I was walking to the bus the other day when an old man stopped me. He had been replacing a Rotary Club sign, and he was grumpy because the sign he was replacing had been damaged by vandals. We were in the grounds of a local Matric college (the last two years of high school, here in Australia) and he was convinced that those students were his problem.
As our conversation progressed it became clear that his problem was a lot broader than that. He was 89 years old and had left school at 13, fought in New Guinea in the second world war, and was bitter about a lot of things. In particular he hated children (he mimed the blows their parents should have given them) and the Japanese (who had shot him in the ankle and were in his opinion cannibals). On the other hand he did have warm feelings towards his wife, now dead two years. He mentioned rather wistfully that although they had been married for 34 years he hadn’t really appreciated her until she was gone.
The old man represents a vanishing side of Australia. He’s been working since he was 11. He’s generally been poor and without opportunities for education. He grew up at a time when Australia was the white colony of a global British Empire, in a monoculture of simple unquestioned values. I admire many of those values – they’re about shared hardship, care for friends, and straightforward sincerity. But it was also a racist, anti-intellectual, close-minded culture which denigrated achievement and did not reach beyond its narrow aspirations. Since then the working class intellectuals and the artists and most of all the migrants have transformed Australia, bringing a forward thinking, compassionate, rich and vibrant culture to the cities.
People like the old man had been left behind. They feel excluded, too, and resentful of a society which cares about things in which they have no interest and envisions a future they can’t imagine. But the old man is not by any means alone. He is allied, for sure, with my brother.
It took me a while to notice because the specifics were different, but my brother has very much the same general feeling about our culture. If you can put an engine in it, or a beer in it, or a bet on it, then there’s a point to it. It’s a simple enough philosophy and it seems to give my brother a great deal of satisfaction. Where I get uncomfortable is that anything else is seen as a threat. Foreigners, intellectuals, art, science, philosophy – that’s somehow snobbish, belittling, and suspect. My brother and I maintain a sufficiently warm relationship by simply never going there, and at the same time his attitudes bother me and he considers me vaguely condescending.
I think of all this as a sad loss. You see my brother is right, to a certain extent, about progressive culture in Australia. It is condescending and it’s lost those really essential heart values that the old man grew up amongst. It has replaced compassion with obligation, exercised through the state. It values show ahead of shared achievement. It values words over sincerity.
But he and the old man have been conned by the neo-cons. Their innate conservatism and narrow mindedness have been used to make fear and greed preeminent in society. The best of the traditional values are simply empty clichés, and Australia has been taken back to all the bad parts of 1950. Muslims are mistrusted. Intellectuals are mistrusted. Even the unions are mistrusted. Society is less equal and less fair than ever. It’s wedge politics and it’s been spectacularly successful. I think Australia has lost its conscience and its heart. The old man and my brother feel disenfranchised, and the cultural, intellectual, and progressive are becoming isolated and irrelevant. But they, not the media bosses and the politicians, are natural allies.
So it’s time that we remembered the day when learning and ideas belonged to us all. It’s time we remembered that mateship is not a slogan but a way of life. Prejudices have driven wedges between us, but each old man was a child once and we have more in common than religion or ethnicity or education or social outlook. We really are all in this together.
The old man showed me just how much we have been taught to hate, but we have always known how to love and it’s very infectious. Time we each practised that instead.