As this study proceeds, the representation of ‘the nation’ becomes increasigly important. It provides the alibi—that of the harshness of the Australian context—for the lowering of the threshold of personal expectations as discussed in Chapter 2; it is the object of the arguments around the image of convictism which are outlined in Chapter 3; and it provides the supporting mythology for the convention of mateship and the representation of character within the models which have just been discussed in the previous chapter. In other words, those Australian fictions which are able to represent themselves as national do so by drawing on the available myths and discourses of national character and identity; and so these myths and discourses—and the ideological tasks which they are able to perform—are necessary objects of study in any account of the narratives of the Australian culture. If, as the last chapter argued, our nationalist myths are not unmediated reflections of history but transformations of it, then they must work to construct a very specific way of seeing the nation.
This way of seeing the nation is dependent upon a relatively narrow range of myths—primarily those attached to the radical nationalist icons of the bushman and the digger. Even Australia II’s victory provoked references to Gallipoli, and one would be hard pressed to name contemporary versions of ‘the Australian’ that have the cultural currency of the bush legend, the legend of the 1890s. In film and fiction it is this legend that provides the paradigms for the representation of nationalism. In this chapter therefore we will examine its dominance, its occurrence in contemporary film, and its ideological function.
Although the ideology of nationalism is most customarily discussed in its relation to hegemony, it is not always seen in this way. It can be viewed as a positive, resistant ideology (as it is by Vance Palmer) which provides the terms for an authentic assertion of identity in order to establish political independence; or else it can be enclosed within an evolutionary model of cultural development which sees nationalism as the index of the end of colonialism and the beginning of the transition to cultural maturity, to the utterances of an unselfconscious ‘adult’ national voice.1
In contemporary theory nationalism is most often seen critically. Its consensual function enables it to obscure differences and divisions that may well need to be recognised and addressed, and its power to establish the overriding priorities for the culture .has extensive possibilities. As Patrick Wright points out, the ‘nation’ acts within the culture as a ‘ground for the proliferation of other definitions of what is normal, appropriate or possible’.2 If the maintenance of hegemony depends upon the winning of assent and upon the regular mobilisation of consensus, then the idea of the nation is an important medium through which this consensus can be drafted. The idea of the nation is thus a target of Marxist critiques of culture which emphasise the political nature and effects of the construction of national identity.3 Within such constructions, it is argued, minorities are marginalised; and divisions or conflicts within society are minimised in deference to the overriding, accepted priorities of the nation which unite the people. As the national character is valorised, the discourses of nationalism therefore tend to become areas occupied by those interests seeking to centre themselves within the culture. A selective history of this process in Australia is given in Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character, and a number of other authors have traced the fortunes of the discourses of nationalism through political affiliations as divergent as the Australian Labour Party and the Country Party.4
In Australia, the discourses of nationalism are drawn almost exclusively from the mythologised past, specifically the radical past—the time when Australia was represented as the ‘social laboratory of the world’, its commitment to democracy manifest in the secret ballot and in votes for women, and its essential character being seen to reside in the organic, egalitarian society of the bush communities.5 That the myth of Australia’s radicalism and egalitarianism can survive the contradictions of one’s everyday experience reveals how effectively it has been mythologised. The representations of the past in film, fiction, fine art and television tend to propose a continuity between nineteenth- century Australia and the present that is unquestioned despite its inconsistency with aspects of contemporary life. The relationship is narrativised as a story which reaches its end in the present. The typical depiction of the authentic Australian in the past is that of the common man of authentic values, who is constantly oppressed and victimised by British imperialism or by authority generally. Both the romanticising of the figure of the bushranger or the mythologising of the democratic spirit of Eureka are examples of this. And the net effect of such a representation of the national character in the past is to declare that the struggles depicted as necessary for that character need not be continued into the present; that, for us, the struggle is over; and that the battles fought for Australia in the past have borne fruit in the conditions which we now enjoy. As Patrick Wright puts it in his discussion of the construction of the ‘national past’ in Britain:
[This construction] makes it possible to think of historical development as complete, a process which finds its accomplishment in the present. Historical development is here conceived as a cumulative process which has delivered the nation into the present as its manifest accomplishment. Both celebratory and complacent, it produces a sense that ‘we’ are the achievement of history and that while the past is thus present as our right it is also something that our narcissism will encourage us to visit, exhibit, write up and discuss.6
The representation of Australia’s radical and formative past, then, is not only available to the left-wing radicals who might see themselves as the inheritors of the tradition, but also to more conservative elements within the culture who would see this version of the past as justifying the present. Indeed, representations of the past seem, in film for instance, especially acceptable to the establishment critics and other guardians of culture—and certainly the eulogising of the past is for them preferable to the treatment of the present.
