Distant Voices (69 page)

BEHIND THE AQUAMARINE
perfection of postcard Australia, the volatility never fails to reassure. On my first day back in Sydney, it was typically February: a flaming dawn, hard rain alternating with hot sun, and winds bringing in the sticky salt of the South Pacific. My mother used to stand on her back steps above Joe's Armenian laundry and watch bush fires licking the horizon, and curse the ash on her washing. February marks the end of a long summer. It is, according to an unreliable source, when most people have their ‘nevers sprike down'.

Zoë, my seven-year-old, and I did what I have done for years on the first day. We headed for Bondi, where I grew up. Hindus making for the Ganges will understand. Under wild skies, the bay was running an even, rolling surf, with the great waves rising like blue-green pyramids. These days the boys and girls on their boards have Vietnamese and Greek names.

On the beach, though, are those who have surfed almost every day for half the century: Cec and Phyllis, in their seventies, who greet me as if a day, not a year, has passed. They were friends of Jack Platt, the Bondi shark catcher, who died last year, remarkably, in his bed. ‘You remember that huge Grey Nurse he caught off the rocks?' says Phyllis. ‘Well, we've got its teeth.' ‘Looks like rain,' says Cec, as it lashes down on us.

Zoë is mystified as to why so many Australians speak with ‘accents'. In my lifetime, Australia has changed from a
second-hand Britain and Ireland to the world's second most culturally diverse society (after Israel). The predominant voices now are from Chile, Iran, Lebanon, Vietnam, Turkey and less and less from the ‘Old Dart' (Britain). The sycophancy to English royalty is confined to municipal politicians and the media; the newspapers wrapped themselves in the Queen, who was here last week, and informed us ‘where to watch Her Majesty'.

If you want to become an Australian citizen – and pride of citizenship has a particular resonance in this immigrant society – you must swear allegiance to the ridiculous Windsors. This helps to explain why a million non-Anglo-Australians have not taken out citizenship. Like many, a friend of mine, an Italian, took the oath in private ‘ . . . because the ceremony is so shaming'.

This will change. Australia's leading authority on ethnic populations, Dr Charles Price, says that, by the year 2052, Australians will consist of ‘some northern European types with fair hair, some Middle East types, some Asian types, some southern European types [and] a sizeable number of mixtures . . .' The largest proportion of new immigrants is from Asia; and they are ‘marrying out'.
¹
What this says is that the Anglo-Irish establishment, which has maintained Australia as an imperial lighthouse, first for Britain and now for the United States, may eventually fade away. The nostalgia that pervades so much of Australian popular culture is part of its farewell.

Yet the promise and excitement that derives from these momentous and admirably peaceful changes has been set back in recent years; so much so, it seems, that even those who used to bear their optimism almost as a deity wonder if the nation will recover. It will, of course; but only after hardship unexpected and unimagined.

In the old mythology, youth and Australia were synonymous. Yet nowhere in the West has youth been so discarded and betrayed. In 1992 one in three young Australians was unemployed, many of them fending for themselves in the inner cities.
²
According to OECD figures of the late 1980s,
a higher proportion of Australian children are born into poverty than British.
³
I ran into a friend the other day who said he had discovered an ‘emergency feeding programme' at a local primary school. ‘We don't see it,' he said, ‘because of this . . .' He pointed at the sun.

The sun is Australia's gloss. It has allowed politicians to deny the severity of poverty, in the same way that they have denied the extent of Aboriginal suffering. In the first five years of the Hawke Labor Government, the former trade union boss oversaw, in a predominantly wage-earning society, the transfer of $A30 billion from wages to profits.
⁴
For a country that could boast the most equitable spread of personal income in the world, Australia now has walls separating the rich and poor as high as those in Britain and America.

There are historical reasons for this; the vulnerability of Australia's wool- and wheat-based prosperity is one; but the policies of a Labor Government have provided the catalyst. And those in the British Labour Party who wish to replace political vision altogether would do well to study the Australian Labor ‘model'. Nine years of Labor in power has yielded Thatcherism without Thatcher; far-right ideology served up as economic necessity and the cult of market forces entrenched: known as ‘economic rationalism'.

