Novel Politics: Studies in Australian Political Fiction

152 Pages·2020·1.516 MB·English

by  John Uhr, Shaun Crowe

Novel Politics
Novel Politics
Studies in Australian Political Fiction
John Uhr and Shaun Crowe
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS
An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited
Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
[email protected]
www.mup.com.au
First published 2020
Text © John Uhr and Shaun Crowe, 2020
Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2020
This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part
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9780522876420 (hardback)
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Contents
Preface
Introduction: Politics and the Study of Literature
Part One
Chapter 1 Catherine Spence’s Clara Morison
Chapter 2 Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion
Chapter 3 Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl
Part Two
Chapter 4 Tim Winton’s Dirt Music
Chapter 5 Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap
Chapter 6 Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance and Taboo
Conclusion: Literature and the Study of Politics
Preface
This book arose out of an undergraduate course on ‘Ideas in Australian Politics’, which we
recently taught at the Australian National University. As political scientists reviewing
Australia’s developing political culture, we found ourselves returning as often to literature
and literary criticism as we did to journal articles and book chapters in our narrow discipline.
We began to appreciate the scope of this tradition: many of the country’s greatest writers,
over decades and centuries, had published insightful accounts of the social and cultural roots
of politics in Australia. Some of this work was playful and indirect; some of it was more
urgent and explicit. We were attracted to the way the writers tracked competing images of
society and culture in Australia—the different patterns of ideas within its political
community—and the way these thoughts both inspired and limited politics, at least as
formally conceived by political scientists. They allowed us to see the practice of politics in
new ways.1
Australia has not always appealed to writers and artists. When D.H. Lawrence published
his 1923 novel Kangaroo, his cynicism seemed clear, at least on the surface. The book
follows a young British poet, Richard Somers, who visits New South Wales in the years
following World War I. The worldly Somers is unimpressed by what he finds. Pondering ‘the
youngest country on the globe’, the poet observes ‘the absence of any inner meaning: and at
the same time the great sense of vacant spaces. The sense of irresponsible freedom. The
sense of do-as-you-please liberty. And all utterly uninteresting.’ Somers notes the Australian
myth of egalitarianism but finds it undiscerning and frustratingly tolerant of mediocrity. For
the young European, Australia feels ‘absolutely and flatly democratic … Demos was here his
own master, undisputed.’2 Generations of readers have taken this as a warning about the
dreariness of Australian public culture. We suspect, however, that many have misread the
book, mistaking the poet’s preference for rule and authority as an expression of Lawrence’s
own distaste for Australian democracy.
A more recent assessment—although for younger readers, perhaps only slightly so—
came from Australia’s first Nobel laureate in literature Patrick White, who considered
himself something of a prodigal son, returning from Britain with the hope of ‘helping to
people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding’.3 White knew only
too well the stultifying flatness described by Somers—‘the ugliness, the bags and iron of
Australian life’—but he also felt that Australian society offered ‘avenues for endless
exploration’. White was convinced that ‘the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary,
dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’. But he also knew how uninspiring ‘the Great
Australian Emptiness’ could be, where ‘the mind is the least of possessions’ and ‘the march
of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves’. Encouraged by White’s
challenge, we began to see more than a few Australian novels escaping from ‘the exaltation
of the “average”’, which in his view coloured so much of Australian culture and thought.
In this book we provide a close reading of six distinctly ‘un-average’ Australian novelists,
and their books that deal with politics as broadly understood. Three of the books were written
by female authors and published in London before Federation: Catherine Spence’s Clara
Morison (1854), Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion (1881) and Catherine Martin’s An
Australian Girl (1890). The following four were written by a diverse set of contemporary
male writers, published in Australia: Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), Christos Tsiolkas’s
The Slap (2008), and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) and Taboo (2017).
More than 150 years separate the earliest from the most recent of these novels. It goes
without saying that Catherine Spence was reflecting on a different society to Christos
Tsiolkas (sexually liberated Greek Marxists did not, generally speaking, arrive until after
Spence’s death). But even within generations, literary critics have long appreciated the wide
range of possible responses to the idea and experience of living in Australia. One basic
cleavage, observed from the earliest period of colonial politics, cut along broadly
‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ tendencies. On one side was an inclination to see Australia
as depressingly dull, burdened by a ‘sense of exile’ from the bustling and superior heart of
European civilisation.
