Monday musings on Australian literature: Two Australian icons

Donald Horne (1920-2005) and Geoffrey Blainey (b. 1930) are Australian icons, not only for their body of work – which is significant – but for phrases they coined which have become part of our national consciousness. Not all Australians today will know who coined them, but most will have heard the phrases themselves.

The lucky country

The lucky country was written in 1964. The title comes from a sentence in the book:

Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.

An ironic statement, clearly! From Horne’s point of view Australia had a lot going for it – including its natural resources upon which the boom of the 1950s and 60s was primarily based – but was limited by a lack of innovative and “clever” thinking. Over the years, the phrase has been used in may ways – both ironic and literal – but for Horne the intention was clear. It was a wake-up call to Australia to grow up, throw off its colonial shackles, and start thinking for itself.

Rosa Cappiello used the phrase for the title of her book Oh lucky country. It’s still on my TBR pile, but Lisa of ANZLitLovers reviewed it in 2009. It was published in Italian in 1981, with an English translation being published by the University of Queensland Press in 1984. It is about migrant workers in Sydney … and presents an unflattering view of Australians, particularly in their (our) attitude to and acceptance of migrants. (I referred to a similar attitude in my recent review of The women in black.) Cappiello takes up the irony, albeit from a different perspective, and the book was not particularly popular (here) when it was first published! Here is the opening paragraph:

The sky here compensates for solitude. Blue-clouded. Cloudy blue. Intensely blue. It’s not the promised land. Maybe in the distant future it’ll be the last one on earth – the basis is here for the much-vaunted lucky country – but for the moment it’s neither the realisation of one’s dreams nor the land of milk and honey.

Anyhow, back to Horne. He was a prolific writer and commentator but I have only read two of his books – The lucky country (back in the 1970s) and Dying: a memoir, in which he chronicles his death from pulmonary fibrosis and passes on valuable reflections and practical information while doing so. A teacher and sharer to the end.

Mereenie Loop, Central Australia

The tyranny of distance

Geoffrey Blainey’s Tyranny of distance was written two years later, in 1966, and is subtitled “how distance shaped Australia’s history”.

Australia is a big country, with a relatively small population. There’s a reason for this: much of the centre is excessively dry and barren. Consequently, the majority of the population lives on the coast – mostly in the east, but there are urban pockets and major cities in the south (Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide), the west (Perth) and the north (Darwin). And there are thousands of kilometres between most of these. Our distance challenges are many-fold: they draw from the immense internal distances, and from geographical isolation from the world’s major centres. The latter though is gradually reducing through improved transportation, increased electronic communications, and shifts in the international balance of power (to, say, China and India).

Given the various discussions we’ve had on this blog, I’m not going to talk a lot here about distance and the Australian landscape, and how this plays out in Australian consciousness and thence in our art and literature. From the beginnings of white settlement in the late 18th century, Australians have been conscious of distance in its many forms. For example, physical distance translated into a psychological tyranny, and there is the distance between urban and rural life and culture (something I’ve touched on elsewhere).

Distance results in loneliness and alienation. It was a practical and psychological issue for pioneer women. Katharine Susannah Prichard captured that well in The pioneers (1915), particularly when the young wife is left on her own for several days while her husband goes to town for provisions:

The air was empty without the sound of Donald’s axe …

The day seemed endless …

She glanced at the child every now and then, laughing and telling him that his mother had found the wherewithal to keep her busy and gay, as a bonny baby’s mother ought to be, and that the song she was singing was a song that the women sang over their spinning wheels in the dear country that she had come from far across the sea.

Patrick White‘s Voss is an eloquent exploration of a relationship, a spiritual connection, maintained between Laura in town and Voss exploring remote regions. Its themes are not so much the tyranny of distance, but it’s under the tyranny of distance that the themes are played out. Here is Voss in a letter to Laura:

… but life and dreams of such far-reaching splendour you will surely share them in your quiet room. So we are riding together across the plains, we sit together in this black night, I reach over and touch your cheek (not for the first time). You see that separation has brought us far, far closer. Could we perhaps converse with each other at last, expressing inexpressible ideas with simple words.

In fact, for Voss and Laura distance has a freeing effect … physical absence encourages spiritual presence as it were. Distance in Australia, then, is a complex issue … it informs the foundations of our society from the mundanities of commerce to the “finest” expressions of culture. You’ve seen it already in this blog … and you’ll see it again.

To return to Blainey, he too has a significant oeuvre including, as Gideon Haigh said in that radio program I blogged about, several works of business literature. He is also known for another well-known phrase in Australian culture, the black armband view of history, but that is a story for another day.