The Lucky Culture

PROLOGUE

An open go

The only keys in my pocket were the ones that unlocked our suitcases. The house and car had been sold, the furniture dispatched and here we were at Sydney airport with spent one-way tickets as souvenirs. At the age of 31, I was unemployed and homeless in a country I had bought off the plan, feeling exhilarated and terrified in equal measure.

You don’t have to be Protestant to possess the work ethic in Australia, you just have to be an immigrant, for no one starting a new life can afford the luxury of failure. The first duty of migrants is to justify their fateful decision to family, friends and, most importantly, themselves. They must prove that this is a better place, even if they have to make it so themselves. They will be given every opportunity, since Australian playing fields are level, and old and new Australians are accorded equal respect.

For those who grew up in the British class system, something particularly refreshing hangs in the egalitarian breeze as soon as you step off the plane. Customs and immigration officers command respect, not because they are wearing uniforms, but because they are earning an honest living, just like the taxidriver you sit next to, not behind. There is no recourse to status, and therein lies the promise, repeated so often that it ought to be a cliché: in this country everybody gets a fair go. There are no institutional barriers to success; the only restraints are personal deficits of imagination, energy and courage.

Within a fortnight I found myself in Adelaide with an introduction from a mutual friend to the Advertiser’s then editor, Piers Akerman. The conversation started badly; Piers appeared impatient with an applicant who had never worked on a newspaper, couldn’t write shorthand and whose nearest journalistic contact was 18,000 kilometres away. He looked at me suspiciously, head tilted forwards, eyebrows lowered, an expression I was to become familiar with over the years. I suspect that that would have been the end of it had he not asked about the kids. Anna had missed out on her first birthday because her feckless father had booked a flight, on that day of all days, across the Pacific dateline. Robert, aged three, had been sick all night, and was asking when we were going home. Beneath Piers’s austere expression, I could sense a heart was beating. ‘You can start on Monday,’ he said, ‘and we’ll see how you go.’ After the bureaucracy of the BBC and the pomposity of everyday British life, it was a refreshing introduction to the Australian workplace. It was clear, however, that a start in the Australia vernacular was different from a job, and what happened next, for better or worse, was entirely up to me.

I grew up in Hythe, an enclave of the working and lower middle classes situated on the muddy fringes of Southampton Water, halfway between the oil refinery and the docks. The local comprehensive school was consistently mediocre, a place where pupils aspired to be fair to middling, for the smart and the dumb were treated with equal disdain. It was not until I arrived at Exeter University that for the first time I came across people who had been to a private school; they pronounced all their syllables, exaggerated their vowels and had rather hoped to go to Oxford with their chums. We called them wellies, because they dressed like gentleman and lady farmers in Wellington boots and Barbour jackets. We mocked their accents and pretensions, they mocked ours, and when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, it seemed to be all their fault. It was some years before I discovered that the people who put Maggie in power, not just once but three times, were the people I had grown up with: the socially conservative working and lower middle classes.

I spent a gap year as a volunteer community worker in the West Midlands, trying to repair failed social experiments. In the evenings we ran a shelter for the homeless and by day we would lend assistance to the rehomed, the people who had been moved from the slums to welfare-churning concrete council estates half an hour by bus from the city centre. The estates had been built from large prefabricated concrete slabs, slotted together around a metal frame and held together by gravity, a technique known as plattenbau in East Germany, the only other place it took off. These days we would call our clients victims, and in a sense they were; the homeless were afflicted by alcoholism and mental illness while the homed suffered from leaking windows and hubristic central planning. The errors of the postwar progressive project were catalogued each week on the pages of New Society, a magazine I had subscribed to since the age of fourteen. At the time, we blamed simple errors of design, expecting social engineers to fix socially engineered mistakes. It took years for me to come to the reluctant conclusion that the entire edifice of the welfare state, in which we had invested our hopes for a better Britain, was a monumental, multi-storey mistake.