The key issue in talking about the role and nature of the presence of nationalism in Australian narrative is thus not so much the range of meanings made available but the fact of the dominance of one set of terms, one body of myth or discourse, as the accepted mode of representation of the meaning of the nation. The myth of the Australian legend in Australian writing has been dealt with elsewhere;7 further, the conditions which determine the production of feature films are much more likely to encourage the use of nationalist myths than the conditions of production of literary fiction. In the next section of this chapter, then, we will examine the role of nationalism in some Australian films.
In Australian Liberalism and National Character, Tim Rowse adapts a Raymond Williams aphorism to local use by maintaining that there ‘are in fact no Australians. There are only ways of seeing people as Australians’.8 There are not very many of these, however; and Rowse’s study reveals just how malleable the dominant ways of ‘seeing people as Australians’ are: radical myths of national identity have been consistently appropriated by conservative ideologies in order to cloak divisions within the structure of Australian society. Richard White, too, insists that there is no ‘real’ Australian waiting to be uncovered; ‘a national identity’, he says, ‘is an invention’.9 Since this study has interested itself in representation as the product and the manufacturer of cultural meanings, the point is acceptable; nevertheless it is worth remembering that such inventions of national identity are not simply cultural templates to be employed, with automatic success, by various groups. That the message has been ‘sent’ is no guarantee that it has been received. Further, definitions of national identity are sites of struggle; the definitions are never static or ‘fixed’. Nevertheless, the specific terms of the particular ‘invention’ are of some cultural importance.
What is most immediately apparent about the Australian construction of national identity is that the particularities of the 1890s version of nationalism have outlasted most of the political and social conditions which produced them without losing their potential for signifying Australian-ness. Their presence has also been accepted as an index of cultural maturity in a number of representational media. The single most representative character, the figure of the battler, probably occurs first in Lawson,10 as does much of the mythologising of the harshness of the land and its amelioration by the model community of ‘mates’; and it is the convincing assertion of such Australian types through an Australian ‘voice’ in Lawson, Paterson and Furphy that produces the first recognition of an Australian literature. With such writers, Australian literature is seen to ‘come of age’, to mature. Similarly, in accounts of Australian painting, the longed-for break with the European tradition is seen to arrive with the Heidelberg School, whose restricted pallets caught the authentic colours of the Australian landscape and whose work actively mythologised the very same world explored by the writers. The work of Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, in particular, mythologised the bush, the itinerant bush workers, the shearers, the landscape dominanted ethos of the country, and worked within the visual equivalent of realist prose; hence Robert Hughes’ assessment of Roberts and his contribution to the maturation of Australian fine art:
Roberts’s imagination runs parallel to the prevalent tone of Australian writing in the nineties. His virtues of mateship, courage, adaptability, hard work and resourcefulness are the very ones Lawson celebrated in his short stories, and Joseph Furphy described in such is life. Their use indicates a growing sense of cultural identity. These virtues were thought distinctively—even uniquely—Australian.11
Frederich McCubbin is seen in a similar context:
His admiration for mateship . . . ballooned into a near-religious mystique by 1905, when he painted The Pioneers in the manner of an altar triptych, showing the hard life, struggle, resourcefulness, achievement and death of the early settlers, and even supplying a vision of the future in the last panel.12
As the conservative reaction against the modernist threat from Europe then stifled Australian painting for a long period (during the 1920s and 1930s) Australian painters suffered a sense of increasing irrelevance. Yet their emergence from this and their successful claiming of a prominent place within the national character soon occurred, by way of Sydney Nolan’s and of Russell Drysdale’s reworking of the same mythic material. Nolan’s depiction of the landscape (his isolated stick figures dwarfed by it) and his romantic narrativisation of the legend of Ned Kelly enabled what looked like abstract paintings at first glance to be read by way of the codes of the 1890s definition of nationalism. Drysdale’s work is less challenging, providing in such paintings as ‘The Drover’s Wife’ direct reference to Lawson, and his efforts constitute a simple up-dating of the images of Roberts and McCubbin.
It is not just Australian literature that announces its distinctiveness by incorporating this particular mode of representation as a convention—a convention, it must be stated, that by no means dies with Lawson but that can be seen at work even at the end of such a nonrealist work as Peter Carey’s Bliss.’13 It seems as if other art forms must do the same. Although the specific meanings which are generated by the use of these 1890s codes, the interests which they serve and the ideologies which they produce may vary, this set of terms and body of myth thus still remain as the definitive signification of Australian-ness; and their invocation has hegemonic potential.
Australian cinema is no exception to the rule. John Tulloch has more than adequately charted the treatment of the bush legend in the early film industry in Australia, and he has also indicated the ways in which this cinematic treatment drew on the literary sources and put the myth to hegemonic use.14 In the early films, what is often striking about the use of the myth as a way of enfolding audiences within the narrative is its transparent arbitrariness. For instance A Girl of the Bush (1921), a lively melodrama of love and betrayal in the backblocks, seems not to require its frequent exploitation of documentary titles detailing Australian life. The film nevertheless opens with the verse from Dorothea MacKellar’s ‘My Country’; however, it relates the poem to the rest of the narrative ideologically rather than thematically—in order, that is, to establish the film as an Australian tale and therefore one of interest to us all. Ken Hall’s On Our Selection (1932) opened with a gratuitous ‘Bushland Symphony’ of bush bird calls which the audience greeted with cheers of recognition.
