Many Australians are reacting fiercely today to threats to Australia’s character and culture from ideological or national groups. What character and culture, some are asking? Indeed, the more extreme deny that such a character and culture exist. In the final chapter of my book, PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION, I sketch what I understand as Australia’s character and culture.

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An excerpt from chapter 19, ‘Cultural Continuities in 1900’, Prison Hulk to Redemption, available through Amazon.

From the outset [of Prison Hulk to Redemption], I endeavoured to depict a new, independent nation emerging from Captain Phillip’s seminal act of planting the Union Jack in the soil of Sydney Cove. In a remarkably short time, the inaugural members of this new nation began to refer to their land and themselves as Australia and Australians, though still closely connected to their origins in the British Isles. The fiery and intemperate William Charles Wentworth embodied those who experienced no doubts about themselves and the new nation they were forging. But what, precisely, does this Australianness entail?

Australianness represents a profound modification of Britishness, the unifying culture of the British Isles—England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—rooted in the broader culture of Christian Europe. Although Australians retained many traditions, customs, and social and political institutions from Great Britain, as well as the arts and literature, and were content to do so, their experiences led them to develop fundamentally distinct identities from their counterparts in the British Isles. The varied physical environment contributed to the emergence of a unique, independent expression of Britishness. Consequently, all traditions, customs, and institutions brought over by the First Fleet were transformed, regardless of how subtle these changes might sometimes have been. Although this transformation began as soon as Captain Phillip planted the British flag, it was not until the 1880s that overseas observers began to notice a distinctly Australian character.

At this time, around seventy per cent of Australians were native-born. By 1901, the time of Federation, this figure had risen to eighty-two per cent. We were democratically minded, a relaxed sporting lot, and very much preoccupied with financial matters—making a quid. These were among the qualities observed by visitors. In Town Life in Australia (1883), Richard Twopenny wrote that Australian men, compared with Englishmen, appeared to have a ‘greater independence of manner and thought, more tolerant views, less reserve, more kindliness of heart.’ Perhaps the most recurring comment was that Australians’ lack of proper regard for authority verged on impertinence. The trouble was, this view missed the genuine character of the supposed impertinence, revealing as much about the observer as it did about the observed.

Convicts and free settlers formed the bulk of the population from the beginning of the Colony. So, we are not merely discussing convicts when explaining Australians’ perceived disregard for authority. The circumstances faced by both groups—striving for survival—placed them on an equal footing. This necessity for cooperation was vital for both safety and social cohesion, particularly as settlers and emancipated convicts ventured into rural areas. From this essential cooperation emerged the concept of mateship, a distinctive characteristic of Australians. Popular writer Henry Lawson highlighted Australian mateship in his narratives of the bush’s adversities and tragedies. This notion of mateship is echoed in an observer’s remark during the First World War that Australians went into battle in a team formation. It was not that Australians possessed a disregard for authority, but rather that they reacted from an undeniable egalitarian stance in their interactions. All of this has been elaborated upon in the earlier chapters.

Australians could sense airs and graces in the gentlest breeze and would rarely hesitate to parody unwarranted expressions of superiority. It was more than the reaction of the so-called larrikin; Australian society began as a classless society and would remain so. The reader might recall that convict John Boyle had no trouble approaching Governor Phillip about his missing ‘opussum’—and receiving a sympathetic hearing. Of course, there are ignorant Australians who do not know how to behave, but rude and ignorant behaviour is not an assertion of equality. The sense of being on the same level is often mistaken for anti-authoritarianism. This kind of egalitarianism was perhaps the crucial factor in the ontological modification of Australian Britishness.

There are Australians who, in the name of equality, separate themselves into an elite class and believe they are entitled to sling off at anything English, identifying the English with the British, which are not the same. It is as if they feel they cannot be truly Australian without the put-down. In the 1890s, a bevy of writers attached to the nationalist Bulletin revelled in mocking the English, especially those hinting at an upper-class background. An Englishman arriving in Australia with his nose in the air is fair game for Australian parody and satire. Such self-delusion and petty arrogance were as much the target of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, who were far more ruthless and proficient satirists than the Bulletin’s provincial scribblers.

The Bulletin satirists seemed unaware that a crass put-down of all things English and the mockery of Australians accused of emulating the English were, in turn, deserving of satire. Exposing himself to the same ridicule that he directed at so many in his Short History of Australia, Manning Clark sided with the Bulletin’s satirists. With approval, he quoted the judgement of Francis Adams, ‘an English man of letters’ who lived in Australia between 1884 and 1889. What Adams observed about the Australians, wrote Clark, was their ‘Britishness.’

