What to me seems the most challenging question in Australian history receives commonly a very confident answer. What effect did the convicts have on our national character? Answer: they made us an anti-authoritarian people.
The best antidote to this view is still an article written forty years ago by Henry Reynolds, before he turned his attention to Aboriginal history. He deals with the aftermath of convict transportation in Tasmania and, unusually in historical enquiry, argues with the simplicity and conclusiveness of a syllogism. In Tasmania the convicts represented a higher proportion of the population than on the mainland. If convicts are responsible for an anti-authoritarian attitude, it should be particularly prevalent there. In fact, Tasmania after transportation was the most conservative, traditional and Anglophile of the colonies, the most un-Australian in outlook, with a working class that was submissive, unprotesting and apolitical. Therefore, convicts cannot be responsible for anti-authoritarianism.
Reynolds had in his sights the classic work on the national character by Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, published in 1958. Long before Australian society generally accepted and even boasted of its convict foundations, Ward took pleasure in insisting that convicts are our ‘founding fathers’, and from them he derived our independence, anti-authoritarianism and the group solidarity of men, which became mateship. But he also outlined other factors which accentuated and embedded these characteristics. In the colonies generally, and in particular ‘up the country’, where the old hands (convicts and ex-convicts) were concentrated, there was a shortage of labour, which removed from workers the fear of the boss. In the pastoral country outback, men wandered independently from station to station, not bound to one employer, often known only by a nickname, and not needing references to land a job. The sparseness of settlement and the isolation from civilised society led these men to depend on one another. Their bonds were more intense because there were few white women in the bush; the pattern of these men’s lives was to work hard, drink away their earnings, swear outrageously and find sexual release with Aboriginal women.
It is said that a good history book will carry the evidence to refute its own argument. Perhaps all these other factors that Ward presents were enough to produce the national characteristics? And so convicts can be dropped from the explanation? The Tasmanian case seems to support such a conclusion: here, there was not a labour shortage, settlement was closer and governments and the employing class exercised a firm control on the lower orders.
However, convict influence might be saved by arguing that Australia inherited convict characteristics, but that they needed certain circumstances in which to flourish—New South Wales had them, Tasmania did not. But doubt can be thrown on this supposition, and with an argument that Ward half-recognises. Australia in its foundation years acquired free British workers as well as convicts, and both came from a Britain where the old social bonds of deference were weakening with the disturbances brought about by rapid economic growth and industrialisation. In the late eighteenth century the working people of the towns were known as the ‘loose disorderly sort’ and were notorious in Europe for their unruliness. By the early nineteenth century, working people were beginning to organise to claim political rights, to be part of the nation and not merely to be the poor or the lower orders. If we find stroppy workers in Australia, we don’t have to look for convict influence.
William Howitt, a traveller to the goldfields in the 1850s, was alert for rude behaviour from the lower orders. In England he was a radical but a gentleman, and in Australia he travelled heavy and dressed as a gentleman. On one occasion a group of diggers put him and his son in danger by playing cricket in the middle of the main road. The bowler hurled the ball just past the ear of Howitt’s horse, and the batsman struck it back so that it nearly hit his son in the face. Some mounted police had just ridden by and had made no attempt to stop the game. Howitt quietly remonstrated with the men on the danger they were causing, but they heaped abuse on him and yelled, ‘We do as we like here. You are not in England, remember.’ These men were almost certainly fresh off the boat, as was Howitt himself. Though he was annoyed, he was calm in his explanation of their behaviour, which made no reference to convicts and their influence. He saw them as Englishmen crudely asserting their freedom after being held in more restraint at home.
It is possible in Britain itself to find a workforce with the ‘Australian’ characteristics without any convict influence. The navvies who built the railways in the early nineteenth century were high-paid, roving men, often known only by a nickname, who spent their monthly wages in a great burst of drinking and being a great terror to decent society. They were a tribe apart and had strong loyalty to one another: a navvy on the tramp between jobs would camp with other navvies, who were honour-bound to contribute funds to see him on his way. Like the Australian sundowners, some of these trampers were suspected of never wanting to find a job.
