The Australian Nation: Its British and Irish Roots
by Geoffrey Partington
Australian Scholarly Publishing
At last those Australians whom banana-republicanism leaves sick with fear have begun to observe that, barring for the nonce a total Rwandatype hell, our country's next war will be the culture war: and that the need to win this war gives the tag "publish or perish" -- a whole new meaning. We now have one more obligatory item for our knapsacks: Geoffrey Partington's The Australian Nation.
Readers of Quadrant and the late Encounter long ago recognised Dr Partington's significance in our intellectual life. Academics with his erudition are rare. Academics with his intelligibility are rarer. Academics with his erudition and intelligibility are so rare as, by rights, to belong on a World Heritage list. Moreover, it is almost unheard-of for any Australian-born or -domiciled writer to command, as Dr Partington commands, great gifts at any prose-length. Neither 350-page staying-power nor the 1000-word straitjacket deters him. Some of his most devastating insights have taken the form of essays — among which his 1979 Quadrant contribution "Morton's Fork, Or Having It Both Ways" ranks particularly high — and even letters to the editor. Here is a recent epistle of his (The Weekend Australian, 2-3 July 1994), which even in its unabridged state demolishes Malcolm Turnbull's pretensions with fewer words than it would take the average tenured Australian Trotskyite to address an envelope:
"I read with interest the article by Malcolm Turnbull alleging excessive British involvement with Australia before, during and after the enactment of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act ("How Britannia Ruled Our Constitution", The Australian, 29 June).
I had just been reading the opposite criticism from the pen of another leader of radical thought, Dr Henry Reynolds, who regrets that British governments did not intervene sufficiently in Australian internal affairs and veto land policies he considers were hostile to Aboriginal interests ...
If British governments did not intervene at all, this shows Britain's irrelevance to Australia.
If they exerted any influence at all, this shows Britain was a persistent meddler.
The British are damned if they did and damned if they didn't".
This conclusion summarises everything Dr Partington deplores in the mindless Anglophobia (as distinct from valid reproofs of specific British individuals and institutions) typifying what passes for official Australian "historiography". To witness our "historians" gurgling with anger at monarchism and the Old Dart — "a colostomy bag on the body politic" was the characteristically vindictive, though uncharacteristically memorable, epithet chat one such genius applied to the Royal Family at a 1993 St Patrick's Day shindig — is to endure a mental climate in which the occasional differences from Der Stürmer result more from inadvertence than from conscious aspiration. Dr Partington has created something much bigger and better than a mere pamphlet emphasising our British patrimony's virtues, commendable though that would have been. His work is temperate in tone, extraordinarily learned, free from any discernible suppressio veri as from any outright suggestio falsi, and so useful chat only ideological rancour could (as it doubtless will) deny it inclusion in undergraduate bibliographies.
Much too scrupulous a chronicler to impose Grand Themes on his material from outside, Dr Partington nevertheless takes justified pleasure in the patterns which his material reveals of its own accord. Most obvious among these is the power that British institutions have exercised over the imaginations not only of Britain's Australian friends, but of Britain's Australian foes. Nineteenth-century antipodean malcontents bemoaned British rule from positions which Britain had won for them. They shared the intellectual confusion of the New York cabbie who was immortalised in an anecdote by Anglo-Peruvian comic Michael Bentine. On first hearing Bentine's voice the cabbie realised that his vehicle was being contaminated by the presence of a British passenger, and he snorted "Great Britain! Hah! What's great about it?" Unruffled, Bentine asked "What language are you talking?" "English", admitted the driver. "That", responded Bentine, "is what's great about it".