Even some of Australia's traditional conservatives are uneasy. ‘At the beginning of the 1980s,' wrote Malcolm Fraser, the former conservative prime minister, ‘the top 1 per cent of the population owned as much as the bottom 10 per cent. Now that 1 per cent owns as much as the bottom 20 per cent.'
⁵
Under Labor, the political ground has moved so far to the right that the current opposition derives from the stone-age wing of Australian politics.

Tax avoidance – made legal – became the growth industry under Labor, whose rich ‘mates' could not believe their luck. In the 1980s, Alan Bond, Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer and other ‘mates' of Bob Hawke's regime seldom paid corporate tax of more than 13 cents in the dollar, even though the official rate stood at 49 cents.
⁶
Only in Australia could the rich claim tax relief on interest paid on their foreign debts.
Only in Australia could ‘Bondy', owner of gold mines, pay no tax on gold profits. Before they collapsed, Bond's companies accounted for an incredible 10 per cent of the Australian national debt of more than $A100 billion, which is behind only that of Brazil and Mexico. This has to be paid back by the nation in earned export income. Meanwhile, Bond is serving two and a half years in prison, convicted of dishonestly concealing a $A16 million ‘fee' in relation to a failed merchant bank in Perth. The bank's former chairman, Laurie (‘Last Resort') Connell, is awaiting trial. Like Bondy, Connell is, or was, a close mate of ‘Hawkie'.

Hawkie (a.k.a. ‘The Silver Bodgie') retired from politics last week, dumped by his party in the manner of Thatcher's going. Unlike her, he cultivated a populist image. He was the ordinary bloke's ordinary bloke, who would ‘always stand shoulder to shoulder with my mates'. He didn't specify which mates. ‘This stuff about the meek inheriting the earth', he once said, ‘is a lot of bullshit. The weak need the strong to look after'em.'
⁷

The strong are Hawke's ‘big mates', who ran ‘the big end of town'. They include Kerry Packer, who owns tracts of Australia, the only national commercial TV network, most of the magazines Australians read, resorts and so on. When Hawke's Labor Government came to power in 1983, Packer's wealth was estimated at about $A150 million. He is now a billionaire many times over. Last week Packer's Channel Nine paid Hawke an undisclosed sum for the exclusive rights to televise the Silver Bodgie's announcement of his retirement from politics. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had asked Hawke for his ‘last free interview' and was told, ‘You've had it.' The ABC responded by playing a Hawke voice over the 1960s song, ‘I'm leaving on a jet plane', replacing the words with, ‘I'm leaving on a gravy train.'

The former Labor prime minister has been signed up by International Management, which hustles for tennis players and pop stars. Although guaranteed a pension of $A100,000 a year, an office, a car, a chauffeur, free first-class travel, free postage, free telephone and much more, Hawke is demanding
large amounts for much of what he does and says as a public person. He is to be paid a reputed $A100,000 for each of a series of interviews with ‘world statesmen'. One of Sydney's luxury hotels was approached by his agents for a suite of rooms for six months as part of a ‘special deal'. The suite would be gratis and the Silver Bodgie would put in a number of ‘celebrity appearances'. The hotel said no.
⁸
Hawke leaves the highest unemployment Australia has known for sixty years. Officially it is almost 11 per cent; unofficially it is more than 15 per cent: something of a record in the capitalist world.
⁹

Such is one of the sources of a cynicism that is like a presence in working-class Australia. Moreover, Hawke's successor, and one-time heir apparent, Paul Keating, is the architect of the economic disaster that resource-rich, energetic, talented, sunny Australia should never be. One of Keating's first acts as treasurer was to abolish the Reserve Bank's authority to monitor money leaving the country. This allowed the ‘big mates' to avoid tax on a previously unheard-of scale. In 1983, Keating suddenly lifted all banking controls and floated the Australian dollar in a highly unstable speculators' market. Farmers were forced to pay interest rates of up to 30 per cent; many went bankrupt.