A dispiriting year with the Brummies, followed by an undergraduate course in sociology, proved the perfect cure for youthful idealism. The downside was that I was, to all intents and purposes, unemployable; though I was not without ambition, and I began applying for traineeships at the BBC. Undaunted by the selection panel’s blindness to my journalistic potential, I drove laundry vans for a year while the corporation’s glacial personnel department considered if I were capable of being trained to run a radio studio. By this circuitous route, I began my professional broadcasting career turning a Bakelite knob on a prewar control panel in Bush House at 2.00 am, trying to lower my voice an octave as I made my first station announcement: ‘This is the External Service of the BBC. The following program is in Mandarin Chinese.’

After two years doing my bit towards fighting the Cold War and the battle for the Falklands from basement studios in the Strand, I was offered a job by Paul Lyneham, who was then Channel Seven’s correspondent in London. It was a crash course in stump jumping: the Australian art of overcoming obstacles to get the job done. We found the back way up a fire escape at the race track at Longchamps to stand on the creaking grandstand roof and capture the Australian thoroughbred Strawberry Fields finishing fifth in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe; we commandeered a Paris taxi to drive the 300 kilometres to Brussels in the middle of the night to get to the Heysel Stadium, the scene of a terrible disaster in May 1985. We hired a BMW and conned our way onto the route of the Tour de France, nudging our way alongside the peloton to interview Phil Anderson as he rode over the Alps. We climbed the shores of Gallipoli, literally – colleague Alan Dent carrying the camera, and I the recorder, to capture the experience of the diggers. We interviewed men in their late 80s and 90s who had made that climb 70 years before, men in tears as they embraced Turkish veterans they had fought against. I was beginning to feel Australian.

I returned to the BBC as a journalist, and spent my last two years in Thatcher’s rust belt covering the closing of shipyards and rising unemployment. My first assignment was in Middlesbrough, where the steel fabrication yards that had rolled out girders for the Sydney Harbour Bridge were empty, decaying shells. My cameraman gave me a quick guide to the city. ‘If you think of the River Tees as the arsehole of England,’ he told me, ‘then Middlesbrough is five miles up it.’ By a stroke of good fortune, I scored a break from the northern winter in January 1988 to fly to Sydney to report on the bicentenary. It was my second visit to Australia, and again I found its egalitarianism much as D.H. Lawrence had described it 65 years earlier in his novel, Kangaroo:

They ran their city very well, as far as he could see. Everything was very easy, and there was no fuss … No real authority – no superior classes – hardly even any boss. And everything rolling along as easily as a full river, to all appearances …

In Australia nobody is supposed to rule, and nobody does rule, so the distinction falls to the ground. The proletariat appoints men to administer the law, not to rule. These ministers are not really responsible, any more than a housemaid is responsible. The proletariat is all the time responsible, the only source of authority … ministers are merest instruments.

Back in England, I sent for the immigration forms. In a choice for preferred prime minister, Bob Hawke had my vote over Maggie. I had met Hawke briefly in a press conference in Brussels in the early ’80s, and had been completely taken aback by his informality. If I recall correctly, he used the word bugger, which seemed to me to be me to be the right word for a prime minister to use when answering questions about the European Economic Community, the institution that became the European Union, and later the European Crisis.

At The Advertiser, I quickly became immersed in South Australian politics and discovered, to my delight, that just as Lawrence described there was no ruling class as such, even in Adelaide. Within weeks of stepping off the plane, I was sent at short notice to interview a man named Des Corcoran, for a series called Where Are They Now? I framed my first apologetic question: ‘I know this is a bit rude, but I’ve only just arrived. Could you tell me where you were then?’ Mr Corcoran, it turned out, had once been premier and a soldier in the Korean War. He invited me onto his back deck, where he offered me a beer and a helpful two-hour tutorial in Labor politics. Politicians did not seem to hide behind press secretaries as they did in Britain; when I rang then Premier John Bannon’s minder, Chris Willis, for a quote one Sunday afternoon, he seemed mildly irritated at having his weekend disturbed and suggested I should drive round to Mr Bannon’s house to ask him, since he was not answering the phone. I discovered that the premier of South Australia was building a compost heap, and he answered the door in gardening gloves to give me a polite ‘no comment’. Lawrence was right, it seemed to me: ‘Demos was here his own master.’ I was beginning to think about being British in the smug way ex-smokers think about cigarettes: why had it taken me so long to give up?