Are we done with convicts? Not quite, because we need to consider the quintessential anti-authority figure, the Irish convict. Ward puts much stress on him. Since the Irish were rebels against foreign domination and tyrannical landlords, they seem natural candidates as contributors to Australian anti-authoritarianism. But this mistakes the nature of the anti-authoritarian attitude we are discussing. We are not looking for explanations for open, violent rebellion. There has been little of that in Australia, and when it did occur—at Castle Hill, near Sydney, in convict times, and at Eureka, on the Ballarat goldfields—the Irish were prominent. We are looking for the origins of a street-smart, irreverent attitude, mocking authority or evading authority but with no sense of controlling or replacing it. The origins of this are English, late-eighteenth-century, working-class and urban; not pre-modern, rural and Irish. The Irish were more communal and tribal, more combative and loyal, less interested in independence and swagger, and pleased to find a patron who would protect them: ‘God bless you, your honour.’
The Australian national character is always presented as a marked departure from the character of the English. When Australians make these comparisons they are thinking of the toffy, upper-crust Englishman in a bowler hat. When George Orwell described the English national character in 1940, he wrote of the working class and the lower middle class—the very people who came to Australia.
… another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it … is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above …
One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world.
Much of this is true of Australians, and of Australians who are no longer working-class. The drinking, gambling and swearing are part of the national stereotype that Ward identified and explored; he did not recognise as part of the national character the desire for the back garden and the home of your own, but they have been highlighted by those who have labelled Australia the first suburban nation. Nationalists writing of national character look for distinctiveness of local origin; we are better off thinking that Australian characteristics are those of the English working class writ large.
Ward considers that the outback workers—shearers, stockmen, drovers—adopted in the purest form the national characteristics that interest him. Yet it was the city larrikins, whom he does not mention, who made anti-authoritarianism an art form and who set a style which has become nationally admired. Larrikins flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century and at first were not lovable people. Their pushes operated openly: they blocked the footpaths, jostled passers-by, made obscene remarks to respectable girls and women, and spat on the clothes of well-dressed men. They beat up and robbed drunks and Chinese. But they were different from the roughs of European towns. The Melbourne journalist John Stanley James described them in this way:
One marked difference between the Melbourne larrikin and his compeers elsewhere is his extreme boldness and contempt of authorities. In Europe, the ‘rough’ avoids the neighbourhood of police courts. He loves not to be known by magistrates or detectives. But here, the larrikin not only chaffs and annoys the policeman on his beat, but daily crowds the police court, and manifests the liveliest interest in the fate of male or female friends who may be on trial … Another marked difference, which is in the larrikin’s favour, is his generally better-fed and better-clothed appearance. The rowdy and thief in the old world, after all, lead a miserable life, and generally their profession does not appear to be a lucrative one; but here, in the first stage, they seem physically in good shape.
When tough measures against larrikins were called for, the larrikins were often found to be the children of respectable parents and in work. When they were prosecuted they could raise the money to employ a lawyer in their defence. The larrikin spirit is still a mysterious phenomenon. It was not the defiance of the damaged and excluded; it was the boldness that came from self-confidence, of young men who would not be confined.
A prosperous working class, free of old-world condescension, had spawned in its native-born youth this baroque display of independence. In Sydney it was possible to argue that the larrikins were a residue from convict times, but larrikins flourished in all cities, and particularly in Melbourne, the largest, which had only a faint convict heritage.
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The strongest influence of the convicts is not to be sought in the anti-authoritarian attitudes of a segment of the people, but in the trauma of a nation which had to come to terms with its shameful origins. How was Australia to cope with the world’s bad opinion? The one thing that everyone knew about Australia was that it was founded with convicts, which continued to make it morally suspect. As an 1850 British verse had it:
There vice is virtue, virtue vice
And all that’s vile is voted nice
The world would not forget the convict past, though Australians had themselves disowned it with the anti-transportation movement of the 1840s. When the crowd at the Sydney Cricket Ground invaded the pitch in 1879, an Englishman at the crease called out, ‘You sons of convicts!’ In 1942 Winston Churchill was tired of John Curtin’s requests about the need for British re-inforcements for Australia and blamed this panic on ‘bad stock’.
