'The Declaration of She’ll Be Right'

There are few documents in history to match the USA’s Declaration of Independence. Inked in that marvellous calligraphy, in the 18th century equivalent of neon lights, is a set of words and ideas with which to found a great nation.

In hindsight then, it’s a pity the British didn’t arrest Thomas Jefferson at the outbreak of the War of Independence, and, after a decade’s incarceration, had him transported with the First Fleet to Port Jackson. Had Jefferson been part of Australia’s foundation, and had he bequeathed to us a document so purposeful, so fine and so powerful, how fortunate we might have been. Imagine Jefferson working by lamplight, under southern skies, drafting the Declaration of She’ll Be Right. What truths would we, the people of Australia, hold to be self-evident?

This article seeks to develop the idea, found in over two centuries of scholarship that our thoughts and feeling about Australia derive not from geography or genealogy, but rather as a creation, literally, of literature. Or, as Honoré de Balzac put it, “[t]he novel is the private history of nations”.

How so? When it comes to understanding what a nation is, Walter Bagehot said, “[w]e know what it is when you do not ask us, but we cannot very quickly explain or define it”. But this has not stopped a great many scholars attempting to do just that - and the results are both counter-intuitive and enlightening.

As an historical artefact, most trace the roots of modern nations to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. But as a cultural artefact, the picture is far less settled. The current prevailing view is that nations are a contingent, not a necessary fact of human existence; yet this view usually encounters unalloyed hostility from most national citizens. Such a claim indeed requires justification, because each of us subjectively feel as though the nations of which we are members have some existence separate from us and are somehow ageless. Yet M.N. Roy reminds us:

[N]ation has no meaning apart from the men and women composing it ... “We shall defend our nation to the last drop of blood,” declaims the leader of every nation. May we ask “what have we defended when the last drop of blood has been shed?”

E.J. Hobsbawm, a Marxist scholar, provided an etymology of the term “nation”, demonstrating that it did not appear in dictionaries with its familiar usage until the mid-late 19th century. Indeed, he explains that in many non-European languages, “nation” is a foreign loan word for which there is no native equivalent. Another major contribution was Ernest Gellner’s study which identified the preconditions of the modern nation-state - urbanisation and mass-education - as originating from the industrial revolution.

Lest anybody think that such views of nationhood are some sort of flaky Marxist or postmodernist plaything, I point out that antecedents of this view date from as early as 1882, when French philosopher Ernest Renan demonstrated the artificiality of nations by showing that their borders rarely align with anthropologically valid human divisions such as linguistic, ethnic, geographic or cultural groupings. This led Renan to conclude that nations are contingent entities, and are no more durable than the idea of co-nationhood which sustains them.

And, turning back now towards literary matters, we find a useful clue in Benedict Anderson’s theory of “print-capitalism”, which invokes a critical role for literature in the development of national identity. Here, the durability of the printed word is what creates our subjective feeling of the agelessness and permanence of our nation.

Through print-capitalism, the argument goes, we develop a compelling sensation that out there are “fellow-readers, to whom [we are] connected through print”.

A telling example of this at work in Australia is the only broadsheet which is available from Sydney to Perth and Darwin to Adelaide; the masthead of which is none other than The Australian. But in what sense do we imagine The Australian to be Australian? The US location of its stock and the foreign citizenship of its owner seem insufficiently compelling reasons to dislodge from our imagination the newspaper’s “Australian-ness”: that arises from nothing less or more than the invocation of its masthead, and the community of which its readers imagine themselves to be part.

Thanks to the seeming permanence of text, and the ritual repetition of ideas, there is a corresponding durability in national identities. In the Australian case, we see that the ideas of 19th century nationalist Bernard O’Dowd, whose paeans to “mateship”, the “exclusion of elements likely to make trouble” and protecting our seas from “foreign neighbours” are reflected, unchanged, in the 21st century by none other than the Australian Prime Minister.

We see also that the pages of The Bulletin circa 1886-1900, resound with arguments about perceived threats from foreign labourers, the plight of “the Aborigine”, and the relative merits of forming a republic. Most of these arguments are repeated today, unchanged, in forums such as On Line Opinion. Our national discourse appears to have crystalised circa 1885.

Nick Mansfield demonstrates how this kind of thinking, and the literature that it produces, effect to resolve ambiguous, distressing or complex historical questions into unquestioned grand narratives. Thus the plight of Australian Aborigines can be resolved into a “noble failure” of European peoples to “elevate” them. And wholesale environmental devastation can be portrayed as an heroic conquering of a harsh, unforgiving land.

Mansfield describes this process, rather kindly, as “self-authentication” - though I call it begging the question.

A stark example of self-authentication is seen in the narrative insistence that “the British colonised Australia in 1788”, a temporal impossibility since the name for the continent was first suggested by the first man known to have circumnavigated it in 1791 - Matthew Flinders. Thus the notion that “the British arrived in Australia in 1788” retrospectively writes into history and literature a name that had not then been considered and a nation that did not then exist, nor did exist until 1901. Self-authentication indeed.