In 2009, I was working as editor of The Weekend Australian when I received a News Limited corporate watch, and realised that twenty years had elapsed since we had disembarked from a Canadian Airlines DC10, with a visa marked unrestricted. Incredibly, by the end of 2012, I had occupied Australia for almost a tenth of its settled history. It was bigger and better in almost every respect from the country I signed up to join at the end of the 1980s, magnificent as it seemed to me then. It is a nation that is confident of its place in the world, one that looks less frequently to Europe or the United States for its lead, and is increasingly at home in its region. Technology and economic growth have broken the tyranny of distance; Australians made a mere 85 million overseas phone calls in 1989, fewer than six per person. We wrote letters instead: the average Australian posted ten items of overseas mail in the year I arrived; twenty years later they sent just four. Passengers on international flights have more than trebled; the cost of flying from Sydney to London has halved in real terms. We had five television channels then; now there are too many to count, even before we contemplate the arrival of the Internet.

It seemed, however, that while the communications gap closed, a cultural divide was driving Australians further apart. Paradoxically, at a time when technology was supposed to be bringing people together, Australian society seemed more polarised than when I arrived. The first decade of the twenty-first century was a testing time for public debate. On the issues of Aboriginal Reconciliation, asylum seeker policy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, later, climate change, it was impossible to sit on the fence. Australia was still one tribe but there were two distinct clans rallying around different totems: the insiders and the outsiders. There had always been divisions in Australian society: convicts and soldiers; Catholic and Protestant; city and country; rich and poor; Left and Right. This, however, was of a different order. For the first time there were people who did not simply feel better off but better than their fellow Australians. They were cosmopolitan and sophisticated, well read (or so they would have us believe) and politically aware. Their presumption of virtue set them apart from the common herd: they were neither racist nor sexist, claimed to be indifferent to material wealth, ate healthily, drank in moderation and, if they were not gay themselves, made a show of solidarity with lots of friends who were. Their compassion knew no bounds: the vulnerable of the world could rely on their support, in principle at least. They were plastic bag refuseniks and tickers of carbon offset boxes, for they knew what the science was saying, and it could not be denied. People like them should be running the country, they thought, or more accurately, ruling it.

Anyone who had behaved like this in the Australia I arrived in would have been told bluntly to pull their head in. Their ridiculousness would have been ridiculed, their pretensions pilloried and their conjectures countered by common sense. Today, however, they call the shots, since their voices represent the majority view in the media, education, the law and the political class. On an ABC TV discussion program, dissenting voices are sometimes outnumbered five to one; unpopular panellists face jeers and boos from the inner city studio audience as mocking tweets scroll across the bottom of the screen. This was not the classless country I had signed up to join; it was split into two, with one side showing troubling aristocratic ambitions. This was not the egalitarian Australia, where everyone who earned an honest living was worthy of equal respect, where manual and non-manual workers stood as equals in the front bar and the wisdom of the cloisters was matched by the wisdom of the paddock.

Sneering was taboo in the Australia I arrived in; today it is ubiquitous. The ocker and the larrikin of 1989 were street-wise underdogs who commanded respect; in the insiders’ imagination, the bogans and rednecks of today are vulgar, vacuous materialists. The proletariat has gone from needy to greedy in the space of a generation. Once they were the victims of capitalism, now they are its mercenary agents, spending their ill-gotten gains to expand their carbon footprint. The oppressed of the earth have become its oppressors.

Industrialists who were once courted by premiers and prime ministers as the creators of common wealth are today assumed to be roguish and unscrupulous. The assumption that growth follows investment as sure as night follows day, and that a growing economy would pay dividends to all, has been abandoned. Contemporary industrialists are portrayed as grasping creatures intent on pocketing everything for themselves. Corpulent capitalists and blubbery blackguards are stripped of their dignity and placed in the stocks.