In more recent times, we have seen a spate of nationalistic films emerging from the industry. The nationalism is now more sophisticated than the kind involved in the films identified with Chips Rafferty, or in those films which attempt to make populist tales of country life in the 1950s (films which were formally different, but equally naive) such as Cecil Holmes’ Three in One (1957) and Anthony Kimmins’ Smiley (1956). Nevertheless, the construction of Australian-ness through reference to these earlier representations is no less common. Russell Boyd has talked of using Tom Roberts as a guide to getting ‘the light of the Australian countryside’ in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and sees the achievement of this as a ‘coming of age’; Gill Armstrong used Roberts and McCubbin in the design of My Brilliant Career, and the influence of Roberts’ shearing paintings is clear in both The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Sunday Too Far Away.15 These may not be seen as nationalist films; but such works as Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, The Man From Snowy River, or Phar Lap certainly demand to be seen as nationalist texts, the mode of their nationalism—again—that of the 1890s. This has been recognised: one reviewer describes Breaker Morant as nationalist to the point of ‘jingoism’; Gallipoli advertised itself as the film which will make you ‘proud to be Australian’; and Banjo Paterson’s powerful celebration of the Australian virtues, the poem of ‘The Man From Snowy River’ becomes, in Max Harris’ phrase, the ‘logo’ of the film.16 In particular, the Lawson-Furphy brand of nationalism in fiction includes not only a set of definitions of Australian cultural identity, but also a major strategy for measuring that identity against the English, and valorising those aspects of our national character which depart from English values and loyalties.17 And the two ‘war’ films, Breaker Morant and Gallipoli, make direct use of this strategy.
Icons of the Australian character: the classical overtones of the painting give way to the naturalism of cinema, but the image is the same. Left: Tom Roberts (1856-1931) ‘Shearing the Rams’ (1890) (National Gallery of Victoria) and (Above) Jack Thompson as Foley in ‘Sunday Too Far Away’ (1975). (STILL Courtesy of the South Australian Film Corporation)
In Breaker Morant the execution of Morant and Handcock is seen as a racist act; the features which define the characters as Australian (Morant is seen as Australian, despite his birthplace, and the three central characters encapsulate the various positive formations of the Australian—the larrikin, the worldly misfit from Europe, and the innocent) are precisely those which incite the British to destroy them. They are represented to us as individualist, independent, resistant to authority, and determinedly iconoclastic. British and Australian values are directly contrasted through the most unequivocal of structures—the courtroom drama. The conventional roles of the innocent and the guilty, the gaoler and the convict, are neatly and characteristically inverted so that the Australian convicts are seen, yet again, as honest and courageous while their English persecutors are treacherous and cowardly. The simplicity of the equation sits awkwardly with the film’s considerable moral ambiguity, but, true to the tradition of the battler, the audience’s identification with the Australians develops in proportion to the film’s establishment of their position as underdogs, outmanoeuvred by the system.
The English in Gallipoli, while contained within a less unequivocally nationalist narrative context, are equally stereotyped—monocled and parading on camels when they are not sending our boys into the battle zones to provide cover for their own troops. Peter Weir represents the English in Egypt with the crude nationalism of an 1890s Bulletin cartoon, and while this is not central to the film’s purpose it is an important moment for the film’s relationship with its audience because it proffers an invitation for them to indulge their preference for the Australians by finding the English ridiculous. The anti-English attitude modulates easily, as it does in our history, into a general suspicion of authority. In both films, the paradigm of authority—bureaucratic force aligned against human vulnerability—is English. The Australian versions of authority tend to tacitly condone the larrikin, independent and undisciplined behaviour of the troops; the Breaker allows his subordinates to address him as Harry and is the ‘acceptable’ version of authority who participates in his troops’ ‘unmilitary’ but understandable revenge on the Boers, while in Gallipoli Australian officers incite the riot that disrupts the mock battle in training. The avuncular Major Barton (Bill Hunter, whose iconic function we have already referred to) actually renounces his authority in the suicidal last attack; and declaring that he will not ask his men to do anything he would not do himself, he dies with them. So that the only recommended authority is, paradoxically, an egalitarian one.
