prince’s New Clothes: Why Do Australians Dislike Their Politicians? (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002) and Ian Marsh and David Yencken, Into the Future: The Neglect of the Long Term in Australian Politics (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2004).

Chapter 3 See, generally, Simon Marginson, Educating Australia: Government, Economy and Citizen Since 1960 (CUP, Melbourne, 1997); Barry McGaw, ‘Evidence or Ideology: Developing Evidence-based Policy in Education’ (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, 2004); for multiple intelligences, see Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, New York, 1983); see also my own ‘Who Counts?’, Australian Quarterly, August 1999, and for criticisms of falling standards, see my own ‘Dumbing Down: Some Thoughts on a Phrase of Our Time’, Agenda, vol. 9, no. 1, 2002. For the section 267


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on immigration, the principal sources are James Jupp’s great contributions to our knowledge, among them his The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its Peoples and Their Origins (CUP, Melbourne, 2001) and From White Australia to Woomera. The Story of Australian Immigration (CUP, Melbourne, 2002).

Chapter 4 For ‘knowledge’, see David Adams, ‘Usable Knowledge in Public Policy’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 63, no. 1, March 2004, p. 30. For the new attractiveness of work, see Helen Trinca and Catherine Fox, Better than Sex: How a Generation Got Hooked on Work (Random House Australia, Sydney, 2004).

Chapter 5 For male/female differences, and much else besides, see Allan and Barbara Pease, Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps (Orion, London, 2001); for women’s not having it all, see Anne Summers, The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women’s Choices in 21st Century Australia (Random House, Sydney, 2004); for women moving into self-employment, see the Canberra Times, 3 November 2004. Catholic Church attendance figures come from the Catholic Church Life Survey, AD2000, vol. 12, no. 11, 1999–2000. For infant mortality, see J.C. Caldwell, ‘Good Health for Many’, Asia Pacific Population Journal, 1999; for preventative versus curative medicine, Jane Halton, ‘A Healthy Public Sector— Vital to Australia’s Health?’ Australian Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 2, March 2004.

Chapter 6 The remark about the prevalence of pianos comes from The Australian Encyclopaedia, Vol. 7, p. 76; for Australian orchestras, 268


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A note on sources

see the TOAN website at www.toan.com.au; for Australian composition, see Jim Cotter, ‘Larry Sitsky and the Australian Musical Tradition’, National Library of Australia News, vol. XIV, no. 12, September 2004. Australian popular music awaits its historian. But see Toby Creswell, Love is in the Air. Stories of Australian Pop Music (ABC Books, Sydney, 2003). For books and publishing, see Martin Lyons and John Arnold (eds), A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market (UQP, Brisbane, 1999); for specialist bookshops, Dawn Cohen, ‘The Little Aussie Battler’, Australian Author, vol. 36, no. 2, August 2004; for press freedom in Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 2004. For Howard Gardner and ‘bodily kinesthetic intelligence’, see also his Intelligence Reframed (Basic Books, New York, 1999). The alcohol intake comparisons come from Tiffen and Gittins, How Australia Compares, p. 217. For Australian cuisine, see Cherry Ripe, Goodbye Cultural Cringe (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993), Robert Carrier, New Great Dishes of the World (Boxtree, London, 1999), and Gay Bilson, Plenty: Digressions on Food (Penguin, Sydney, 2004).

Chapter 7 For individualism and the Liberal Party, see Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard (CUP, Melbourne, 2003). For Donald Horne and Muswellbrook, see The Education of Young Donald (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1967). I am indebted to the Australian Institute of Criminology for much of the data used in the section on crime. See also Adam Graycar, ‘Crime in 20th Century Australia’, Year Book Australia 2001, John Walker and Monika Henderson, ‘Understanding Crime Trends in Australia’, Trends and Issues, vol. 28 (Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, January 1991), and Don Weatherburn, Law and Order in Australia: Rhetoric and Reality (Federation Press, Sydney, 2004). For trust, see the chapters by Murray Goot and Andrew Leigh in D. Burchell and A. Leigh’s The 269


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Prince’s New Clothes (UNSW Press, 2002). For litigiousness, see Wilfrid Prest and Sharyn Roach Anleu (eds), Litigation: Past and Present (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2003).