For over a century Australians upheld a taboo of not mentioning the convicts. This covered the shame; it did not remove it. My exploration here of the consequences of this repression is necessarily speculative, but there is no doubt about how raw this wound was. In 1899 a well-intentioned governor of New South Wales, en route to take up his post, sent this message ahead: ‘Greeting; your birth stain have you turned to good.’ There was an uproar and the governor had to retreat from such an offensive remark.
As we have seen in Question 4, in the late nineteenth century the image of Australia in verse and picture was of a young virginal girl, absolutely pure. The purity came from being free of the old-world ills of caste, inequality and class prejudice: Australians were one people on a single continent, living in harmony with no civil strife, with opportunity for all, isolated from the rest of the world by the encircling sea. I think this stress on the nation’s purity was the Australian response to the impure origins of the nation. ‘You think we are polluted,’ the poets are saying to the world, ‘but we are developing a nation that is superior to all others.’ The purity and the whiteness did not at first refer to race. This image was developed before Asian migration was taken to be a threat. It was not until the late 1880s that the nation-to-be was taking a racial form; the colonies first cooperated to limit Chinese migration in 1888. Thereafter, the slogan of ‘White Australia’ carried all the hopes for the young nation: pure, progressive, enlightened.
Other nations excluded Asian immigrants but not under a slogan of the Australian type—a ‘White New Zealand’ or a ‘White Canada’ did not become the panoply of nationhood. Racial purity was more desperately sought and proclaimed in Australia. Increasingly around the world purity of race mattered, and on that test Australia could rate high: Australians boasted they were ninety-eight per cent British, free of the mixture of other races. The insistence on this, the boastfulness about it, was the way to show the world that the convict stain had been washed away—except, of course, that in racial thought blood went on counting, so in hitching Australia’s destiny to a purity of race, the Australians did not escape their origins, as Churchill’s jibe about bad blood showed.
Purity of race is no longer a progressive cause, as it was in 1900, but democracy still is. In the disowning of the racism of White Australia, we can overlook that it advanced the cause of a more democratic Australia, in two senses. Firstly, a racial identity obliterates the differences of class within the nation. All men are ‘white men’, a common bond of masculinity, which took on a moral dimension as a ‘white man’ became one who was true-hearted, loyal, reliable. Secondly, racial exclusion had been demanded most vociferously by working people, their trade unions and the early Labor Party. Workers would be the ones to suffer most directly if cheap ‘coloured’ labour became prevalent. The acceptance of their demand for the exclusion of Asians was a commitment by the nation to the dignity of labour and its proper reward.
Here is another speculative connection between convict shame and national history. The landing at Gallipoli has been honoured more and more fervently in recent years, but the claim, made at the time, that the nation was born at Gallipoli is a puzzle to modern Australians. Did Gallipoli mean so much because it was a supreme test of Australian mateship? No. Did Australians honour it because they took a perverse delight in defeat? No. Gallipoli did make the nation because it freed it from the self-doubt about whether it had the mettle to be a proper nation. Australian soldiers had been put to the supreme test and had come through magnificently. Landed at the wrong place, facing almost perpendicular cliffs with the Turks firing on them from above, they got ashore and scrambled up and hung on. All the military experts proclaimed their success; most importantly, the British praised them. The first description of the landing to be published in Australian newspapers came from the British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. His praise was worth much more than that of the Australian war correspondent, C. E. W. Bean, which arrived later. Ashmead-Bartlett’s report (see below) is a foundation document of Australian nationality. Once Australians read it, they knew they had gained a good name before the world. The outcome of the Gallipoli venture, whether defeat or victory, would not matter. The self-doubt had gone. What was the deepest source of self-doubt? The convict stain.