The basis for the social structure assumed under this egalitarian principle is mateship. The bond between Morant and Handcock is an obvious example of the automatic ‘me, too’ mateship. As they are marched off to their execution Morant and Handcock are asked if they have a religion. Morant replies that he is a ‘pagan’; Handcock asks him what that is, and the answer—that a pagan is someone who does not believe in a Divine being who controls all—satisfies him. ‘I’m a pagan, too’, then says Handcock; and it is the separation of their values from the civilised and effete values of the English (not their paganism) that is once more celebrated. Breaker Morant, however, unlike Gallipoli, is capable of at least intimating the existence of a more radical and political bond between men than that of nationality or mateship. Despite Stephen Crofts’ claim to the contrary,18 the film does suggest that the Australian soldiers are lackeys to an imperialist power whose interests are intrinsically opposed to theirs. Morant’s suggestion that they are fighting on the wrong side—against ‘farmers’ like themselves—is a critique of the system itself. To see a greater brotherhood between the Boers and the Australians than between the Australians and the English is to go beyond nationalism to a more political understanding of the social structure, and it is a perception that Gallipoli, in contrast, is unable to reproduce in its depiction of the classless Australians and their upper class English officers.
Bailing out the Empire: Morant (Edward Woodward), Handcock (Bryan Brown) and Whitton (Lewis Fitzgerald) break the monotony of prison to repel a Boer attack in ‘Breaker Morant’. (Still Courtesy of the South Australian Film Corporation)
In both Gallipoli and Breaker Morant the nationalism is sufficiently woven into the narrative to make it a good point for reviewers to retrieve and display. In The Man From Snowy River the nationalism is so pronounced that it produces a backlash. Probably the most nationalistic film that has been produced since the beginning of the 1970s revival, Snowy River was, ironically, attacked for selling out to American values. Unlike Gallipoli and Breaker Morant, it is unashamedly populist; it selected an American star to play not one but two Americans; and, stylistically, it flies in the face of the critical preferences current in the Australian film culture. The Man From Snowy River is all plot, it seems, developing at a breakneck pace and with ruthless economy in a style more reminiscent of the golden years of Hollywood than the Australian ‘renaissance’. It is enthusiastically romantic—and since the romantic fiction of the nineteenth century, and the ballads of Paterson and Gordon, romance does tend to have disappeared from Australian narrative traditions. Despite its debts to Hollywood, the film is constructed, as Tom O’Regan has pointed out,19 in order to appeal to as wide a section of the Australian population as possible; and it deliberately uses the specific terms of Australian nationalist myths in order to set up an alternative tradition of frontier romance, an Australian genre that is different in meaning to the American Western. This particular meaning of the film has been approached from a number of positions: Jack Clancy has described it as an allegory of cultural independence from the twin threats of English and American imperialism,20 but since it is still so frequently seen as a ‘sellout’ of Australian values, it is worth outlining why in my view Snowy River is such a vividly nationalist film.
Unlike the two films discussed so far, the version of Australian identity articulated in Snowy River is not dependent upon a comparison with England; apparently the makers were confident enough of their idea to concentrate on the Australian’s relationship with his own land. That confidence is clearly evident in the visuals; the camera is exuberantly active, swooping and soaring among the mountain scenery in a celebration of the landscape that is brash and naive. The harshness and indomitability of the landscape, so clearly caught by Russell Boyd’s blinding vistas of reflected light in Gallipoli, is here presented simply by its scale—the screen is packed with busy horizons, shot from cranes and helicopters. The result is a vision of a land that is awesome but not unimaginable, inspiring affection and a qualified optimism as befits the romantic form.
Although the film carries the same keynotes of mateship, of egalitarianism and of the bush ethos which we find in Paterson’s poem, it is in the depiction of the relationship with the land that it is most faithful to the poem and the most nationalistic. The land is tough, dangerous and beautiful. Jessica sees this when she is trapped on the cliff in the storm: ‘It changes so fast,’ she says; ‘one minute it’s Paradise, the next it’s trying to kill you.’ Accommodation within this murderous Paradise is the goal which the hero, Jim Craig, pursues. His acceptance of the challenge that the landscape presents differentiates him from the squatters in the valley below, while his affinity with the bush horses invests his quest with hope by connecting him with the film’s strongest metaphor for the spirit of the land. Jim and Jessica meet through a staged demonstration of his familiarity with horses (he teaches her a rope trick that the villainous station horse breaker, Curly, spends the rest of the film trying to master) and he reaches what the film defines as manhood by matching the bush horses on their own terrain. His respect for the ‘colt from Old Regret’ is the clearest example of his harmony with the Australian version of nature, and it is important that he trains the horse by ‘gentling it’ rather than by dominating it.
This is the thematic substance of the film and it is central to the nationalist myth and the ideology of the invented Australian; ours is not, like the American, a myth of the imposition of the individual on the land—of the politics of conquest; ours is a myth of accommodation and acceptance which admits the impossibility of conquering the land and merely recommends a manner of survival by learning to live in partnership with it. In what it means to be a ‘man’ in Snowy River, we have an Australian transformation of the individualistic ethic of the American Western; in this country the ‘man’ is not the toughest one, but the one who can accept and live with the priorities of the land. Jim’s success is rewarded with the love of Jessica, whose family background typifies the range of alternatives that Jim rejects—the values and ways of the city and an exploitative attitude to the land. Jessica, too, rejects these—as the daughter of ‘Matilda’ she is anything but the archetypal civilising female. Through their union the film offers us a conventional romantic resolution, but also a paradigm of existence in harmony with the land justifying the nostalgic sense of acceptance which also underlies Paterson’s poem.