Like the middle-class ascendancies of earlier ages, the new elite are inclined towards puritanism, although this time without divine authority. They cast a censorious eye on the lifestyles of their fellow Australians, sternly admonishing any lapses of judgment in a manner that would only have been acceptable from the pulpit or the teacher’s desk half a century ago. For the most part, the grazers at McDonald’s are considered to be as clueless as the cattle slaughtered for their sustenance; they cannot be expected to know better. A few, however, who show outward signs of intelligence, can only be taking a contrarian stance out of malevolence. The distinction between mutton-heads, who are merely demeaned, and the malevolent, who are detested, can be seen in the attitude to body mass. The suburban classes have been ravaged by an obesity epidemic that torments them much as their ancestors were stricken by typhoid and cholera. The others are considered to be downright gluttonous; stout entrepreneurs, portly politicians and paunchy power-brokers deserve nothing but the deepest contempt.

Such mirthless, illiberal and intolerant behaviour would not have been allowed in the country in which I arrived in 1989 yet, like swearing in front of women and children, the moratorium has been lifted on the sneer, the open denigration of one’s fellow Australians. It is a display of prejudice we once reserved for foreigners: lazy Mediterraneans, warring Tartars and inscrutable Orientals, before race-based expressions of patriotism became unfashionable. With the arrival of Twitter, the sneer has gone viral, an expression that, like the obesity epidemic, absolves anyone of any responsibility.

The Australians I admired from afar from childhood were outspoken, witty people, unencumbered by the stifling politeness of British society. I marvelled at the verbal dexterity in their deployment of the word bastard. It was a profanity that could not be uttered in an English family home, ranking marginally behind the four-letter words in its capacity to shock. In Australia, there were heaps of bastards; you could be a lucky bastard or a bloody bastard, and even a bad bastard could be good. Naturally, there was no excuse for an act of bastardry, but as a blunt term of endearment, bastard seemed to be an adornment to the lexicon of a people courageous enough to fall out with one another and then square it up later at the pub, rather than hiding behind the cowardly and insidious sneer. At times I felt as if I was back at comprehensive school, averaging out my thoughts and opinions to avoid losing friends.

In August 2010, I listened to Frank Furedi at a Centre for Independent Studies conference as he discussed the rise of Europe’s new moral guardians. Cosmopolitan sophisticates from London to Helsinki were absorbed with the transnational European project, out of touch and out of patience with the majority of their compatriots. They seemed the identical cousins of our own putative ruling class, and if the crumbling Euro-project was a portent of where we were headed, it was time to start taking them seriously. Over lunch in Sydney later that month, and in subsequent email exchanges and Skype conversations, Frank encouraged me to dig deeper into the origins and nature of our emerging aristocracy, and the idea for The Lucky Culture was formed.

It remains to be seen if Australia can rise above this new global intellectual hegemony. The anointing of a self-appointed ruling class of sophisticates would, however, be an unnatural development among a people skilled at lopping poppies. To describe the Australian habit of cutting the pompous down to size as the tall poppy syndrome is to imply it is undesirable. To me it seems to be a natural enforcement mechanism for egalitarianism; nobody is allowed to have tickets on themselves or presumptions of privileged status. The flattened social landscape has its critics, of course, the most common argument against it being that egalitarianism leads inevitably towards mediocrity. It is an argument that is defeated once a year on the first Tuesday in November as several tonnes of precious thoroughbred flesh laps the Flemington Racecourse. The Melbourne Cup is powered by the energy of egalitarianism; mass participation, flattened odds and the handicapper’s lead in saddle bags do nothing to curb the thoroughbred industry’s eternal quest for excellence; in fact, they are its motivation. There are 24 runners at the starting gate and hope rides on every one of them, not because they are equal, but because they have been given a chance. Australia’s dynamism begins with the understanding that since everyone has an equal chance in life, everyone should have a go. Cultures that permit favouritism are prone to fatalism; the perception that the odds are stacked against you stifles ambition and leads to stagnation.

