of the Australian outback. Compassion for the underdog was combined with a romantic view of the people in the bush, even if our romantic writers were mostly disaffected urban intellectuals for whom the outback represented, as it does today, vicarious thrills and a relief from the claustrophobia and conformity of city and suburbs.
The vast open spaces of Australia influence people in different ways: they can be intoxicating for some, frightening for others. While ‘Banjo’ Paterson glorified life in the outback and wrote heroically optimistic tales, the poetry that plumbed the depths of the Australian character was cynically romantic. For many people the Australian landscape produces profound disquiet in which the individual is truly at one with a harsh, raw environment which so reduces him to insignificance that he feels swallowed up by nature. It is easy to understand why this experience was often portrayed by local writers as a form of madness and why Australians share a deep ambivalence towards the bush. Australians who know the bush acknowledge an intimate connection with each other: their empathy is based on a profound understanding of the precariousness of existence and the need of forbearance in the face of absurdity.
Australians, at least those in the outback, have faced a fundamental choice. One can act as if nothing matters or, while accepting the ultimate futility of life, one can act as if it is not futile. The Australian character has been moulded by this choice. And the result is a curious mixture of the two where today the most common expressions are ‘no worries’, ‘she’ll be right’: cryptic and easy-going versions of Lawson’s ‘it doesn’t matter much, nothing does’.
A darkly heroic realism developed among pioneers because of the harshness of the bush, which broke nearly all of the hard men and women who tried to master it. Thus there developed among the early Australians a creed of integrity – of being true to life – which reminds one of the cynical romanticism of Nietzsche and Albert Camus. Australian history is filled with tragic stories of lost children, drought, bushfire, floods, loneliness and tragic death in the outback. Australia boasts eleven of the fifteen most poisonous snakes in the world (including the top three); the most poisonous spider (and in Sydney too); the deadly box jelly-fish and blue-ringed octopus; scorpions; sting-rays, sharks; and crocodiles that have developed a taste for American tourists. And how does the man in the bush react to these nuisances?
The first march of the young pioneers was over; the sixteen miles of rough uptrack had been traversed in a day; the average load had been over a hundred pounds per man . . . Between the wall of timber and the cliff rim ran an open strip a few yards wide, a breathing space which was chosen for a camp site. Before blankets were rolled out, six tiger snakes had to be killed and two bull-dog ants’ nests burned out. Herb had been sitting on the brink of a cliff watching the opalescent spray of the falls leaping out into the twilight. On getting up to go back to the camp site, he found two hissing flattened reptiles blocking his path; there was no stick handy and no retreat. “Bring a stick!” he yelled to the others, “Two snakes here!” “You can have my stick,” Norb called out, a bit out of breath, “as soon as I’ve finished killing these beggars over here.” Two carpet snakes and a twelve foot rock python were spared – they proved useful about the camp later by eradicating bush rats. It would have been a bad camp for a sleep-walker; three yards from the foot of their leafy beds was certain death over the three hundred feet cliffs; behind their heads was a tangled mass of thorn, stinging tree and burning vine, which the jungle always uses as a first line of defence; over in the coarse tussocks beyond the camp fire lived a large community of tiger snakes and death adders, which for centuries had been lords of this one, sun-baked ledge on the vast, gloomy plateau. Such trifles do not trouble men who carry a horse’s pack all day, and so, undisturbed by the howling of dingoes and the scream of Powerful Owls, the first night passed in heavy sleep.6
Australia is a hard country and the people have had to adopt a starkly realistic view of life, or go under. In the bush, they usually go under anyway. One way to cope with a hard country and a tough life is through humour. Australian humour – realistic and sardonic – is used as a self-protective device to keep one’s courage up in the face of inevitable disaster. This black humour involves an ironic acceptance of the fact that in the end, we all lose. Confronted by tanks, a digger said to his mate: ‘You go that way and I’ll go this way, and we’ll surround ‘em’. Deeply rooted in disjunctions – English versus Irish, male versus female, bush versus city, optimism versus pessimism – irony dominates Australian humour. Casual, shoulder-shrugging resignation leads to the stark conclusion that ‘we can’t win, no matter what’ – the swagman in Waltzing Matilda died, the bushrangers Ned Kelly and Ben Hall perished, and many soldiers died pointlessly in the disaster at Gallipoli. Despite this, Australians continue to protest vigorously, and their vehicle for protest is swearing. Ned Kelly’s description of the Victorian police is legendary:
The brutal and cowardly conduct of big ugly fat-necked wombat-headed big-bellied magpie-legged narrow-hipped splay-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or English landlords which is better known as officers of Justice or Victorian police.7
Laconic and stoical, Australians combine a calm acceptance of the fates with a grim humour. There is an old story about Percy Lindsay, having a drink with a few professional friends. The barmaid approached, apologised and asked the ‘boys’ if they would mind making less noise because her father had hanged himself in the back shed. After considering this for the time it took to finish their beer, they trooped out to the shed where Percy said: ‘And sure enough there was the poor bastard hanging from a rafter dead as a doornail. He had his mouth half open in a funny way and looked a bit grim. We had quite a job getting him down’.
Such is life. The contrast with European angst, English class consciousness and American histrionics is obvious and makes this a very Australian story, even down to the words used in its telling. The barmaid says ‘sorry’ – a favourite Australian word used to inform unfortunate commuters that buses are out of service. Visitors note with amusement that Australians apologise for things that aren’t their fault. ‘Would you mind’ is used obsessively to avoid the appearance of authoritarian behaviour, while ‘a bit’ is a popular expression used to qualify, if not further apologise for, the request. Visitors have also noted the irritating tendency of Australians, especially females, to end their sentences with rising intonation as if asking a question. ‘We had a lovely holiday?’ means ‘We had a lovely holiday. Is that all right with you?’ In Australia one must never place oneself above others.
Although European romanticism was an important influence on nineteenth-century writers, Irish romanticism was even more influential. In The Irish in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell argued that it is not the conflict between individual and the bush, but culture conflict (notably between the English and Irish) which explains the development of Australian society. The refusal of the Irish to act out a deferential role discomforted the English elite, eroded their feelings of superiority and announced that the old-world social order could not be reproduced in Australia. This produced a general atmosphere in which rigid hierarchies became increasingly difficult to sustain. It was the Irish and their friends who freed the atmosphere of authoritarianism, pretence and pomposity. The main unifying theme of Australian history is, for O’Farrell, the clash between the English majority (moderate, respectable, conformist), the Irish minority (melancholic, humorous, romantic, contradictory, volatile), and a local Australian minority (masculine, hedonist, non-intellectual).
The English thought that Australia should be a little England of the South Seas but the Irish minority promoted an Australian nationalism which repudiated the class-consciousness and conservatism of British society. The Irish were enemies of pretentiousness, pomposity and repression, indifferent to worldly progress, and friends of innocent merriment, mischief and passionate tragedy. O’Farrell notes that while the non-Irish rich and powerful built commercial and industrial empires, the Irish preferred anonymity, equality, and the security of their own kind as their vision of a good life. It was a vote for the underdog, but its danger lay in glorifying the role of underdog with his fatalism, his suspicion of excellence, and his sense of grievance.
Yet it would