The first thing that struck me on walking about Sydney one afternoon … was the appalling strength of the British civilisation … Everywhere are the thumb marks and the great toe marks of the six fingered six-toed giant … These people in Sydney have clung not only to the faith but to the very raiment of their giant. The same flowing dresses, cumbrous on the women, hideous on the men, that we see in England! … the same food, the same overeating, and overdrinking, and (observe how careful we are) at the same hours …

In this unconsidered caricature, Adams is right to notice the Britishness of Australians and to identify the force of ‘British Civilisation.’ What seems beyond his comprehension is that the key features of British Civilisation are endlessly adaptable, as would be evident to the observer visiting New Zealand, Canada, and the United States at that time. I conclude the only Australians he saw were those in the central business districts of the main cities, perceived only at arm’s length, accompanied by a typical sense of superiority. Fashion may have been the same in Sydney as in London, but it was the same in Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam as well. The more telling point is that fashion merely clothes the man. Further inquiry and a little closer observation would have revealed that the British Australian was not the same as the Englishman in his bowler hat pressing through the drizzle and smog on a winter’s morning in London.

 This book presents an extensive argument against Adams’s perspective on Australians and his understanding of British civilisation. It is likely that he never encountered an Australian like my great-grandfather, John McGroder, the son of illiterate convicts and seven times mayor of his flourishing country town [Molong]. Or my great-great-grandfather, James Joseph Wilson, who, according to my Great-Uncle Percy, was ‘a fine figure of a man’ and in a portrait taken late in life was hardly distinguishable from the Fathers of Federation. James Joseph Wilson exemplifies this point. From the status of a determined thief, he underwent a radical transformation influenced by the Australian social and physical environment. He adapted and modified the essentials of the culture he had left behind in London. His legacy to his descendants was the transformation of his character. He might have dressed in the style of the leading political figures in the Colony, but upon closer inspection, there was no possibility of confusing him with a Briton from the British Isles.

My grandfather, Clarence Steele (1894-1970), was, outwardly, the most British member of my immediate family. He went everywhere dressed in a navy three-piece suit, with a pocket watch and chain attached to his vest. He held strict views on matters of decorum and cast disapproving looks at those who transgressed. Clarry Steele was raised in rural Galong. Throughout his working life, he was a respected employee of the New South Wales Railways. He would never have been mistaken for an Englishman of a similar social standing in Denham, Buckinghamshire, where his great-grandfather, Frederick Meredith, was born.

If Adams had confused just these three of my ancestors with the British in England, Scotland, or indeed Ireland, then he had a problem of perception or prejudice—or perhaps both. His misapprehension becomes more pronounced when it is possible that some of those people dressed in what he perceives as British ‘raiment’ were of non-British ancestry. At the time, Australia welcomed migrants from numerous non-British nations. They and their descendants became Australians by embracing Australia’s modified system of government, its institutions, manners, customs, and traditions. Ethnicity or national background does not dictate Australianness, though one migrant’s background may integrate more seamlessly with Australian society than another’s. After providing numerous pages of evidence and argument, I need not labour the point.

Most Australians railed against the unqualified depiction of them as British, despite their frequent references to the British Isles as ‘home.’ However, objecting to the identification of Australians with the British without discrimination was not the same as mocking all things British simply because an elite class believed Australians should be anything but British. Manning Clark asks, ‘if the Australians were not British, what were they?’ He poses a crucial question. He considers whether Lawson has created the (non-British) Australian in his short stories but finds he has come up short. Lawson, he said, concerned himself ‘only with the problems of provincials.’ He [Lawson] ‘applauded the same philistine qualities observers had criticised in British middle-class society.’ It is revealing that Clark sneeringly narrows national character to the qualities of the middle class—qualities that the enlightened ones deemed worthy of contempt.

If there is any doubt about Clark’s intellectual and theoretical basis, he dispels it by accusing Lawson of ‘failing to deal with the universal problems of man in a capitalist society deprived of the consolations of religion.’ He would more accurately have referred to a ‘materialist’ society, depriving the people of the consolations of religion. This is precisely how the leading Catholics perceived it. In brief, Clark’s method of analysing national character is Marxist. In his account of the rise of workers’ and employers’ organisations, the collapse of the banks, and the debates leading up to Federation, he employs the method of dialectical materialism, focusing on class conflict. The crux of his critique is that neither Lawson nor the politicians adhered to the dialectic. The issue is that a particular national character, as distinct from any other, dissolves in the dialectic.