Chapter 8 James Curran’s excellent The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image (MUP, Melbourne, 2004), is the main source for the first section. For the Free Trade Agreement, see Linda Weiss, Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews, How to Kill a Country: Australia’s Devastating Deal with the United States (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004); for Anzac in Australian mythology, see Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (UQP, Brisbane, 2004).

Chapter 9 For Lindsay Tanner’s perplexed reaction to the 2004 election outcome, see the Canberra Times, 20 October 2004. For the infrastructure deficit, see the article by Ian McAuley in Dissent, vol. 12, Spring 2003, pp. 24–30. I am indebted to Ian McAuley also for the example of the Snowy Scheme. For a booklength explosion of frustrated rage about what was seen as a loss of democracy during the first eight years of the Howard government, see Margo Kingston, Not Happy, John! (Penguin, Sydney, 2004). For an account of the Genuine Progress Indicator, see Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, Tracking Well-being in Australia: The Genuine Progress Indicator, Discussion paper No. 35 (The Australia Institute, Canberra, 2000).

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1 CHAPTER INDEX TITLE

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, 222 Aboriginal peoples, 5, 13-14, 55, 165, 194, 208, 220-7, 235, 258 Mabo judgment, 221 Wik judgment, 221 abortion law reform, 130 ‘Accord’, the, 55 Acorn, The, 24, 34 Aitkin, Don, x, 162-3 Alexander, Stephanie, 180 Allen, Peter [Peter Woolnough], 163-4 Ansett Australia Airlines, 117 Anglican Church, 22 Anthony, H. L., 63 Anthony, J. D., 63 Anthony, L. J., 63 Anzac Day, 220, 233 arbitration, industrial, 51 Armidale, vii, 19-35, 98, 122, 144, 157, 200, 227 Armidale Express, The, 20, 164 Armidale High School, vii–viii, 1-2, 4, 21-35, 80-1, 105, 113, 123, 151, 157, 172, 176, 220, 227, 231 Armidale Teachers’ College, 21, 33, 34 Armstrong, Gillian, 174 Army Education Scheme, 72 art, 170-1, 223 galleries, 171, 223 Arts Council of Australia, 172 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 228 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), 228 Australia Council, the, 168, 216 Australia Party, 60 Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, 160 Australian Broadcasting Commission, 54

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 54 Australian Bureau of Statistics, x, 170, 172, 209 Australian Capital Territory, 71, 79, 131 Australian Catholic University, 147 Australian Chamber Orchestra, 160, 230 Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), 78, 105, 173-4, 216 Australian Government Solicitor, 54 Australian Industrial Relations Commission, 105 Australian Industries Development Corporation, 216 Australian Institute of Criminology, x Australian Labor Party (see Labor Party) Australian Law Reform Commission, 208 Australian Masters Games, 178 Australian Mathematics Competition, 86, 95, 174-5 Australian Mathematics Trust, 174 Australian Music Centre, 159 Australian Museums and Galleries On Line (AMOL), 171 Australian National Choral Association, 159 Australian National Training Authority, 83 Australian National University, vii, x, 72, 114 Australian Public Service, 52, 64, 135, 199 Australian Recording Industry Association, 162 Australian Society of Authors, 168 Australian Sports Commission, 177 Australian War Memorial, 151 Australian Welsh Choir, 172 Australian Youth Orchestra, 160 Australians abroad, 185-7 Ball, Mary, 136, 172, 181, 251, 258 Bank of New South Wales, 118, 193 Beatles, The, 162, 164

