Innovatia

From an antipodean outpost to an innovative Australia – internationally- acclaimed author Thomas Keneally discusses why we need to get over our past. Fear not O n successive weeks in 1942, the great art- ist and illustrator Norman Lindsay pub- lished on the cover of The Bulletin two

drop our bundle too easily. I don’t mean of course in response to outrages such as the Bali tragedy. But much smaller shifts and changes in the winds of the world can evoke this timidity, the side of our nature we naturally enough least like to project. Timidity might be explained by the fact that we feel threatened by the geographic distance which lies between us and the wellsprings of our settler culture; by the difficulties, demands and perils of living with our nearest neighbours. And it can’t be denied that some of our edgi- ness might be of the post-colonial variety. As a settler group we had a successful colonial expe- rience, at least in terms of liberal progressive- ness if not in terms of relationship with the indi- genes of the continent. The Chartist institutions of universal male suffrage, payment of mem- bers, regular elections, were in place early here. Though some rebels did it tough (Ned Kelly), oth- ers such as the 13 men charged over the Eureka stockade incident in 1854 were acquitted by the juries and – in some cases – were soon members of a Legislative Assembly elected by all male adults. Thus the severe repression which marked Canada in the 1830s, Ireland and India did not characterise Australian institutions.

drastically contrasting images of Australia imper- illed by the Japanese advance in the Pacific. One is of a rock-jawed digger, indomitable, present- ing his .303 rifle and bayonet in the direction of a new sinister dawn, the onrush of the Japanese assault on the Pacific and in South-East Asia and the Pacific. The other image is of a maiden, cer- tainly full-breasted in the Lindsay tradition, but vulnerable, likely to be ravaged by the onset of danger or strangeness. Now in that year, as I can remember from a child’s point of view, 15,000 Australians were captured on one day in Singapore, February 14, and within a few days the bombing of northern Australian cities began. The peril was the most intense it had ever been or would ever be to the time of writing this. But even now, 60 years on, we have not quite worked out what our culture is – the rock-jawed warrior or the fragile maiden. The warrior is much in evidence when we win the Ashes or the Bledisloe Cup. But the fragile maiden is a self-image we Australians so often project at the first whiff of strangeness, change or disorienta- tion. To use an Australianism, we may very well

“Australia is often in danger of succumbing to post-colonial timidity.”

INNOVATIA Photo Credit: Paul Jones flickr.com/people/126964449@N04 | Art & Culture

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INNOVATIA

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