Admittedly, The Man From Snowy River is atypical of nationalist films for a number of reasons. First, its camp, even witty, awareness of its own myth-making activity separates it off from the myth itself. This enables the representation of Clancy of the Overflow, for example, to be perceived as a work of romantic invention in which the audience is asked to collaborate. Importantly, Snowy River is received as fiction as well as history. Second, the film also uses its romantic form to present an optimistic and positive image of Australian existence. It is not necessary to ‘win’ as much as Jim Craig does in order to produce a satisfying articulation of Australian-ness. Indeed, in the follow-up film, Phar Lap, the doomed horse with the oversized heart becomes the type of the Aussie battler whose very talent results in his death. The film begins with that death, so that it eliminates expectations of transcendence immediately; and only afterwards do Phar Lap’s battles against the predictably upperclass, Anglocentric and clubbish racing officials follow. Again, the process of definition is one of establishing differences between Australian and foreign values. Phar Lap represents its ‘hero’ as the victim of the struggle between, on the one hand, the Australian turf officials with their need to protect their privileged structure from infiltration and, on the other, the commercial imperatives of the American owner. Like Australia, Phar Lap is the subject of colonisation by European civilised values and American capitalism. Phar Lap is the champion of the working man in the film (although the ‘class struggle’ is implicitly depicted as free enterprise versus monopoly rather than labour against capital) but his death is not a triumphant one. Despite his defiant victory in the Melbourne Cup, his death is made, by the very structure of the narrative, inevitable.
As Phar Lap reveals, the nationalist discourse can be much more than just egalitarian; it can also naturalise certain proletarian values, whereby the authenticity of a working-class, unsophisticated way of life is preferred to those civilised values which are seen to be both the regrettable objectives of the Australian ruling class and the hallmarks of foreign, (particularly British) domination. The general type of the battler is the alternative to this—but he too is partly defined by the subordinate position that he occupies within society. As Wilkes points out in his discussion of the battler in Lawson:
To deserve the title, a battler is not required to exert himself against a hostile world; he has only to occupy a lowly place in it. So in Lawson even the failures may come to seem honorific through their apartness from the privileged and the affluent.21
As Wilkes goes on to say, the battler and the larrikin become inverted heroes. Their class position and their consequent powerlessness can be seen as indices of their value, because these characteristics are indices also of their Australian-ness. The ideological effect of this will be examined later in this chapter, but it is clearly related to the legitimation of the politics of subordination as described in Chapters 2 and 3.
If nationalist constructions do support existing social and economic conditions—by naturalising and romanticising the battler, for instance, in order to disconnect the figure from a class position—this is not necessarily all that they do. Indeed, the case of Snowy River suggests that genuinely populist films—even nationalist ones—seem to have subversive potential. The notion of ‘popularity’ is open to several constructions; one can see it simply in terms of large scale commercial success, while another can see it as a resistant, subversive expression of the needs of a subordinated class.22 Popular art, in this second formulation, is a rejection of the dominant bourgeois ideology, and such a view of the popular could explain some of the critical response to Snowy River. Certainly there seems to be a class motivation behind the critical reaction in the press, since its box-office success is in inverse proportion to its critical evaluation. It was called a ‘tragedy’, a ‘costly, awful mess’:
Using ‘clues’ from the poem, the scriptwriters, John Dixon and Cul Cullen, have cobbled together a tenuous, puffed-out soap-operatic story about love and hate in the high country. I don’t know what their brief demanded, but the evidence of the film suggests that the story was written to accommodate a number of commercial considerations—indeed that the script itself was little more than the realisation of a marketing plan.23
The references to commerce, to ‘marketing’, and to soap opera, seem to expose the film’s ‘crass commercialism’, its lack of ‘quality’, as its weakness rather than as its thematic or ideological substance. While the film may indeed hold subordinated positions within its thematic, its rejection of ‘quality’ and its unashamed populism are also ideological. Like the ocker comedies, Snowy River attacks the dominant notions underlying the ‘Australian film’ (what Susan Dermody calls the AFI genre, typified by Picnic and My Brilliant Career24). Thus it is culturally important in that it establishes a connection between commercial success and a successful rejection of those pretensions towards high art which enclose most depictions of the Australian type. In a country where Lawson’s populism is qualified by his perceived skill as a realist writer; where Tom Roberts’ proletarian romanticism is acceptable since his oil paintings are clearly intended for gallery walls, Gallipoli’s intentions towards high art can be much more easily accepted than Snowy River’s populism:
Gallipoli is the best film I’ve seen this year. The best film from anywhere. Nothing I have seen has moved me so much. Nothing has had the thematic virtue of Gallipoli.25
Clues to the basis of this judgement lie in its cultural cringe (‘the best film from anywhere’) and in its use of ‘thematic virtue’ (which merely indicates approval of the film’s ideological position—anything but progressive). Despite the invocation of standards of excellence, this response is to approve the film’s conservative, naturalising treatment of Australian history; so that it is not only the middle-brow nature of Gallipoli’s formal representation of the nation that protects it from the attacks directed at the vulgarity and crass parochialism of The Man From Snowy River. (Interestingly, the ‘parochial’ film did much better business overseas than its ‘quality’ competitor.)