The nature of today’s presumptive ruling class that claims authority not by wealth or force, but by moral superiority, endows it with a deeply illiberal streak harmful to civic debate. Since it claims to enjoy a more virtuous outlook on life, the playing field in the contest of ideas is tilted in its favour. A class that claims the moral high ground will be tempted, sooner or later, to resort to censorship, since notions that challenge good ideas are, by necessity, bad. To allow that the idea might be better is to surrender their post. The shutting down of debate, the threat to regulate the press and the curtailment of the right to free speech through whatever means are available are new and disturbing tendencies.

Emphatically, The Lucky Culture is not a political history, for we are more than just political animals. I am indebted, therefore, to Professor Furedi for rekindling my interest in the discipline of sociology, enabling me to step beyond the imagined divisions between Left and Right. The seating arrangements of pre-revolutionary French government are an untrustworthy guide to the cultural topography of contemporary Australia, and to suggest that people behave in a certain way because they are neo-liberals, greenies, communists, Hayekians or Keynsians is to dodge the intellectual heavy lifting. Only the freakish few are genuinely driven by ideology; the rest of us are obliged to look for more mundane excuses for our actions.

The Lucky Culture is also, in part, a study in history. As I read more about events in Australia before 1989, the year of my arrival, it became glaringly apparent that there were substantial gaps in the narrative. It is hardly surprising that a forward-looking people, little given to nostalgia or raking over the past, has limited appetite for history. Yet if we consider the shortage of nourishing history as a deficiency in our intellectual diet, it might account for the listlessness of current debate, the pallid shades of many of its arguments and the choleric temper of many of its proponents. Too much of our history has been written with a political narrative; I share Niall Ferguson’s conviction that broad-based economic and cultural history is often more informative.

I therefore hope to make a modest contribution to the field of cultural archaeology, if there is such a discipline. It is hard enough to understand what is going on in the heads of our contemporaries, let alone our forebears. Yet hundreds of millions of cultural artefacts are preserved in our libraries and museums: the contemporaneous written word, or ideas otherwise recorded, that paint a rich picture of the lost intellectual worlds of the past. There has never been a better time to mine these treasure-troves; digital technology has brought an exponential increase in the information available from the past as well as the present. The digitisation of newspapers, books and other documents has made great strides, and the ability to word-search vast quantities of material in a matter of micro-seconds has opened new oceans for the curious scholar to explore.

The last thing the Australian publishing industry needs is another polemic, and our civic debate needs one even less. If offence is taken at an ill-chosen adjective, or a lazily constructed argument, it was not intended. Ideas should be held lightly between the fingers, and with that in mind, The Lucky Culture comes with an open invitation to disagree. Australia is a country that thrives on discussion, a true democracy in which everyone, or nearly everyone, considers it their business to discuss the affairs of the day. In that spirit, I do not expect anyone to agree with everything I have to say, and I sincerely hope that vigorous debate will ensue. I hope the discussion will continue on my website – luckyculture.com.au – where correspondence will be gladly entered into and clarifications noted.

Mindful of the ease with which words can be misunderstood, the site will also contain a glossary. Three items of semantic housekeeping also need to be cleared up at the start of this book. The terms mankind or man without a preceding article and gender unrestricted refer to human beings collectively. The terms settled or modern Australia should be read as value neutral references to circumstances from 1788. Descriptors for the new class are problematic, and where terms like progressive, moral or sophisticate appear, they are meant neither as endorsements nor pejoratives.

Outside the inner clique that dominates politics, academia and the media, the Australian spirit remains strong. It is not, I would suggest, the spirit of the frontier but the spirit of the front bar: pragmatic, personable and above all generous. It is the spirit I found alive and well at the Imperial Hotel in Ravenswood, Queensland, where I spent two weeks in August 2012, putting the final touches to this book. It gave me courage that I was on the right track, that intelligent life in Australia does not disappear ten kilometres from the CBD, and it is from the essential virtue of its people that I draw my optimism for the future.