To Ashmead-Bartlett, the most amazing thing he saw on the first Anzac Day was the behaviour of the Australian wounded, which was quite unlike anything he had seen in war before. They were ferried back to the warships and cheered on reaching the ships they had left that morning. Even those shot to bits and without hope of recovery cheered. He sensed the reason: ‘They were happy because they knew that they had been tried for the first time and had not been found wanting.’
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s account of the Gallipoli landing
The Australians, who were about to go into action for the first time in trying circumstances, were cheerful, quiet and confident. There was no sign of nerve nor of excitement. As the moon waned, the boats were swung out, the Australians received their last instructions, and men who six months ago had been living peaceful civilian lives had begun to disembark on a strange and unknown shore in a strange land to attack an enemy of a different race.
The boats had almost reached the beach, when a party of Turks, entrenched ashore, opened a terrible fusillade with rifles and a Maxim. Fortunately, the majority of bullets went high. The Australians rose to the occasion. Not waiting for orders, or for the boats to reach the shore, they sprang into the sea, and, forming a sort of rough line, rushed at the enemy’s trenches. Their magazines were not charged, so they just went in with cold steel.
It was over in a minute. The Turks in the first trench were either bayoneted or they ran away, and their Maxim was captured.
Then the Australians found themselves facing an almost perpendicular cliff of loose sandstone, covered with thick shrubbery. Somewhere, half way up, the enemy had a second trench, strongly held, from which they poured a terrible fire on the troops below and the boats pulling back to the destroyers for the second landing party.
Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but those colonials, practical above all else, went about it in a practical way. They stopped for a few minutes to pull themselves together, got rid of their packs, and charged their magazines. Then this race of athletes proceeded to scale the cliffs without responding to the enemy’s fire. They lost some men but did not worry. In less than a quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position, either bayoneted or fleeing.
But then the Australians, whose blood was up, instead of entrenching rushed northwards and eastwards searching for fresh enemies to bayonet. It was difficult country to entrench. Therefore they preferred to advance.
There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and storming the heights, above all holding on whilst the reinforcements were landing.
These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres, and Neuve Chapelle.
New Zealanders landed with the Australians but were not in the first wave at dawn on 25 April 1915. The feats of their soldiers led to a growth of national consciousness, but no one ever said that the New Zealand nation was born at Gallipoli. New Zealand was not so desperate for the world’s approval. Though a British colony with strong connections to her neighbours in Australia, she had declined to join them in the Commonwealth in 1901, often giving spurious reasons for doing so because one of the strongest reasons could not, without giving offence, be mentioned: she did not want to join the déclassé Australians and be identified with their shame.
As the war progressed, the Australian soldiers became more proficient, and they played a large part in the final battles against Germany on the Western Front. The soldiers had cemented Australia’s reputation before the world, and Australians then had to accept their soldier, warts and all. As warrior for the empire, respectable people could be proud of him; however, there were other aspects of his character—his refusal to show respect to officers, his tendency to larrikinism—which were harder to swallow but had now to be indulged. They became willy-nilly acceptable national characteristics because they were characteristics of the digger. Every Anzac Day both parts of the character were on display: the warrior in the formal celebrations in the morning; the drunk and two-up player in the afternoon, when the police turned a blind eye so that the digger as larrikin could have free rein.
This is not Ward’s account of how an anti-authoritarian attitude was accepted or tolerated by the nation at large. He claims that the attitude came from the outback workers and in the 1890s spread to the rest of the population, chiefly through the nationalist literature of Paterson and Lawson. In the long term this literature did have an influence, but there were many people around 1900 who were not yet ready to embrace a shearer or a swagman as an iconic national figure. The bourgeoisie was more immediately and completely won over by the digger because he had suddenly made the nation and themselves respectable.