Insofar as such Victorian-era republicans as John Dunmore Lang and Daniel Deniehy bordered on philosophic coherence at all, they deprecated modern Britain principally because they thought it was not being British enough. They maintained as their ideals, not Marat's or Danton's eventful republican precepts, but Magna Carta, Hampden and Locke. (So much for the absurd thesis, propounded at great fist-thumping length by Thomas Keneally, that Lang et al regarded themselves as being trial runs for Thomas Keneally). As the essence of good government Australian Catholic spokesmen invoked, not Bishop Bossuet's "Le roi, Jésus Christ et l'Église: Dieu en ces trois noms" or Metternich's Holy Alliance, but Britain's own Bill of Rights and Catholic Emancipation laws. Cardinal Moran, Archbishop of Sydney, affirmed in 1891 that "all our interests at the present day, and for 50 years at least, point ... to a closer union with the [British] Empire".
CATHOLIC WELFARE
Between 1788 and the end of the 19th century Catholics fared, on the whole, much better under Protestant rule in Britain and Australia than they did in most nations where they formed a majority. This is not to suggest that their treatment always warranted applause: merely to note that their treatment elsewhere was far crueller. Dr Partington could have made still more of this point than he has, because — even if we discount nakedly Marxist terror campaigns -- the anticlerical persecution which Catholics underwent in France, Italy, Portugal and Latin America continued well past 1900.
When the House of Savoy's troops conquered Rome in 1870, and Pius IX had good reason to fear that he would be murdered as his Prime Minister Pellegrino Rossi had been, he begged the Catholic powers to aid him. They all offered eloquent excuses for doing nothing. Gladstone, by contrast, despatched a man-of-war to Italy's western coast: not only to evacuate British subjects in Rome bur to rescue, if necessary, Pius himself. When French Prime Ministers Jules Ferry, Rene Waldeck-Rousseau and Emile Combes hounded the religious orders, it was Britain which gave many of these orders asylum.
Nor did only monks and nuns find British law, quite literally, a lifesaver. The Catholic crowned heads whom Britain succoured in exile included Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis-Philippe, Napoleon III, Eugenie, Louis the Prince Imperial (who fought and died for Britain in the Zulu War) and Portugal's Manuel II. Small wonder that the Osservatore Romano commented in 1893: "England, true to her principles of liberty, has accorded it to her Roman Catholic minority — in a way which must make many continental Catholics envy the lot of their co-religionists in England". Small wonder, also, that Leo XIII expressed "grateful thanks ... for the justice and protection which the Catholic Church has enjoyed during the reign of Queen Victoria throughout the vast extent of her realm".
Even the darkest chapter in 19th century British history, Ireland's Great Famine, is illuminated by Dr Partington's eloquently restrained aperçu: "It is unlikely that deaths in Ireland from the famine would have been fewer had [Irish Nationalists] John Mitchel or Charles Gavan Duffy been in charge rather than Sir Robert Peel or Lord John Russell". British and Australian Catholic advocates of State Aid endured frequent ridicule; they were not, however, strung from telegraph poles or shoved before firing squads, as their Mexican counterparts — well within living memory — were apt to be. The manner in which these truths (so unpalatable to Leprechauns Anonymous and the other pressure-groups controlling Australia's education systems) are routinely suppressed illustrates the frightening parochialism of modish Australian thought: even, or rather especially, when it makes its most laborious attempts to seem global.
ANGLOPHOBIA
Just as impressive, and just as antipathetic to rent-a-mob republicans in 1994, is the breadth of 19th- and early-20th-century Australian Anglophobes' reading. The British heritage, as well as shaping such Anglophobes' political mentality and their notions of sport, coloured -- indeed determined -- their entire approach to literature. Dr Partington cites The Bulletin's carpet-chewing, almost proverbial wrath at Edward VII ("Tummy ... The Fat Little Baccarat Man ... a bloated prince of parasites"), his mother ("blind and greedy as the grave ... that cold and selfish woman ... that dull and brainless woman ... that dull, yet gilded dummy") and his elder son (" 'Twere better for his comfort that the Duke of Clarence died"); since this same pubescent invective marked the journal's utterances about Oriental races, any Martian who acquired the journal's back-issues would conclude that the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha's main "sin" was to have been Chinese. But even The Bulletin's own A.G. Stephens never countenanced, as Donald Horne in our own Augustan age has advocated, penalising the study of foreign authors. Stephens lectured on Marlowe, Sheridan, Thackeray and Moliere; in print he eulogised (with every sign of expertise) Balzac, Maupassant, Theophile Gautier and Prosper Merimee; he once recklessly asserted that "Verhaeren [Emile Verhaeren, a then-renowned socialist scribbler] and Verlaine have far more poetical significance than the rabbits of the English warren like Kipling". Nor did Henry Lawson -- whose successive attitudes to foreign climes resembled less an intellectual odyssey than the insensate careering of a dodgem-car — hate England enough to avoid praising Boadicea, Alfred the Great and the Virgin Queen in verse. In addition he read, with relish, Cervantes and Captain Marryat: hardly among the writers one first associates with blowfly-infested Australian literary jingoism.