Leaving aside Clark’s self-serving move from the concrete issue of national character to the abstract consideration of universal man and his problems, I acknowledge that he is free to apply a Marxist analysis to Australian society. However, I find it baffling that an academic historian of Manning Clark’s stature should act as if there is no other way to interpret Australian history. As I have already briefly discussed, Edmund Burke’s vigorous response to the theories that underwrote the French Revolution provided just such a means of challenging any abstract political theory. He questioned the revolutionaries’ understanding of human reason, human nature, of man in society, and of how state and society are constituted. He addressed man and society in the concrete. There was no other man, he claimed, other than the man in the concrete circumstances of everyday life.

In addressing the French revolutionaries of 1789, he said, ‘You have theories enough concerning the rights of men—it may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their nature and disposition. It is with man in the concrete: —it is with common human life, and human actions, you are to be concerned.’ Reasoning about social and political issues is not merely a linear mathematical process. A person’s natural moral feeling and moral imagination are constantly engaged. Communities and societies do not materialise from nothing, nor are they established according to the provisions of an abstract theory that enables fictitious architects to dissolve and renew them at any given time.

No, a particular society forms over time through many adjustments involving the arts, literature, traditions, customs, institutions, and forms of government. These reflect the wishes and inclinations of a community of individuals. The process is so lengthy and varied that the reasons for all adjustments and developments become obscured by time. One can, indeed, discuss how third-person reasoning partly guides development. It is absurd to think that Australians and Australian society could be anything other than a product of growth and development from the British societal forms brought by the First Fleet.

The issue was how those forms—customs, traditions, the rule of law, equality before the law, rights and obligations, democratic government, and so on—would be concretised over time and within the Australian context. Once established, they served as guides. They were prescriptive, allowing for further development but preventing radical interference unless dictated by the most ineluctable moral necessity that called for radical change. To indiscriminately rummage through the established concrete forms of one’s society, blindly adhering to the provisions of one theory or another, is both ignorant and irresponsible.

To approach society and national character in this Burkean manner, as I have done, is to discover and preserve Australia’s national character in its uniqueness. Manning Clark, by contrast, sought to subject Australian society to the cleansing fires of class conflict in pursuit of some dream of socialist utopia—a global society uncompromisingly levelled. All differences and distinguishing characteristics evaporate in the socialist inferno. Would it be different in a liberalism founded on Thomas Paine’s conception of the free and equal man enjoying unlimited rights in the state of nature?

In the campaign for a democratically elected government by manhood suffrage, echoes of the rhetoric from Paine’s The Rights of Man resonate. The radically free and equal man in the state of nature is man in the abstract, possessing the abstract right to construct, renew, or dissolve state and society according to his will. No established structures—particularly governments rooted in tradition, religion, and customs—can impede his path. To allow established ways to dictate would be to deny man’s freedom and equality, which, in Paine’s terms, is enslavement. In circumstances where all concrete elements of state and society are theoretically rescindable at the behest of will, national character would be thoroughly unstable—in fact, unidentifiable.

In theory, it could scarcely differ under a liberalism based on J.S. Mill’s principle of utility, which many consider classical liberalism. If a principle of utility—the balance of good over evil—determines what is deemed useful (approved) in society, then, theoretically, no established arrangement could withstand Mill’s utilitarian calculus. Social stability and community cohesion are perpetually in balance. A distinct national character would struggle to emerge, while an established one would be constantly under threat.

The crucial point is that philosophical materialism underpins each of the three theories—socialism, classical liberalism, and liberalism based on Paine’s subjective individualistic abstract rights in the state of nature. This materialism accounts for the precariousness of identity. It does not allow the anchor of enduring social forms and an objective moral framework. Of course, whatever some theorists might say or infer about national character, the ordinary person insists he perceives distinct national characters. This only indicates that a Burkean analysis, which incorporates the integrity and prescription of established arrangements lived by its people, is at least on the right track. No matter how destructive materialist theories of state and society may be, they will not fully overcome nature, understood in the Burkean sense.

Following what I have termed a Burkean analysis in tracing my family ancestry within the development of the Australian state and society, I have identified two levels of character. One is national character, or macro-character, and the other is individual family character, or micro-character. The latter exists within and contributes to the former. Individuals, having their natural place in families, help to build a sense of national character, however challenging that may be to define in precise, rationalistic terms. The elements of Britishness, modified and diversified by the specific circumstances of the Australian social environment, remain recognisable as distinctly Australian. My family ancestors contributed to the evolution of that Australianness in their unique ways, yet their shared qualities remained remarkably consistent over more than a century …