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What was it all for? Beazley, Kim, 63, 237 Benjamin, Arthur, 156 Bennett, John, 28, 158 Bill of Rights, 189 Bilson, Gay, 180 birthrate, 132, 152, 249 Black, Gordon, 157 Blainey, Geoffrey, 219 Blanchett, Cate, 173 Blunn, Tony, x Bond University, 78 Bonner, Neville, 62, 226 Bowen, Stella, 151 Boyd, Ann, 159 Boyd, Arthur, 171 Bradman, Don, 177 Britain (see United Kingdom) British Medical Association, 193 Broome, 226 Brown, Senator Bob, 236 Brubeck, Dave, 163 Burgess, Jill, 136-7 Burns Philp, 193 Cahill, J. E., 20 Canterbury Tales, The, 35 Calwell, Arthur, 12 Campbell, Cass, 32-3 Campion, Jane, 174 Canada, 7-8, 42, 64, 70, 169, 186, 201, 222, 241 Canberra, 156, 183-5, 201-2 Canberra Theatre, 159 Canberra Youth Music Society, 160 Carey, Peter, 168 Carr-Boyd, Ann, 159 Carrier, Robert, 180 Casey, Lord, 218 Catholic Church, Roman, 5–6, 73, 91, 140-2, 144, 182 Catholic/Protestant division, 5, 20, 139, 190, 194-5 censorship, 85, 167-8, 191 Chappell, Bruce, 28-9, 138, 181, 235 Chidley, Rex, x, 61, 66, 128, 176-7, 248 Chidley, Robyn, x, 128, 136, 181 Chifley, J. B., 15-16, 37, 46 China, 95 Chipp, Don, 249 Citizen Military Forces, 6, 16 citizenship, 231-4 Class of ’53, viii, 2, 4, 17, 22, 25, 33, 37, 43, 46-7, 55-6, 60, 73, 88-9, 99-100, 102, 110, 113, 116-17, 122, 126-7, 135, 141, 144, 149, 155-8, 163, 167, 172, 176, 181, 189, 196, 198-200, 204, 207, 209, 214, 217-19, 225-6, 238, 241, 246-7, 249, 250, 254, 258-9 Climpson, Roger, 163-4

clubs licensed, 183 service, 198-9 Cole, Nat King, 127 Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), 193 Comino, Peter, 98, 105, 129, 181, 186 Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, 118-19 Commonwealth Bank of Australia, 24, 53 Commonwealth Employment Service, 52 Commonwealth Repatriation Scheme, 72 Commonwealth Schools Commission, 79 communism, 16, 60, 200 community changes, 197-212 compassion, 207-8 competitive spirit, 154, 229-31 Conn, Neil, x, 46, 167, 181, 225-6, 248, 255 contraception, 6, 128-30, 135-6, 141-2 Conway, Jill Ker, 10 Cooper, Norma, 176 Corin, Isobel, x, 30, 247-8 Coronation 1953, The, 24-5 Cotter, Jim, x, 159 Country Party, 12, 14, 19, 59, 62, 139, 197, 200 Country Week, 197 Crean, Simon, 63, 238 creativity, 6, 153-87 crime, 199-200, 202-95 Curtin, John, 12 Darwin, 184 Davidson, David, 32, 146 Davis, Judy, 173 Davis Cup, 17, 190 De La Salle College, 22, 129, 144 Democratic Labor Party, 59 Democrats, The, 60 Deniliquin High School, 34 Denmark, 242 derby, 226 divorce, 133-4 Dollin, Rex, 32, 104-5 ‘downsizing’, 52-5 dress, 18, 189-90 Dreyfus, George, 158-9 drugs, 203-5 Drummond, D. H., 20-1 Drysdale, Sir Russell, 171 Dusty, Slim, 162 economic depression in 1890s, 4 in 1930s, 4, 153, 242 economic growth nineteenth century, 3 twentieth century, 40-57 education 67, 72-91, 257 Aboriginal children in, 223

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Index secondary, ix, 5, 72-8, 167 assessment in, 76 attitudes of immigrants to, 74 drift to private schools, 76, 239-40 importance of mothers in, 28-35 teachers, 103-4 technical education, 82-4 (see also university education) Edwards, George, 61, 108, 176 Edwards, Ross, 159 Elizabethan Theatre Trust, 173 employment (see unemployment) England (see United Kingdom) environment, 59-60 Estonia, 93 Eureka Stockade, 233 Evatt, H. V., 15-16 expenditure, household, 70, 178-82 Fadden, Arthur, 15 family formation, 123, 132 Fairfield Boys’ Primary School, 105 Faulkner, Robin, 104-5 federal system, 63 feminism, 136-9, 141-2, 258 film, 6, 17, 173-4 Finland, 253 Finlay, Peter, 168 Fitzgerald, Cyril, 163 Fitzgerald, Kate, 174 Fitzgerald, Mrs, 163 ‘floating the dollar’, 51, 69, 111, 118, 192 food, 6–7, 131, 178-81 Fort Street Boys’ High School, 23 France, 207 Fraser, Malcolm, 50, 58, 219, 238, 249 Free Trade Agreement, 232, 243 Freeman, Cathy, 223 Friedman, Milton, 48-9, 191 Friels, Colin, 173 gambling, 182-3 Gardner, Howard, 88-9, 175, 253 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), 251 Gibson, Mel, 173 Giles, Ernest, 195 Gilmour, John, 28-9, 66, 91, 196, 200, 213, 225, 232-3, 249 Ginibi, Ruby Langford, 223 Gittins, Ross, 203, 250 Giurgola, Romaldo, 250 Glanville-Hicks, Peggy, 159 Goldner, Richard, 158 Goodooga, 226 Goods and Services Tax (GST), 54, 245 Goolagong, Evonne, 223 Gorton, John, 58, 249 Graham, Rev Billy, 144 Grainger, Percy, 156