Of course, none of this academic hand-wringing prevents us from dreaming the idea of Australia as a kind of secular religion. The modern mindset, informed by liberal humanist values yet still rooted in our innate tribalism, has sought to substitute the nation for God, as the “something bigger” to which all humans seek to belong. The nation has become, in Joseph Conrad’s words, that which “redeems” the wars and conquests carried out its name. In Heart of Darkness, Marlowe explained that the sins of imperialism were redeemed by:

[a]n idea at the back of it … something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to …

... Whether it be Britannia, Uncle Sam or Dorothea MacKellar’s “sunburnt country”.

Those who doubt the central importance of literature in national identity would do well to remember that much of the formal academic study of English, and most English departments and professorships, were instituted as recently as the late 19th century, driven by the perceived urgency to define a unified cultural inheritance to which all “Englishman” could lay claim: and which in fact bound other non-English populations - Welsh, Scots, and indeed Australians - into an imagined cultural and political unity with “mother England”.

These ties are, literally, fictions - the fictions of Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and Pope - yet many earnestly put the view that these works metaphysically bind their readers together. How otherwise serious scholars can entertain such mysticism is unclear, but the idea is quite contagious.

The seemingly eternal canon we study has only been thought of as such for a scant several generations: since the likes of Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot decided what literary artefacts qualified as good English. This co-opting of literature into the service of English nationalism was inspired by rival political pressures emanating from France and Germany, whose scholars, such as Goethe, had “awakened” (sic) national consciousness by focussing heavily on the literary output of their countrymen.

In fact they had not “awakened” anything - they had created it from the whole-cloth of novels and poems. Even describing “national consciousness” in terms of “awakening” presupposes there was some eternal, slumbering thing there, waiting to be roused, when in fact it was called into being by the very act of enquiry.

But how seductive the nationalist ideal remains. Let us examine briefly the arguments of those who seek to ground a nation’s essence in its geography or language, oblivious to the siren call of literature.

Frederic Loliee’s 1906 work, entitled, apparently without irony, A Short History Of Comparative Literature From The Earliest Times To The Present Day, contained a view of national literature, common at the time, that is based upon deterministic and essentialist assumptions. He regaled the reader at length with the “relative imperfections” of the “Oriental mind”, the “Greek genius and its weaker side”, and the features the “French mind”, “German thought”, “Anglo-Saxon talent” and so on, assembling laundry lists of poets and novelists that each nation could claim as its own, as though the corpus of literature was territory to be staked out and divided in line with imperial practice.

Through such windy and circular dissertation, Loliee saw fit to claim in a scholarly work that a sense of refined cultural “[t]aste ... is an essentially French faculty”, leaving the reader to wonder where, in the neurophysiology of a French person, this marvellous organ is to be found.

A fashion by 20th century scholars such as S.S.Prawer was to use close linguistic analysis to discern alleged national “essences”, producing such post-hoc claims as Latin having the sound of “a great nation” because its frugality of articles, pronouns and prepositions gave a “harder, more purposeful sound”.

Prawer also cited Wilma Muir’s claim of the “will to power” supposedly inherent in German, claiming that the hierarchical linguistic structures of German gave rise to a culture of subordination and control.

While it can indeed be plausibly submitted that language “limits our world” by demarcating the boundaries of possible thought, it is quite another thing to claim a causative behavioural link. Moreover, when theorists ascribe national character to the local language, it amounts to a circular (and sinister) claim that a people cannot be other than they are, because their language makes them so.

Such arguments echo the discredited essentialist theories of J. Gottfried Herder, circa 1780, who ascribed “national” characteristics to local climatic or geographic conditions, in a kind of environmental chauvinism, viz:

... it is obvious to everyone that the region of the most perfectly formed people is a middle region of the earth, lying, like beauty itself, between two extremes [where] ... a mild regularity of the seasons appears to have great influence on tempering the passions ... [whereas] the predatory Turcomans, who roam the deserts or the mountains, retain a hideous countenance even in the mildest climate.

What predictions, I wonder, would Herder have made about Australian people, based on our climate?

To conclude, perhaps we should return to the never-written "Declaration of She’ll Be Right", in which we Australians hold to be self-evident the truths that: everybody on the dole is a bludger; the Prime Minister is a bastard but he’s a better bastard than that other bastard; foreigners are alright but why don’t they speak English and why can’t they drive; this is the greatest country in the world; and I’m not racist but.

In this light, we can see that there is no binding parchment for Australia, and perhaps there never should be, in a land where people truly value freedom.

For it is a totalitarian fantasy to insist upon certain values all Australians must hold in common. I shall not therefore venture to assert some statement of what creeds Australians “should” hold, for to do so would be in conflict with another principle I consider to be rather more precious and more fragile; namely freedom of thought.

I shall leave it to others to carry the cudgels of the thought police: if others wish to make declarations about what thoughts are permissible in our free and democratic society, then they must accept the label of totalitarians, else that term has no meaning whatsoever.