Thus the meanings carried by nationalist discourse are not simple or self-evident. Certainly, the function of nationalism in a ‘quality’ film and the exploitation of it in a ‘soap opera’ is affected by the form: in the quality film, the high art, universalising, codes effectively cloak the political dimension of nationalism, by enabling the essentially egalitarian or proletarian myths to be connected with their opposite, the universalising and civilising notions of value. And so the discourses of nationalism are made acceptable. But this does not apply where the populist form articulates the mythic content in a different fashion. Even if one does not see populist art in Brechtian ways—as ultimately revolutionary—but (as Stuart Hall does) as a site of constant struggle between the dominant trying to contain the subordinate, and the subordinate attempting to resist this containment,26 Snowy River does seem to resist containment sufficiently to alarm part of our film culture. One is tempted to examine Snowy River for oppositional content, for the ways in which it subverts hegemonic constructions of property or progress, in order to account for the response. But even without doing this, the conservative reaction to the film suggests that although nationalism does normally serve an hegemonic function, its articulation through popular representational forms provides it with the potential for recovering class divisions and for challenging the dominant points of view of the culture.
The historical connection between popular forms and the nationalism of the 1890s is a close one, and has not gone unnoticed. Indeed, the establishment’s suspicion of, and reaction against, nationalism’s discursive formations has probably contributed to nationalism’s success in maintaining its sense of being oppositional and resistant—and even proletarian. Certainly there is a long history of Eurocentric, conservative attacks on nationalism—particularly in Australian literary criticism. There, the attacks are not framed in explicitly political terms but rather as disinterested and academic concern at the anachronistic and ‘inappropriate’ nature of these discourses for a civilised, developing, urban culture. Usually proceeding from the same elitist high culture position which Docker saw as controlling the Australian literary tradition, the anti-nationalist argument tends to resist the dominance of the egalitarian, rural, secular myth as one that is parochial, backward looking, and lacking in refinement. There is a sense that as a description of the ‘real’ Australia the nationalism of the 90s is inaccurate, and that as a description of the desired Australia it is unacceptable. Nationalism is an ideology and its cultural function is not to define Australia as a real entity but to represent Australia as an ideological construction. This is not often recognised in literary criticism. In The Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn, Wilkes complained about the unquestioned dominance of this mode of nationalism, ‘other significant manifestations of it having been overlooked’.27 We hear echoes of H. P. Hesel tine, twenty years earlier, insisting that the myths embodied in Lawson’s work were anachronistic: ‘if all Lawson and his tribe can offer is mateship and proletarian protest’, wrote Heseltine, then ‘they must regretfully, even painfully, be relegated to the past’.28 Judith Wright, while dismissing Paterson’s ballads as ‘colonial heroics’, regrets the currency of the myth which his poems, among others, have created. Sounding just like the reviewers of Snowy River, she grudgingly accepts that the versions of heroism depicted in Paterson’s poems have ‘built themselves slyly into our characters’; but this, she continues, is a ‘dubious legacy’ which may take us ‘another century to outgrow’.29 Ann Hutton, too, talks of the archaic forms of nationalism in film, and asks for a ‘cinematic identity more appropriate’ to our age.30
Just as contemporary film critics prefer the nationalism of Gallipoli because it clearly has high art pretensions to that of Snowy River (which is populist), so Wright, Wilkes and Heseltine imply that there is better art upon which we might build our national ideologies. Apart from assuming that we can choose such things (as we can, apparently, choose the works which form our literary canon) this position also assumes that one can fix a nexus between artistic quality and cultural impact: what is seen as the meretriciousness of Paterson’s poetry or of George Miller’s film marks them out as threats to the culture—and so it immediately disqualifies them as important references to, and representations of, a central body of myth in our culture; and thus finally it is made to ‘invalidate’ that body of myth.
This kind of reaction against the cultural force of the myth of the 1890s and against more contemporary descendants (such as ockerism) is a strategy of containment. It is motivated by the elitist notion that popular art should not be part of our cultural capital. Further, it arises because cultural myths are seen in the most literal sense; that is, it is assumed that they can be ‘disproved’. Behind Wilkes’ often admirable and useful re-reading of Australia’s cultural development, and behind Heseltine’s seminal correction of orthodox accounts of our literary tradition, a notion clearly works that the ‘Lawson-Furphy’ tradition dominates our perception of the past by some kind of mistake. The received idea is wrong, and so let us correct the received idea. What Heseltine saw as a distorted version of Australian writing, Wilkes sees as an historically incomplete version of Australian cultural development. Underlying Wilkes’ approach is the assumption that the myth of the bushman, for instance, is available to empirical challenge. Yet it is widely accepted that the Australian of the 1890s was no more the mythologised figure produced by the nationalism of the 1890s than we are now.31 The myth of the bushman was as much an urban invention as a rural fact, but its centrality to representations of Australia remains unaffected by the invocation of historical truth.