Graziers’ Association, 193 Greens, The, 60-1 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 42, 245-6, 251, 257 Hadley, Ailsa, x Halifax, 201 Hall, Ian, 108-9, 117 Hamel, John, 43-4, 153 happiness, 251-2 Harrison, Deirdrie, 66, 137-8, 250 Hawke, Bob (Class of ’53), 32-3, 118-19, 165, 226 Hawke, Robert James Lee, 50, 58, 63, 95, 219, 246, 249 Hawkesbury Agricultural College, 34 Hayek, F. von, 48-9 health, 5–6, 148-52 Hibberd, Jack, 173 Higgins, Herb, 44-5, 61, 145-6, 158, 256-7 HIV-AIDS, 150, 207 Hogan, P. J., 174 Hollywood, 186, 215 Holmes, Win, 147, 155, 158 Holt, Harold, 58, 221, 249 Hong Kong, 95, 186 honours system, 1 Horne, Donald, 43, 195 horse-racing, 18, 182-3 housing, 140, 178-9, 181-2 Howard, John, 10, 35, 58, 95, 219, 235-6, 238-9 Hoy, Ken, 104 Huggins, Jackie, 223 Humphries, Barry, 10 Hunt, Ralph, 152 Hyde, Miriam, 159 immigration, 4, 13, 67, 91-9, 132, 191-2 ‘New Australians’, 93 ‘multiculturalism’, 96, 245, 252 infrastructure, 68 India, 95, 215 Indonesia, 185, 201 individualism, 192-4 intellectuals, 84-7 intelligence distribution of, ix multiple intelligences, 87-91, 253-5 Internet, 56, 191, 198 Ipswich, 146 Jackes, Peter, x Japan, 42, 54, 114, 216, 232, 249, 253, 257 John, Alan, 159 Johnson, President L. B., 47, 144 Joss, Bob, 118 Kats-Chernin, Elena, 159

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What was it all for? Keating, Paul, 58, 63, 218 Kelly, Paul, 11, 50, 54, 57 Keneally, Tom, 168 Kerr, John, 58-9 Keynes, J. M., 40-1, 47-9, 191 Kings’ School, The, 30 Kisch, Egon, 12 Knight, John, 62 Knoff, John, 46, 97-8, 114-15, 126, 167-8, 181, 229 knowledge, increase in, 77 Koehne, Graham, 159

music, 6, 17, 156-65 musical instrument-making, 161 Musica Viva, 158 Muswellbrook, 195 Myer stores, 193

Labor Party, 11, 59, 61-2, 94, 139, 189, 236-8, 243-4, 246 Latham, Mark, 236-7 Latvia, 93 Lawler, Ray, 173 Lawrie, Chris, 32, 137, 188 Liberal Party of Australia, 12, 14, 59, 94, 139, 189, 191, 236-7, 243, 246 Lindsay, Clare, 138 Lithuania, 93 Lewis, Elizabeth, 157 London, 156, 173, 186, 230 Los Angeles, 186 Luhrman, Baz, 174 McCormick, Mrs page, 130 McEwen, John, 3, 58, 249 McIntyre, Keith, 60-2, 113, 201, 226, 248, 252 McKillop, John, x Mace, Phyllis, 30-1, 36, 66, 137, 145, 177, 200 Mackay, Hugh, 37 Mailman, Deborah, 223 Malouf, David, 168 Malaysia, 95, 185 marriage, 127-38 Martin, Jill, 10, 98, 163 materialism, 141 Meale, Richard, 159 Melba, Dame Nellie, 156 Melbourne, 164 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, 160 Menzies, R. G., 1, 14, 58, 65, 79, 216, 238 Methodist Church, 22 Mills, John, 200, 239 Monkton, John, 176 Morgan, Roy, 206 Morgan, Sally, 195, 223 mortality, 148-50, 224 Moses, Ingrid, x Moses, John, x Muir, Hilda J., 223 Murcutt, Glenn, 179 Murphy, Margery, 129, 138, 226 Murwillumbah, 160