Australia belongs to no trading bloc; it is on its own and, unless it maintains much of the protection claimed as a right by Japan, America and the European Community, it can never ‘compete' in the ‘free market'. Hawke once described the consequences of Keating's policies – chaotic by any standards – as an ‘historic transformation', wrought by the ‘world's greatest treasurer'. More than one million unemployed Australians would doubtless agree with the former, if not the latter.

The title of Donald Home's path-breaking book,
The Lucky Country,
written in the 1960s, is often misunderstood; it was meant to be ironic. Lucky with its climate and beauty and, at times, opportunity, Australia has always been a nation of wage-earners and ‘battlers'. The great depressions of the
1890s and 1930s were felt here more deeply than anywhere; and this is true of many features of the current recession.

It was this history of harsh economic experience, and struggle, that produced many of the world's first gains for working people: pensions, child benefits, a basic wage and (with New Zealand) the vote for women. In 1920, the zinc and silver mines of Broken Hill, in the far Outback, fought for and won a 35-hour week and safety conditions at the workplace, half a century ahead of Britain and America. It is hardly surprising that the most potent Australian myth is that of a society priding itself on ‘a fair go for all'.

Most Australians – those who do not own banks or junk bonds, or land, or newspapers, or resorts, or ride on gravy trains – deserve better, if not ‘a fair go for all'. When fires were lit on Bondi beach for unemployed and homeless youngsters, the fact the surf ran true and the sun shone made no difference to the shadow over this extraordinary country.

February to June 1992

Sydney

OCCASIONALLY, FROM BENEATH
a surface of colonial fidelity, Australia's anger has broken through. Surrounded by Australian war graves in France, the poet Geoff Page wrote: ‘The dead at Villers-Bretonneux rise gently on a slope towards the sky . . . Headstones speak a dry consensus. Just one breaks free: “Lives Lost, Hearts Broken – And For What?”'
¹⁰

During the First World War, Australia, with a population of fewer than five million, sustained more than 211,000 dead and wounded young men. As a percentage, more Australians died than Americans in both that war and in the years of the Vietnam War. No army suffered losses in the proportions of that which came dutifully from farthest away.

The British used Australians, and their own, as ‘shock troops': cannon fodder. On Gallipoli peninsula, for every 500 yards gained, at least 1,000 Australians were lost. And For What? The Kaiser offered no threat of invasion to the Antipodes. It is a painful irony that Australians have shed more battlefield blood than most, and that so much of this sacrifice has not been in the cause of independence, but in the service of an imperial master. Australians fought in China's Boxer Rebellion so that British mercantile interests could continue trading in opium; and in New Zealand so that British imperial interests could exploit that country and destroy the resistance of the Maori people; and in South Africa so that the same class could subdue the Boers and dominate the Cape of Good Hope.

And when Australia itself was threatened in 1942 – and a last line of defence was drawn across the continent from Brisbane, and young children, myself included, were evacuated to the Outback – the Australian prime minister, John Curtin, was told by Churchill that his troops were needed elsewhere and not told, deliberately, that Singapore and Australia had been abandoned.
¹¹

In denying this momentous treachery last week, and declaring that ‘Australia was not attacked by Japan', those like Sir John Stokes, MP expressed the ignorance, trivialisation and condescension that have marked the ruling British view of Australia. In fact, the Japanese attacked Australia in 1942, destroying Darwin in fifty-nine bombing raids and shelling Sydney, while Australia's defence forces were far away under imperial command.

The remarks by Paul Keating about these matters were long overdue. He was, of course, using nationalism to create the illusion of difference between Labor and the conservative opposition. However, the importance of his ‘republican stand' cannot be overstated, both for what it meant for many Australians and what it concealed.

Australia's bloodied and often secret past is not, I believe, much understood in Britain: nor is its struggle for independence. The old bromides and stereotypes are preferred: Barry Humphries' Les Patterson
et al
. For Keating merely to describe his country as ‘necessarily independent', and to predict that it would ‘one day' become a republic, was bold enough. To attack the British establishment by illuminating one of its sacrificial disasters (Singapore), and the duplicity of its greatest hero, was to reach into forbidden parts, including Australia's own complicity.