as works of art.
In Creative Effort, written in 1920 after the senseless slaughter of the world war, Lindsay despaired of mankind. He believed that the only way some control might be exercised over man’s destructive impulses was by restoring the great classical-romantic values in life and art that had been jettisoned in the early years of the twentieth century. Diagnosing modernist art as a symptom of a disease which was infecting Western civilisation, Lindsay refused to praise and admitted no merit in any modernist. They were ‘mere savages’ who, through their brutal representations, revealed their personal despair. Modernists are products of Europe’s moral exhaustion and the neuroses engendered by the slaughter of the war: they have debased every classical value in art. He refused to believe that these ‘fooleries’ would last: people might be gullible but once the novelty wears off they will see through this monumental confidence trick. He was right about the gullibility but wrong about the demise of modernist art and literature. The rise of jazz infuriated him and he threatened to drive gramophone needles into the fingernails of every jazz producer in the land. He firmly believed that the nihilistic nature of modernism would ensure its early demise. But modernism triumphed and gave way to postmodernism and the decline of all aesthetic standards. Junk became art and the few remaining standards by which excellence was judged collapsed.
Lindsay’s solution to the sickness of modernism rested with the artists who delved into unconscious life-forces to gain creative inspiration. Creative vision is the ability to discover one’s own universality. But those who attempt this are doomed to failure. All we can do is engage in ‘creative effort’ and hope that there will be moments of aesthetic consciousness. Agreeing with the Romantics that although we can reject society we cannot ignore nature, Lindsay followed them in the belief that it is up to us to make nature sublime.
After acknowledging his profound debt to Nietzsche, Lindsay criticised him for attempting to create an earthly paradise built on the will of conquerors. Lindsay had no time for Nietzsche’s idea that if the resentful mob cannot find a direction they must be given one. True, Nietzsche cleared away the rubbish that man had accumulated in building Western society. But having destroyed conventional Western values, Nietzsche fell into the trap of allowing himself to offer yet another version of the great Human State, lorded over by men of indomitable will who, believing that might is right, assume the right to impose themselves upon others in the name of creative leadership. Lindsay wanted nothing to do with that dangerous form of utopianism because it presupposed that power over others is given to those worthy of power. It never was, for those truly worthy of power disdained to use it.
In 1932 Fortune magazine in New York published Lindsay’s opinions of Australians:
The pose of the average Australian is that of a sardonic cocksureness. He is foolproof: aware of the rottenness of human motives and not to be taken in by them. He derides everything – except himself. His weekly papers reflect this uneasy vacillation of national self-esteem by their incessant jokes at the expense of Englishmen, who are exhibited as semiimbeciles…In return, the Englishman dislikes the Australian as a colonial and a convict-bred upstart without any social status…
Nevertheless, this annoying cocksureness of the Australian springs from two of his best virtues: his physical courage and his ability to think for himself in action. For a century he has been forcing a place for himself in a crude and difficult land afflicted by drought and an uncertain rainfall, and the War of 1914 demonstrated his tradition of toughness and endurance. His sporting impulse is one outcome of his passion for taking a risk, whether on a bad horse or by dying of thirst, or casually swimming in the company of sharks…
Australian churches are almost empty; the Australian spends his Sunday rationally in the open air, and the Australian parsons have the hunted and harassed air of the uncertain wage-earner...
States of mind do not alter; they merely change their habitat. What was the parson and the convict official is now the bureaucrat. For its size, Australia has the largest bureaucracy with the lowest mentality in the world. The cost of maintaining the public service in Australia is such a joke that one can’t laugh at it . . .
No one outside of Australia can have any notion of the degradation Australian intelligence has been subjected to by the antics of its official morons…5
Lindsay’s philosophy is a form of cynical romanticism: it is libertarian, pessimistic, elitist, anti-authoritarian and it emphasises the individual’s detachment from society and politics. His considerable influence on poets, novelists and playwrights, too many to list here, cannot be doubted. In our postmodern artistic world of junk, Lindsay is an anachronism and thus unjustly ignored.
By way of contrast, the Melbourne intellectual scene has been one of social, or even utopian, romanticism based on the view that art is central to society and a force for progressive social change. This view is anti-individualistic, egalitarian and socially democratic. In Australian Cultural Elites, John Docker argues that Melbourne intellectuals characteristically think that an Australian, nationalist-derived, social democratic ethos is compatible with what are viewed as the central values of European civilisation. Melbourne intellectuals feel at the centre of their society because they are modest social activists who strive to introduce Australia to European standards of sophistication.
Sydney intellectuals look to Europe as defining that which is important in life. But, Docker argues, they do not live in Europe, and if they did, would not feel part of Europe’s social texture. Rejecting Australia and rejected by Europe, they are threatened by a personal nihilism. They opt for a third realm where universal romantic European ideals prevail. Since they reject society they cling to the romantic idea of the natural as real in life and the social as contingent. Melbourne romanticism embraces society; Sydney romanticism rejects it.
Lindsay’s cynical romanticism was an aesthetic way of wrestling with existential dilemmas. Henry Lawson’s was quite different. He recognised the need of man for man in a rough and brutalising country which produces profound feelings of emptiness. Faced with such absurd challenges to personal existence, it is tempting to withdraw into comfortable conformity. One can understand the need to invent the idea of mateship to counteract the consequences of widespread nihilism associated with life in the outback. Lawson obliged and so provided nineteenth-century frontier society with a survival technique and twentieth-century urban dwellers with one of their most cherished myths: mateship.
The loyalty of man to man is interwoven with an obsessive assertion of rights. But the passion for equal justice can easily sour into a grudge against gifted people and the desire for mateship can easily express itself by pulling down those who do not mix with the crowd. The ideal of mateship which appeals to ordinary Australians springs, not only from their eagerness to embrace fraternity, but from their determination to pull down high achievers.
In Lawson’s life and work, however, mateship is fragile and conditional. It didn’t (and still doesn’t) apply to women, children, Aborigines and recent immigrants, although it did apply to dogs and horses. More importantly, Lawson realised that mateship was a protection against living with oneself. Those who deviate from the path of sociability and choose the lonely road of the reclusive individual invariably go mad. Did they need society? But it was the need to escape from the hypocrisy of society that made the journey to individuality necessary. And the result was, in Lawson’s words, nothing.
Confronted by the terminal claustrophobia of hypocritical social relationships the inhabitants of this wide brown land had a unique opportunity to ‘go bush’. Most didn’t. And those who did – explorers, farmers, bushrangers – were generally broken by the bush. Their belief that coming to terms with the bush was an index of one’s character reminds one again of Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill one makes one stronger. To this day there is a silent and deep respect for those who battled with the bush and failed. Compassion for the underdog was not solely a reflection of identification with convicts and hostility towards their rulers. It had as