nation building, 244-59 national anthem, 164-5 national Archives, 185 National Gallery of Australia, 185 national identity, 7, 154, 213-34 National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), 78, 173-4 National Library of Australia, x, 185 National Museum of Australia, 185, 233 National Party (see Country Party) Nealon, Don, 129 Nealon, Nola, 28, 66-7, 129, 137, 163, 200 Neighbourhood Watch, 204 ‘New Left’, 47 New State Movement, 71 New York, 173, 230 New York Metropolitan Opera, 160 New Zealand, 7, 42, 64, 114, 222 Newcastle, 155 newspapers, 16, 85, 169-70, Newton, Dobe, 165 Nile, Rev. Fred, 167 Nolan, Sir Sidney, 171 Northern Rivers Symphony Orchestra, 160 Northern Territory, 71, 79, 221, 226 Norway, 207 Notre Dame University, 78 Noyce, Phillip, 174 obesity, 150-1 OECD, 54, 246, 248 O’Donoghue, Lowitja (Lois), 223 Olympic Games 1956, 175-6, 230 1974, 177 2000, 175, 230 2004, 177 One Nation Party, 55, 71, 95, 219 OPEC, 41, 47, 117 ‘oil-price shock’, 69 Opera Australia, 160 Ottawa, 185 Otto, Miranda, 174 Pakistan, 215 Papua New Guinea, 239 Paris, 248 participation, 210, 231 pastimes, 18 Pearce, Diana, 61, 66, 104, 125, 138, 146 Perkins, Charles, 62 philanthropy, 210-11

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Index Philippines, 95 Presbyterian Ladies’ College, 22 poker machines, 183 politics, 57-66, 189 poverty, 211-12, 241-2 ‘presidentalisation’, 64-6 Presley, Elvis, 162 professions, 106-7 primary production, 43 Pryor, Lindsay, 114 publishing, 165-70

Soviet Union, 11, 39, 60 sport, 6, 17, 86, 154, 175-8, 195 Sri Lanka, 95, 201, 215 ‘state aid’, 140 status seeking, 194-7 Stuart, Wayne, 161 suicide, 205-6 Sunday observance, 192-3 Sutherland, Dame Joan, 160 Sutherland, Margaret, 159 Sweden, 242, 257 Switzerland, 42, 253, 257 Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 34 Sydney Museum, 109 Sydney Opera House, 159 Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 157, 160

Qantas, 53 Queanbeyan, 184 Queensland, 71, 85 Queensland Performing Arts Centre, 160 radio, 16 reconciliation, 55, 225 regional issues, 71 republican issue, 7, 218-19 restaurants, 180-1 Rich, Rod, 25, 61, 106, 115, 217-18 Ripe, Cherry, 180 Rolling Stones, The, 162 Roosevelt, President Franklin, 191 Royal Military College, Duntroon, 24 Rush, Geoffrey, 173 St John’s Hostel, 97 St Vincent de Paul Society, 199, 210 Sanger, Margaret, 130 Salvation Army, 199, 209 Saudi Arabia, 186 Schumpeter, Joseph, 48-9 Sculthorpe, peter, 159 Seekers, The, 162, 164 secularisation, 138-48 Sedgman, Frank, 177 sex education, 126 sexual abuse, 143, 193 sexual behaviour, 126, 131 Shields, Peter, 31-2, 100, 112-13 Shop Assistants’ Union, 192 Sinatra, Frank, 127 Sinclair, Jolyon, 118 Singapore, 253 Sitsky, Larry, 158 Skillman, Noela, x Slater, Colin, 254 Smith, Ian, x Smith, John, 88, 104-5 Smith Family, The, 199, 210 smoking, 150-1 Snedden, Billie 62 Snow, C. P., 9 Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme, 245 social capital, 206-7 South Australia, 71