ABORIGINALS
To enlighten those who seriously equate Australian white settlement with the Holocaust, Dr Partington points out that the colonists had only three options in their legal dealings with Aborigines. They could adopt Aboriginal legal customs; they could ensure that British laws and Aboriginal laws co-existed and were kept separate; or they could ensure that British laws were "shared as far as possible with the Aborigines with whatever concessions to local custom" were mandatory. The second of these options, which would have lumbered Australia with apartheid, was rejected. The first option would in practice have meant postponing all legal judgments until each Governor and magistrate had acquired the requisite skill in such time-honoured indigenous punishments as mutilating genitalia and spearing villains to death. So the third option became -- dread adjective -- inevitable.
Taxpayer-subsidised activists who acquire vast personal wealth from cynical breast-beating over the "genocidal" British "invasion" should remember how easily Australia could have been a Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French or Japanese colony instead. If they continued to opine that the Australian Aborigine would have fared any better under those settlers than he did under the British, they would of course be entitled to their opinion. The rest of us — who actually have a nodding acquaintance with what befell the Aztec, the Inca, the Xhosa, the Angolan, the Egyptian Mameluke, the Algerian and the Ainu — would be equally entitled to ask them what they were smoking.
In short: everyone afraid of what Greg Sheridan once called "the lies we teach our children" should read Dr Partington's volume. Alas, for about the 58th time in recent literary history, a laudable Australian book has been disfigured by subediting which is not so much lax as nonexistent. The Eleusinian mysteries of computers' spell-check and grammar-check functions appear never to have been profaned by Australian Scholarly Publishing's keystroke operator: our PM from 1941 to 1945 is described as "Jhon Curtin" (p. xiii); early 19th-century NSW is said to have "consituted" a scene of oppression for Catholics (p. 75); Sir Henry Parkes is quoted as urging a Melbourne audience to "Make yauorselfs [sic] a united people" (p. 112); the Christian name of artist Grinling Gibbons is spelt "Grindling" on p. 131, which also misspells Henry Grattan's surname as "Gratton"; Sydney University's first Professor of Science is quoted as affirming that the university's purpose is "not necessarily to give any large amoung of information" (p. 171); the Lawson poems that Chapter 8 discusses include "paeons" (paeans, presumably) to Cromwell (p. 224); p. 286 speaks of "South African" where the grammatical context necessitates "South Africa". In other passages there are either too many or too few words for sense to prevail: "he would have a done a work as disastrous", we are told on p. 133; Lawson, p. 220 informs us, "was the son of Norwegian sailor". Elsewhere the problem is mere editorial carelessness. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is described (p. 141) as being "among the living" in 1877, though she had died in 1861. The source (p. 340) to footnote 82 is given, tantalisingly, as "pp. XXXX". And Henry Vlll is credited (p. 29) with having received from Leo XII the title "Defender of the Faith": no mean feat, since Leo was not even born until 213 years after Henry expired. Retaining so many mistakes in a finished product reveals scant courtesy to any author; it is worse when the imprint, by its very choice of name, purports to rise above philistinism.
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