Over beers at the Imperial’s front bar, I discovered abundant reserves of human energy and ingenuity, Australia’s great renewable resources. We expect to find them in every native-born Australian, but we look for them especially in migrants and are seldom disappointed. No one comes to Australia for an easy time, they come here for a future. They do not seek deliverance, they seek the opportunity to deliver. This is not the promised land or the island of the blessed, but it is a land of promise that offers the chance of redemption.

ONE

The Australians

They tramp in mateship side by side –

The Protestant and Roman,

They call no biped lord or sir,

And touch their hat to no man!

Henry Lawson, ‘The Shearers’

If there were an effective method of screening new arrivals for traces of social pretension, or an insecticide that could be used on aircraft to kill airs and graces, Australia’s assiduous quarantine service would have discovered it by now. The levelling instinct is woven thickly through the social fabric and Australians are forever on their guard against snobbery.

There is no place for deference in the Australian book of etiquette; the inheritance of wealth is tolerated but no one inherits privilege, and respect is not for sale at any price. Richard Somers, the visiting Englishman in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo, could see no class distinction, only differences in wealth: ‘Nobody felt better than anyone else, or higher; only better-off. And there is all the difference in the world between feeling better than your fellow men, and merely feeling better-off.’ When a proposal was put forward in New South Wales in 1851 for an upper house modelled on the House of Lords, it went against the grain. The Empire newspaper wrote: ‘In a young community, containing a native population with no inconsiderable share of intelligence, the repetition of these old worn-out absurdities is a positive insult to the good sense of the public.’ William Wentworth’s proposed New South Wales constitution was defeated by derision at a gathering of some 2000 people protesting against the ‘mongrel body’. The radical lawyer Daniel Deniehy mocked the bunyip aristocracy, a term that lodged itself in the Australian idiom as a warning against pulling rank. ‘These Harlequin aristocrats, these Botany Bay magnificos, these Australian mandarins … let them walk across the stage in all the pomp and circumstances of hereditary titles,’ he declared. ‘But though their weakness was ridiculous, these pygmies might do a great deal of mischief.’

Egalitarianism is the nation’s primary operating principle, the key to its success and its saving grace. There is no other country where egalitarianism is held in such high regard, nor where any hint of an aristocracy has been so firmly slapped down. Australians’ special ability to slice through pretension and to cut the pompous down to size is a skill that is appreciated around the world. Their comic heroes, Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee and Barry McKenzie, used their levelling wit to expose the frailties of other people’s class systems with their disarming, easy-going humour. Violinist Richard Tognetti can ignore the rules of the concert chamber when he plays Carnegie Hall because he leads the Australian Chamber Orchestra; while Clive James’s writing is uninhibited because he comes from Kogarah, New South Wales.

Egalitarianism fosters enterprise in a pioneer society where settlers put the old ways behind them to build civilisation afresh. Australians instinctively understand the American metaphor of log cabin to White House; its egalitarian promise, abounding optimism and democratic embrace are common to both nations. In the Australian version, however, the pauper-to-president narrative is turned on its head: Rooster one day, feather duster the next. Told this way, it is less a story of inspiration than one of caution; it is not an ode to Redemption, but a parable of the Fall. Yet it is no less powerful a statement of the egalitarian promise: everybody deserves a fair go, what happens next is entirely up to them. Rooster or president, log cabin or feather duster, the lesson is the same; in an egalitarian society, every citizen has the power to change their lives for better or for worse.

Egalitarianism is frequently, and sometimes deliberately, misapplied as a synonym for equality. Dollar-shop Marxists, who reduce the narrative of the nineteenth-century class struggle into an argument about postcodes, seize upon disparities in wealth and income as proof that Australia is not, and perhaps never was, truly egalitarian. Democratic egalitarianism, however, concerns social status, not socialism; it is equality in manners, rather than equality of wealth, the democratisation of social distinction and the abolition of privilege. Everybody deserves the same respect and is free to chase their dream. Paradoxically, egalitarianism is a force for financial inequality, since it offers an incentive to rise above the crowd, to achieve whatever your imagination desires. It is the motive force of personal and national progress, mining the inner resource Americans call grit, the British call courage and Australians call mongrel. The obstacles to success are personal, not social; individual failings rather than institutional prejudice are mostly what holds its people back. As Alexis de Tocqueville discovered in America, ‘the chief cause of disparity between the fortunes of men is the mind’.