The view that the ‘truth’ matters here is itself mistaken. Our version of national character is not unmediated. History does not simply provide the environmental conditions from which certain dominant modes of behaviour naturally emerge. Rather, the culture is formed both by history and its representations. Representation is a discursive mediation which occurs between the event and the culture and which contributes to the construction of national ideologies. The articulation of these ideologies is the work of constellations and alliances of groups or interests which appropriate, transform and mythologise the specific terms of the legend as part of the labour of producing and determining meaning. The dominant version of Australian nationalism which some groups hope to ‘outgrow’ is not dominant because most Australians ‘lived’ it, or because it is an unmediated reflection of social conditions at any one point in time. Rather, it is dominant because it is currently accepted as the construction, the mode of signification, of nationalism in Australia. It provides the repertoire of representational codes, the discourses through which Australians currently agree to represent themselves and their country. Its importance is not finally as a reflection, or as a refraction, of the past, but as a construction of the present (fully enclosed within and mobilised by it.) As Jameson reminds us, ‘our readings of the past are vitally dependent upon our experience of the present’.32
With this in mind, it is to the function of the specific terms of Australian nationalism that we should now direct our attention. Reactions such as those described above do, at least, reveal an intuitive awareness of the possible implications of the unquestioned dominance of these terms—their inherently regressive, reactionary nature. Despite the oppositional possibilities provided by such populist texts as Snowy River, the specific terms of the Australian legend characteristically offer a bogus plausibility for stasis, for acceptance. It does this by enclosing such an attitude of acceptance within the characterisation of the Australian type, as the legacy and achievement of the national past.
The key to the hegemonic function of nationalist discourse is the way in which it valorises Australian-ness as the privileged, desired term. This enables, for instance, even the worst aspects of Australian existence to be represented more or less naturalistically, with the proviso that these aspects be enclosed within a connotative framework which celebrates them as definitely Australian rather than explores them for opportunities of renovation. So, as Stephen Crofts protests, Breaker Morant’s convincing depiction of the cultural dependence of Australia upon Britain is used simply to celebrate the underdog’s subjection ... by establishing it as an icon of Australianness—of ‘manliness, comradeship and sardonic dignity’.33 I have already pointed out that the depiction of the landscape does this too. Indeed, the nationalist invocation of ‘Australianness’ not only naturalises the conditions I have described but also treats them honorifically, as objects worthy of celebration.
Although we have not looked at the historical development of the bush legend in any detail (Tulloch, Rowse and McQueen all cover this in various ways that complicate the environmental determinism of Ward34) many accounts of nationalism in Australia point to the way in which its terms are appropriated and exploited by dominant interests. Amanda Lohrey’s statement on this is characteristic:
It’s directly related to the judicious pruning of the Australian Legend to fit establishment ideology and the suppression of the potentially most vital part of it [unionism].35
Lohrey goes on to quote Jack Lindsay’s claim that the ‘falsification of the national character in terms of outdated attitudes is a mask for the deeper distortions of our reality’. Such accounts see the workings of hegemony as accomplished more by conspiracy than through ‘cultural leadership’, in Gramsci’s phrase. Certainly, the displacement of our radical tradition into the past through the myths of the 1890s is an efficient way of keeping it there, yet it would be too simple to assume that only the dominant sections of Australian culture see this displacement as being in their interest. To suggest that one can separate oneself from the construction of national character is to excise one of the major ways of making meaning out of experience within that culture. Nationalism is a way of celebrating those aspects of national character which are current, and the celebration is one in which it is very difficult not to participate.
However, the political effect which Lohrey and Lindsay refer to is recognisable: that the celebration of this specific version of the national character has political consequences is made clear by Stephen Crofts. Crofts points to the problem which is inherent in ‘heroizing’ such portraits of the battler and the larrikin as we find in Breaker Morant:
... the promotion of the underdog, of the Aussie battler, brings the ‘Australian character’ perilously close to gallows humour. These are the traits which enlist sympathy for our heroes, which ensure a good laugh at corrupt authority, but which do nothing to challenge the real bases of that authority. This is close to the philosophy of ‘She’ll be right, mate’. To heroize the three lieutenants’ doomed defiance is to make a jingoistic virtue out of a set of characteristics whose effect is to perpetuate the ruling order.36
My only addition to this would be to stress that this perpetuation of the ruling order is not simply the effect of the nationalist myth, but its essential function.
