Why is it that in Australia so many of our great cultural lions are arch and condescending?
ONE of the unexpected pleasures of ABC TV's 7.30 Report is the idiosyncrasy of its magazine format, which serves to yoke together quite disparate stories in unexpected thought-sequences. Back in the dark, forgotten days of the Howard era it was not at all unusual for viewers to witness the public execution of some hapless senior government minister ("Thank you for your time," the host would conclude, with wry insincerity), juxtaposed with a reverential and ever-so-slightly self-indulgent easy-chair chat with a visiting art-novelist or orchestra conductor.
The implicit message seemed to be: political argument is a species of war-making, while artistic discussion is a species of love-making. Hence that curious nightly spectacle on the 7.30 Report: Mars and Venus, Venus and Mars, popping in and out of their respective alcoves like the ornamental figures on a Black Forest cuckoo clock. (Am I the only viewer who has fantasised about the results if the wrong reporter were sent on the wrong assignment? What if, by some awful accident, it was the cabinet minister who was fawned over for his evident genius, and the concert cellist who was grilled for her palpable insincerity?)
The 7.30 Report leaped back into the fray of our revisited asylum-seekers debate the other week with an urgent, heartfelt and thoroughly editorialising story about those poor exhausted Sri Lankans aboard the leaky fishing vessel. As it happens, this report was followed - with that same wonderfully swift incongruity - by a lengthy, jolly and rather doting interview with the grand grey eminence of Australian cultural snootiness, the veteran comedian Barry Humphries, creator of those Dadaesque buffoons Dame Edna, Barry McKenzie and the rest. The mood-shift was a bit of a challenge. And yet for once - entirely by happenstance - the juxtaposition seemed to make logical sense.
After all, to whom if not Humphries do we owe the seeds of our characteristic cultural anxiety about how others will view us as a nation, an anxiety which, at times such as these, produces unhelpful instincts and helpful ones in nearly equal measure?
To whom do we owe that eminently Humphries-esque distaste for the great army of dull-witted, closed-minded, benighted suburbanites out there, on the unready shoulders of whom our fragile national reputation always seems to rest? Why is it that in Australia - otherwise that most relaxed and egalitarian of countries - at times like these, so many of our great cultural lions are as arch and condescending as the habitues of an old-style London's gentleman's club at closing-time? Why, it's the work of Humphries and his contemporaries, the old suburban-loathing Anglophiles, of course.
There is a weighty fund of political knowledge so well-attested that it requires no earthly substantiation whatever. To the best of my knowledge, the received wisdom in some quarters that many ordinary Australians are narrow-minded provincials waiting to be stirred up by some two-bit nationalistic demagogue has never been substantiated by any serious program of empirical research. But somehow we know it's true all the same, not least because two generations of self-styled social satire, inaugurated in the 1950s by Humphries and carried on by university-revue vaudevillians ever since, has told us so.
There's a primal, almost Homeric myth of the Australian creative individual, and it goes something like this. Back in the days of Old Australia, this citizen of the world was bound to feel themselves a kind of stranger in their own country. Surrounded by legions of bland-browed suburbanites with steady limbs and untroubled eyes, they were doomed to a restless moral wandering. This was the experience that stimulated the personal anguish, the lofty and yet narrow and resentful world outlook, of cultural heroes from Manning Clark and Patrick White to Humphries, through to their voluble acolytes in our own day.
Multiculturalism was supposed to be the balm that cured this ancient Australian curse. The great walled camp of Australian suburbia, that feared desert of imagined mediocrity, was supposed to have been fragmented into a multitude of disparate communities, each nourished by some special cultural wisdom spirited from a foreign land. But when the MVTampa was refused entry into Australian territorial waters back in the dying months of 2001, this fable of the New Australia faded fast. It turned out that the New Australians were, by and large, just as nationally minded, just as local and territorial, as the old ones. And so a new cult of the moral outsider was born.
In recent weeks, as the little fishing boats, toiling across the vast seas with their straining engines, have multiplied before the western shores of Indonesia, this primal myth has stirred itself once more. People who a few weeks ago might have struggled to locate Colombo on a map are now full of those awful stories about the atrocities of Sri Lanka's civil wars. (Who knows, maybe some of them have even opened the covers of the harrowing US State Department report, published earlier this month, out of which most of those stories have come.)
And so the same unreal arguments - founded on this same vague if powerful sense of empathy - are once again taking hold. Sri Lanka has hundreds of thousands of internally displaced citizens, and we, somehow, have a moral obligation to take all of them. Somehow, it makes sense for everybody concerned if we accept any and all among the most enterprising of the middle classes of developing nations, even as we know that there are people dying right now in the former safe zones of northeast Sri Lanka for lack of medical expertise. And so on. Compassion that knows no logic, because it knows no limits.
Only a political innocent could have imagined that the federal government would react to this current flotilla of boatpeople in any other manner. It is not mere political necessity that drives the government to dissuade people from taking to boats chiefly in the hope of a new life in a rich country. There is also the policy necessity to maintain the refugee intake within manageable limits, so that refugees can be integrated into society without too much distress, established in local communities without too much friction, and found viable sources of employment without too much delay. This too requires a kind of political compassion, albeit of a less demonstrative kind.
The 7.30 Report's journalists are manifestly not political innocents. Taken as a whole they are some of the shrewdest and most gifted political observers in the country. It takes a certain heroism to subsume those political skills at times like these. That, and the primal call of Humphries's old fearful snootiness.