The indifference to rank shown by Australian infantrymen in World War I and misinterpreted by British officers as insubordination reflected the manners of men who were taught that respect must be earned and was not merely apportioned according to rank. It would be wrong, however, to imagine that Australians are naturally anti-authoritarian; to suggest that Jack is as good as his master is to acknowledge that Jack has a master. Egalitarianism in no way denies that some are workers and some are bosses, that some lead while others follow: ‘the status order is subverted, but not the economic’, says John Hirst. Remuneration is a return on an investment of time and effort, not simply the prize for turning up. In the Australian tradition the distinction between manual and non-manual labour does not prevent fraternisation on equal terms. It remains customary to ride in the front of the cab, next to the driver; conversation is optional, but should always remain civil.

The fair go, equal respect for honest labour, the democratisation of suffering, pulling one’s weight, and social humility – these are the unwritten clauses of the Australian Constitution, the framework for the obligations joining citizens and state. Australians lack the vocabulary to make grand statements about citizenship. In 1999, when Prime Minister John Howard sat down with poet Les Murray to write a new preamble for the Constitution distilling the essence of the Australian spirit, it failed to gain political consensus. The inclusion of the word mateship was especially contentious. Indigenous Senator Aden Ridgeway said he was prepared to entertain it, but some of his fellow Democrats found it ‘offensive’, and would prefer to see the words ‘custodianship, stewardship or traditional ownership’ in its place. Labor Senator John Faulkner said Howard had presented a ‘clunky, negative piece of prose, laced with the prejudices of a man who is absolutely out of his depth and his time’. The word mateship ‘had resonances of a historic Australia … the fiction of Lawson and the tragedy of Gallipoli’, and he seemed to think that was a bad thing. Senator Gareth Evans said that while it was ‘a good and honourable word … the trouble is that our whole history has been too blokey, and women today and tomorrow just do not need language in the Constitution reinforcing that kind of imagery’.

Howard agreed, reluctantly, to drop mateship from the draft, a word he held ‘very dear,’ but suspected his fellow parliamentarians may have misjudged the public mood: ‘I love that word. It expresses a quintessential Australian attitude. I think that millions of Australians love that word.’ The common currency of mateship in every day conversation suggests Howard was right. However inelegantly expressed, Australians have an instinctive sense of what it means to be Australian; it is the equivalent of the good citizen in America, although Australians would never put it in such ornate terms. Conversely, there is also broad agreement of what it means to be un-Australian, and, surprisingly perhaps, the accusation is usually uncontested. Sophisticates prefer to imagine the Australian soul as a work in progress, as putty that can be reshaped to meet the intellectual fashions of the day. Yet Australians instinctively understand that to break the Australian contract – to deny someone a fair go, to disparage lowly work, to bludge on your mates or to get above your station – is to be un-Australian, for we did not sign up to anything less.

The mores of democratic egalitarianism, rooted in a society without castes and adopted by people without pretension, provide the foundation of Australian luck. Everyone enjoys the right and shares the obligation to have a go, for there is no room for bludgers in a pioneering society. The term ‘bludger’ entered the Australian vernacular in the nineteenth century to describe a man who lived off a woman’s immoral earnings, and has retained its sleazy overtone. Governor Arthur Phillip warned convicts from the start that those who would not work would not eat, for ‘good men … shall not be slaves for the bad’. Soldiers in World War I spoke of bludging on the flag. It is a crime against human dignity that deserves nothing but the utmost contempt, a crime against mates and therefore morally reprehensible, since if one man leans on his shovel, the rest have to dig harder.

In America, the perfection of the Union is a self-consciously collective project, but in Australia the synergy between personal and collective ambition, combined with the sanctions against bludging, serve to