TAFE, 83, 167 Tampa. 115 Tanner, Lindsay, 237, 244 Tasmania, 71, 93, 106, 183 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, 160 Telecom, 53 television, 6, 16, 173-4, 195 Telstra, 53-4 Thailand, 201 The Armidale School (TAS), 22 theatre, 170, 172-3 Thomson, Fay, 218 Tiffen, Rodney, 203, 250 Tosh, Judy, 30, 96 Totalisator Agency Board (TAB), 183 trade unions, 16, 55, 110-12, 119, 141 transport, 18, 245 travel, 7, 39 trust, 206-7 tsunami, 201, 209 Turkey, 54, 257 ‘underclass’, 120-4 unemployment, 48-50, 55, 68, 100, 117-18, 120-2, 240 university education, 6, 21, 27, 33, 77-82, 166-7, 196 funding of, 80 HECS, 79 Murray Report, 79 Martin Report, 79-80 postgraduate study, 81 ‘unified national system’, 79 University of Canberra, x, 86 University of Melbourne, 86, 195 University of New England, 21, 34, 80, 105, 113, 227 University of Sydney, 32, 34 University of the Third Age (U3A), 172 United Kingdom, 7, 9, 38, 64, 116, 135, 143, 167, 169, 194, 214-20, 228, 241

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What was it all for? United Nations, 213 United Nations Development Program, 252 United States of America, 8, 12, 38-9, 42, 54, 70, 93, 135, 143, 156, 167-9, 180, 201, 215, 218, 220, 222, 228, 232, 241, 248, 257 Ursuline Convent, 22 Veenker, Peter, x Vickery, John, 46, 167 Vienna State Opera, 160 Vine, Carl, 159 war Afghanistan, 38, 228 the Gulf, 38 Iraq, 38, 228, 235, 243 Korea, 16, 94, 190, 228 Vietnam, 38-9, 58, 47, 94-5, 216, 228 First World War , 4, 214 Second World War, 4, 7–8, 12-13, 190, 215 Washington, 185 Watson, E. R. S. 34 wealth, 7, 67-71, 251 Weaving, Hugo, 173-4 Werder, Felix, 158 White, Patrick, 168, 171

White, Ron, 116-17 White Australia Policy, 12 Whitely, Brett, 171 Whitlam, Gough, 47, 50, 58-9, 61-2, 64, 79, 219, 238, 249 dismissal of, 58-9 Willey, Shirley, 146-7 Williams, Jack, 34 Williamson, David, 173 Williamson, Malcolm, 156 Wilson, Harold, 47 wine, 6–7, 17, 178-81 Winton, Tim, 168 women in society, 125-37 in workforce, 5, 121, 134 skills, 134 Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), 62, 131, 137 women’s liberation, 191 Woodley, Bruce, 165 Woodford, 156 work, 5, 100-24, 133-5, 155 part-time work, 119-20 technological change in, 101 transformation of, 101-20 Wotten, Dorothy, x Wyndham, 226

276

What Was It All For?: The Reshaping of Australia

It was All a Dream

It was All a Dream

Reshaping It All: Motivation for Physical and Spiritual Fitness

i never knew what time it was

The Way It Was

The Way It Was

The Being of It All

The Being of It All

The Meaning of It All

The Hell of it All

The Thrill of It All

The Meaning of It All

The Hell of it All

The Hell of it All

It Aint All For Nothin

It Ain't All for Nothin'

It Was the Day of the Robot

Awareness: What It Is, What It Does

Algebra Know-It-All (Know It All)

The Know-it-All

It was the best of Sentences, it was the worst of sentences

Was It Murder

For Australia

Was It Murder

It Was Over When

Was It Good For You, Too

Was It Good For You, Too

Was It Good For You Too

Was It Good For You, Too

All That Was Happy

What Was It All For?: The Reshaping of Australia

It was All a Dream

It was All a Dream

Reshaping It All: Motivation for Physical and Spiritual Fitness

i never knew what time it was

The Way It Was

The Way It Was

The Being of It All

The Being of It All

The Meaning of It All

The Hell of it All

The Thrill of It All

The Meaning of It All

The Hell of it All

The Hell of it All

It Aint All For Nothin

It Ain't All for Nothin'

It Was the Day of the Robot

Awareness: What It Is, What It Does

Algebra Know-It-All (Know It All)

The Know-it-All

It was the best of Sentences, it was the worst of sentences

Was It Murder

For Australia

Was It Murder

It Was Over When

Was It Good For You, Too

Was It Good For You, Too

Was It Good For You Too

Was It Good For You, Too

All That Was Happy

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