The myth of nationalism rooted in the 1890s operates as a discourse through which narrative can naturalise a grim and static view of the powerlessness of the individual within the Australian context—without for all that appearing in any way to proscribe or rule out other views of Australian experience, or without appearing to suggest that the endurance of that experience is anything but honourable. Nationalism, while appearing to act in a celebratory manner that could qualify or even negate the thematic patterns and ideological structures which I have examined in this study, in fact naturalises exactly these patterns and structures. The difference is that its account of the Australian predicament is represented as positive. The cultural significances are inverted by enclosing them within a discourse of national character, which is then privileged as the ultimate defining feature and celebrated wherever it is found as the ultimate value. As such, the nationalist myth provides us with a signal example of the operation of ideology in narrative, the ways in which conflicts and differences within Australian experience are ‘resolved’ by the simple invocation of the nation.
That this may not be the whole picture, however, is something of which I am aware. The vitality of nationalism—its connection with populist forms, and the continual struggle for its colonisation—suggests that it has elements within it which may be subversive. The disparity between the various opinions of Snowy River implies the existence of important divisions around what constitutes an Australian film—a topic which is itself usually enclosed within the discourse of nationalism. Certainly the existence of such divisions makes it necessary to admit possibilities of change, and to recognise the fact that the ‘dominant’ which I am describing is only able to maintain its dominance through a continual struggle against opposition. The concentration in this study on dominant patterns inevitably leads to potentially monistic conclusions, tending to funnel all aspects being considered into a single pattern. To concentrate on one area in an attempt to establish its importance is legitimate. However, to conclude this study without some account of other, possibly contradictory, models of Australian experience in our narratives would be to unnecessarily circumscribe the point of view of the study. Thus I now want to entertain the proposition that there may generally be more complicating factors surrounding the generation of meaning in Australian narrative than the ones which I have so far considered.
1 The Legend of the Nineties; Heseltine’s ‘The Australian Image: The Literary Heritage’.
2 ‘A Blue Plaque for the Labour Movement? Some Political Meanings of the National Past’, in Formations of Nation and People (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p.47.
3 Exemplary would be the account of ideology and hegemony given in Stuart Hall’s ‘The rediscovery of ideology: the return of the Repressed in media studies’, in Gurevich et al. (eds) Culture, Society and the Media, pp.56-90.
4 Amanda Lohrey, ‘Gallipoli: Male Innocence as a Marketable Commodity’, Island Magazine, 9/10, (March 1982), pp.29-34.
5 A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition would be the central example of this approach.
6 op. cit. p.52.
7 The account of Ward, Phillips, Palmer, and the argument with these positions presented in McQueen, Wilkes, Wilding and others provides the context I have in mind. There seems to be little need to restate the radical nationalist position or the arguments against it.
8 p.257.
9 Inventing Australia, p.viii.
10 Wilkes, The Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn, p.87.
11 Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1970), p.59.
12 ibid. p.68.
13 I have in mind the invocation of the figure of the ‘bushman’ at the novel’s end.
14 Legends on the Screen.
15 Cinema Papers, 10, centrefold; Cinema Papers, 15, p.249; Sue Matthews, 35 MM Dreams, p. 141.
16 Jack Clancy, ‘Breaker Morant’ Cinema Papers, 28 (August—September 1981), p.283; Max Harris, ‘Banjo Would have Hated it’ Weekend Australian Magazine, (27 March 1982), p.7.
17 Wilkes, p.2.
18 ‘Breaker Morant Rethought: Eighty Years On The Culture Still Cringes’ Cinema Papers, 30, (Dec.-Jan. 1980-81), pp.420-1.
19 ‘Ride The High Country: In and Around The Man From Snowy River’ Filmnews, (September 1982.)
20 ‘Parents and Orphans’, Cinema Papers, 42, (March 1983), pp.50-2.
21 p.87.
22 See Tim O’Sullivan et. al. Key Concepts in Communication (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 174-6.
23 John Hindle, ‘Galloping Soapie in the High Country’ The National Times, (28 March—3 April 1982), p.40. It is worth noting that sections of the press more comfortable with popular art (Cinema Papers, 38, pp.261-2, and Rolling Stone, 352, pp.63—4) were more impressed by the film.
24 With Elizabeth Jacka, forthcoming, Screening Australia.
25 John Hindle, ‘The Best of the Year’, The National Times, (August 16—22 1981), p.33.
26 ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’ in Samuel, R. (ed.) People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
27 p.2.
28 ‘The Literary Heritage’, p.87.
29 Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, p.82.
30 ‘Nationalism in Australian Film’, p. 153.
31 R. M. Crawford, for one of many possible examples, ‘The Birth of a Culture’ in The Australian Nationalists, p.34—5.
32 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 11.
33 ibid. p.420.
34 Legends on the Screen, Australian Liberalism and National Character, and A New Britannia, are the works I have in mind.
35 op. cit. p.34.
36 op. cit. p.420.
