When you look at Australian politics before WWII, you get a divide between two groups. One group is described as being establishment, suburban, Anglophile supporters of the British Empire. The other group are the radical nationalists, members of the labour movement, supporters of a more rural, larrikin type of Australian identity.
There were issues with both groups. I want to focus here on two problems with the radical nationalist side, because it helps to understand how politics developed in Australia after WWII.
You have to imagine here that you are someone who does not want Australian identity to be tied so closely to Britain or the British Empire, but instead to a native, more purely Australian derived culture. Taken too far, this had some negative consequences.
One consequence was a type of Anglophobia. This was not true of all the radical nationalists, but it did happen. Arthur Calwell, for instance, justified the pivot toward a culturally heterogeneous society after WWII on the basis that Australia was "a dull inbred country of predominantly British stock". The ongoing influence of this stream of thought was still evident in the early 1980s, in films like Breaker Morant and Gallipoli.
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| Arthur Calwell |
And then there was the issue of indigeneity. Some of the radical nationalists did not want a culture derived from Britain, so they looked in unusual ways to Aborigines as a source of indigeneity.
In 1936 Percy Stephensen wrote a book called The Foundations of Culture in Australia. To be fair, he does state in the book that Australian culture would begin "not from the Aborigines...but from British culture". Even so, he did want to co-opt indigeneity, writing that a form of Initiation Corroboree should be adopted as a means of instantiating Australian "national lore" without which there could be "no national centre, no nation". He also believed in a theory that Aborigines were the original human ancestors, writing to a friend that Aborigines were ‘[o]ur spiritual (perhaps our physical) ancestors, (for the Aborigines are the oldest Aryans on earth)'.
The novelist Xavier Herbert went further. He thought that the children of white fathers and Aboriginal mothers were the true Australians. You can see in his letter to Stephensen the influence here of the Anglophobia and the desire for "indigeneity" - how it alienated him from his own identity and made him want to merge into an Aboriginal one:
My Dear Inky,
A moment ago I concluded your book Foundations of Culture. What can I say about it? …. How your inspired message made me feel! … I dream of being made a patrol officer, so that I may go right home to the old people and become one of them. But I’ve not forgotten ‘the True Commonwealth’. I still tear up such Sydney Morning Heralds as I find, and bare my teeth at Pommies.
Yes—and I’m working to found a gigantic organisation called the Euraustralian League, comprised of so-called half-castes and quarter-castes, and of any whitefellas … [who believe] that the culture of the land will grow like gum trees from the soil. These Euraustralians—or yeller-fellers as the transplanted Pommies call them—are a great race. There are something like 20,000 already …
We are not Australians, Inky. Only those lucky people are. They are I should say the most vigorous race of people on the earth. I love them, and envy them their nationality. Curse the fates that arranged that I should be born a colonial Pommy! Will you work with me to organise this Euraustralian race so it will rise up and up and increase and multiply and eventually sweep the Pommies back into the sea?
PS. Some day I shall write ‘True Commonwealth’, a vast tale of the rise of the Euraustralians and the birth of the happiest nation on the earth and some day I shall father a Euraustralian so as to truly root myself in this dear earth and so as to legitimise my bastard whitefella genius.
Then there were the Jindyworobaks, a cultural movement of the 1930s and 40s founded by the poet Rex Ingamells in 1937. They believed that Australian culture could only thrive by co-opting Aboriginal culture. They were rightly criticised for doing this in a clunky way, by throwing in Aboriginal words like "wurlies" into their poetry.
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| Rex Ingamells |
This too survived into the post-War period. Germaine Greer is the classic example. As a young woman she imagined herself for a time to be Jewish. Later she had herself adopted into an Aboriginal tribe and wrote an essay in 2003 titled "Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way To Nationhood". The message of this essay was that white Australians were experiencing a spiritual malaise because they clung to an Anglo identity and that they should instead declare themselves Aboriginal "as if by an act of transubstantiation".
This adoption of Aborigines as the centrepiece of the national identity at the expense of the Anglo-Celtic founders has been pushed some way forward in recent years by the leftist, cultural elite, most likely because it permits the erasure of the older identity in favour of a newer, open-bordered, multicultural one (the PM Anthony Albanese said in response to Pauline Hanson defending the traditional monoculture, that "it's really a nonsense argument to go back to something that was never there" whilst the Labor Premier of Victoria, Jacinta Allen, declared last year that Australia is "a nation of foreigners".)
What I've hoped to show in this post is that some left-wing intellectuals of the twentieth century, despite being nationalists, did not help defend the existing culture, because they wanted a different originating source of Australian culture, one that was not derived from the British Isles. So they ended up, in some cases, fostering an Anglophobia, and in others trying to co-opt indigeneity from the Aborigines - sometimes leaving themselves alienated from their own identity and wishing to be something else.
It was all unnecessary. When I was a boy in the 1970s there was still a warmth of affection for the UK. You could have a primary love for Australia, but a secondary one for Britain, because of ancestral and cultural ties. The two did not conflict. If anything, the UK connection just added in a richness to that identity.