Ward explains that the nationalist literature had tidied up and ennobled the outback worker. The same thing happened to the larrikin. As the real larrikins were becoming less of a menace, C. J. Dennis published The Sentimental Bloke, a series of verses about a larrikin who puts behind him the loutish behaviour of his push after he is smitten with love for Doreen. The book was an instant popular success when it was published in 1915. The larrikin had already been redeemed by love when his deeds in war put him in the pantheon. But the larrikinism still had a hard edge. Australian soldiers trashed and burnt the red-light district of Cairo, the Wazzir, before they left for Gallipoli. Dennis defended them in verse in which he depicted them as innocents who had come from the ‘cleanest’ land on earth, a claim that should not surprise.
It wus part their native carelessness, an’ part their native skite;
Fer they kids themselves they know the Devil well,
’Avin’ met ’im, kind uv casu’l, on some wild Australian night—
Wine an’ women at a secon’-rate ’otel.
But the Devil uv Australia ’e’s a little woolly sheep
To the devils wot the desert children keep.
So they mooches round the drink-shops, an’ the Wazzir took their eye,
An’ they found old Pharoah’s daughters pleasin’ Janes;
An’ they wouldn’t be Australian ’less they give the game a fly …
An’ Egyp’ smiled an’ totted up ’is gains.
’E doped their drinks, an’ breathed on them ’is aged evil breath …
An’ more than one woke up to long fer death.
When they wandered frum the newest an’ the cleanest land on earth,
An’ the filth uv ages met ’em, it wus ’ard.
Fer there may be sin an’ sorrer in the country uv their birth;
But the dirt uv cenchuries ain’t in the yard.
They wus children, playin’ wiv an asp, an’ never fearin’ it,
An’ they took it very sore when they wus bit ...
’Ave yeh seen a crowd uv fellers takin’ chances on a game,
Crackin’ ’ardy while they thought it on the square?
’Ave yeh ’eard their ’owl uv anguish whey they tumbled to the same,
’Avin’ found they wus the victims uv a snare?
It was jist that sort uv anger when they fell to Egyp’s stunt;
An’, remember, they wus trainin’ fer the front.
Training for the front was the best of excuses but for a time the censor blocked publication of these verses. They did appear later in the war after the soldiers at the front had made the nation proud.
It was always something of a puzzle to observers of Australia to explain the high standing of working men and the prevalence of their values in the culture. The easy answer was to say the middle class was numerically weak. But in a capitalist society their values should be predominant whatever their numbers. So was it that they lacked the will to rule? I have suggested here that convict origins help to explain this puzzle. The bourgeoisie, sharing the shame of their nation, looked for respectability through ‘White Australia’ and military prowess, and the forms these took had a strong proletarian cast: the workingman was elevated by the one and was the most notable embodiment of the other.
Australia has now emerged from the long era of repression about its origins. But it is still a distinctive nation because Australians are now proud of their convict ancestry. To find a convict ancestor is no longer a matter of shame but for celebration. This is a puzzle to the world at large, who think that slurs about ancestry will still hurt—witness the ‘Barmy Army’ of English supporters at the cricket who chant: ‘You all come from a convict colony, a convict colony …’ Suppressed or embraced, convict origins must have an effect. At the very least, a nation pleased about its convict ancestry cannot take itself too seriously.
Those who think that national character is an unnecessary, oppressive and dangerous contrivance will have found this whole discussion otiose. If you are tired of this old theme, read the poet Les Murray’s treatment of it in ‘Some Religious Stuff I Know About Australia’ (in The Quality of Sprawl). Religion? And Australian national character? Yes. Murray suggests: ‘The ability to laugh at venerated things, and at awesome and deadly things may, in time, prove to be one of Australia’s great gifts to mankind. It is, at bottom, a spiritual laughter, a mirth that puts tragedy, futility and vanity alike in their place.’
Murray finds the origins of this spiritual laughter in the underground traditions of working people’s irony, of the poor who came to Australia from the old world. In line with the suggestions I have made above, he calls Australia a ‘proletarian evolution’. But how does working-class irony become and remain a national attitude? It can happen in a nation which knows itself to be an oddity from the start.