If conservatives generally questioned social experiments, the Australian one was no
exception. The progressive instinct, on the other hand, tended towards optimism, with its
advocates buoyed by a sense of egalitarian possibility, entranced by this world of ‘newness
and freedom’. Australian poet Judith Wright called this ‘Australia’s double aspect’, which
twisted the inner sense of nationality in contrasting directions.4 Wright sensed that ‘almost
every Australian writer’ brought together this contradiction between ‘the transplanted
European and his new country’—‘true for all white Australians’—of ‘the European mind in
contact with a raw, bleak and alien life and landscape’. One result was that conservative
politicians tended to avoid what they saw as an ‘insecurely based Australianism’—just as
advocates of ‘a radical and political approach’ leaned towards ‘optimistic reformism’,
elevating a kind of ‘equality … that seems nowadays to leave out a good deal’. Compromises
arose, forming ‘such real Australianity as we have’.5
As Judith Wright acknowledged, these political narratives were firmly rooted in the
European experience of life in Australia (did this ‘new world’ represent an exciting blank
slate for humanity, or did it remain threatening and essentially alien to civilisation?). But for
Indigenous occupants of the land, Australian stories looked very different. As they knew all
too well, the so-called ‘new world’ rested on the bones of a much older one, with its own
stories and culture. According to novelist Alexis Wright, storytelling was central to the
process of colonisation, with physical dispossession also resulting in a kind of literary
dispossession for Aboriginal Australia. Since the arrival of the British, ‘Aboriginal people
have not been in charge of the stories other people tell about us … the plot line has always
been for one outcome, to erode Aboriginal belief in sovereignty, self-governance and land
rights, even when it has gotten to the point where most Aboriginal people have been silenced,
or feel too overwhelmed to fight any more’.
If cultural narratives helped shape colonisation, the reverse also applied: colonisation
helped shape the kind of stories Indigenous people could now tell about their lives and their
country:
This results in further loss in our ability to create some of the best stories of this
country, as we lean in to do what is expected of us … The further we bend our stories
to suit mainstream Australia, resulting in further loss of our cultural norms, the more
we hasten our total acculturation into mainstream Australian society.6
For Alexis Wright, this constituted the ‘tricky question’ of modern Aboriginal storytelling—
something that all Indigenous writers are forced to grapple with, altogether different to the
‘double aspect’ confronting early European Australians.
In teaching our course on ‘Ideas in Australian Politics’, we learned that literature had
much to say about the nature of the Australian political community—both as imagined and as
carefully documented. We observed many of Australia’s most fascinating political
imaginations, even if they often existed a step removed from its more institutional forms. In
some cases, writers had dreamed of democratic reforms far ahead of their time; in others,
they had withdrawn from the dull pragmatics of formal politics, seeking out the consolations
of private life away from compromised civic activities. We decided to gather some of these
discoveries and see if we could unearth a story about the place of political novels in
Australia. These novels were written with different purposes: either engaging deeply with the
practical reality of politics in an emerging democracy, or creatively disengaging from its
immediate demands, in search of larger possibilities. A number of political scientists have
published very good work on aspects of this topic, but there exists no introductory book
stating the case for the value of political novels as important forms of political thought in
Australia.
Our seven examples of Australian ‘political novels’ join the two ends of Australian
literary culture, from pre-Federation to what we might call postmodernism. Each explores the
relationship between ‘character’ and ‘community’, with politics usually emerging in the
difficult space between the two. The novels generally involve some sort of underlying
conflict, either between individuals with different values, or between individuals and
collective expectations. Each involves a complex cast of characters, some of whom represent
the virtues of social responsibility, while others are more disruptive and socially reckless.
These texts work as ‘political novels’ because each writer is daring enough to show us
faulty examples of respectable citizens and worthy examples of unconventional misfits,
challenging normal boundaries of behaviour. Miles Franklin was right when she wrote of
Catherine Spence’s character Clara, who dominates the 1854 novel Clara Morison, that ‘she
was a rebel … and would still be one today in Australia’.7 Only rarely do our six novelists
focus on characters performing on the parliamentary stage, with Rosa Praed’s Policy and
Passion from the 1880s being the most interesting exception. More generally, politics
appears in the norms and conventions of the polis, as discerned by writers looking deeply
into the developing Australian community—into what Miles Franklin called ‘that way of
living called Democracy’.8
We are not literary experts, but we know that most of the readers of Australian political
novels have not been literary experts. We are political scientists making the case that
understanding Australian politics—including critical dissent about what it might be missing
—can be aided substantially by the study of novels written with a close eye on political
themes. One advantage of using novels to clarify politics is that literary writers are often
more open-minded than contemporary political scientists: presenting politics in its deeper
social and human context, beyond the theatre of parliament. Another advantage is that, by
using more evocative language, literary writers can transform the humdrum realities of
everyday politics, or express the hidden poetry of political reform, which might prompt
readers to think about politics along different, more elevated lines. Literature might make
politics bigger and more expansive.
In our sample of political novels, we aim to ‘bookend’ the long history of Australian
literature: with part one covering pre-Federation Australia, through the work of three female
authors, and part two examining contemporary politics in the work of three quite different
male writers. The comparison is between unfranchised female colonial ‘subjects’, well before
the arrival of national citizenship, and three national ‘citizens’, writing about political
identity in the contorted era of multiculturalism, globalisation and postcolonialism. The
country we now call ‘Australia’ dates from 1901, but the term ‘Australia’ was first suggested
by the explorer Matthew Flinders in 1803. In 1817 Governor Macquarie successfully urged
the British Government to call the great southern land ‘Australia’—then comprising the
colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.9 In this sense, ‘Australia’ represents a
historic experiment in establishing a political community—originally under tight British
military rule, while notably excluding the Indigenous owners of the land, to more recent
times when ‘the four surviving groups in Australia’—Indigenous people, Asian people,
European people and settler British people—try, in the words of historian Manning Clark, to
‘learn to live together’.10
Given the considerable historical separation between Spence’s 1854 novel Clara Morison
and the publication of the last four novels in the twenty-first century, there are many
important differences in political understanding between the first and second sets of writers.
Yet there are also important differences in political understanding within both sets, which
allows us to tease out not simply a binary tale of two moments in Australian literary history,
but also a set of valuable examples of literary politics from six of Australia’s most distinctive
novelists. This includes female reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of an emerging
‘masculinist’ nationality in early colonial politics—sometimes referred to as ‘Australianity’11
—and three reflections on cultural diversity in Australia’s contemporary political identity,
fractured by class, race and ideology. Our aim is to map out a number of leading intellectual
exercises in political thought by six notable Australian writers—all of whom continue to
offer substantial contributions to political deliberation in Australia.
Our theme is that ‘Australia’ is a developing entity, with our six novelists each playing
substantial roles in helping readers think through the choices available to citizens in its
evolving—and we would like to hope maturing—political community. We see these writers
as distinctive Australian public intellectuals whose novels challenge readers to reflect on
politics in new and innovative ways—as it is practised and as it might be practised, come the
day of reform. None of the novelists is doctrinaire but all are interested in characteristically
Australian doctrines, each exploring key questions and central problems arising from
Australian ways of practising politics.
Their novels are clearly written ‘in the times’ they were published, but we also see these
novelists as ‘ahead of their times’, or at least ‘out of step with their times’, in their
determination to stimulate readers to reflect more deeply and widely on the nature of politics
in Australia. Manning Clark described Australian literary history in terms of a small number
of spirited revolts against a conventional core of ‘British philistinism’, which over time
decayed into ‘a morality without a faith—the decades of the creedless puritans’.12 In the
same spirit, Judith Wright identified ‘Australia’s cultural landscape’ as dominated by ‘the
almost unopposed ascendancy of material and exploitative attitudes’, with ‘an already
outmoded utilitarianism of outlook’. At their best, novels can both reflect and challenge the
political cultures in which they are set.
Our approach in this book builds in many ways on two earlier works, which also examine
sets of six Australian authors. The first is the pioneering study of Australian poetry by former
ANU literature scholar Tom Inglis Moore, in his 1942 work Six Australian Poets. The second
is Brian Kiernan’s 1971 study of six Australian novelists and their distinctive Images of
Society and Nature, which broke away from earlier assumptions about Australia’s native
literary tradition of social democracy. We will return to Kiernan’s work in our Conclusion,
but here confine our comments to Moore’s striking work, which foreshadows in some ways
our study of Australian novelists.13 Moore’s approach included a detailed introduction on the
evolving character of Australian literary culture—something we do in our own way in the
Introduction, which follows. Moore’s book also included an insightful ‘Foreword’ by US
historian C. Hartley Grattan, whose interest in the political nature of Australian literature
significantly shapes our own approach to the democratic political philosophy we find in
Australian political novels.14 Like Moore, who also wrote a later book on Social Patterns in
Australian Literature, we are interested in the political arguments used by Australian writers
to shape Australian political culture. And like Moore, we want to contribute to contemporary
debate over the international interest in the literary culture of Australia.15
Finally, some words of thanks to those who helped us with this book. We have many
colleagues and friends to thank for their encouragement and assistance during this project.
The School of Politics and International Relations, the Research School of Social Sciences,
College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University helped
substantially with our research on unusual literary methodology in the study of politics.
Thanks also to Richard McGregor and Louise Stirling for their editorial wisdom and help.
We hope we can continue to recover literary pathways in the academic study of politics.
Both authors shared responsibility for the Preface, the Introduction and the Conclusion.
John Uhr took responsibility for chapters 1–3; Shaun Crowe took responsibility for chapters
4–6. We learnt so much from one another during the writing of this co-authored book.
Notes
1 Some important examples are A.A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1958; Grahame Johnston
(ed.), Australian Literary Criticism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1962; Judith Wright, Preoccupations in
Australian Poetry, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1965; Clement Semmler and Derek Whitlock (eds), Literary
Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1966; John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia, 1956–1964, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1969; T.I. Moore, Social Patterns in Australian Literature, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1971; Brian
Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature: Seven Essays on Australian Novels, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971;