Holding the nation together

by James Curran

Published by Melbourne University Press 2004

Launching The Power of Speech
Richard Wherret Studio, Sydney Theatre, 6 May 2004

The Honourable Mr Bob Hawke AC, former Prime Minister of Australia, and Ms Blanche D'Alpuget

Mr Ian Harris, Clerk of the House of Representatives

Ms Louise Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Publishing

Esteemed members of the press

Ladies and Gentlemen

Thank you all very much for coming this evening - especially those of you who have journeyed some distance to be here.

Firstly I would like to express my gratitude to Mr Hawke for launching the book this evening - and indeed for two important discussions that I had with him during my research for this book - my abiding impression is of your willingness to engage in an argument about the issues of leadership, the nation, its history and how your own world-view was shaped.

And I would like to thank author, political historian and Editor-at-Large of The Australian newspaper, Mr Paul Kelly, who is also here tonight, for writing the foreword to this work - I pay tribute to the ongoing depth and breadth of his contribution to political knowledge and political debate in this country.

In thanking the CEO of Melbourne University Publishing, Louise Adler, I would also like to acknowledge the staff of Melbourne University Publishing and express my appreciation for the dynamism and professionalism they bring to their field.

I am particularly grateful to MUP's managing editor, Sybil Nolan, who was an engaging and challenging scrutinizer of the text.

Many have helped along me throughout the writing of this book- and I remain indebted to them all:

To my mother and father, Jeannie Addison and Bernie Curran, who shaped me and made me aware of the world, both ancient and modern, and who passed on to me their own love of language and respect for words.

To Elwyn and Silvana Elms for their unstinting support and generosity over the years - it is characteristic of Silvana's selflessness that she chose to be in Canberra tonight to look after Pia.

To Paul, Janice and Patrick Curran for the magnificence of their hospitality during research trips to Canberra.

To the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library and the Australian Academy of the Humanities for their invaluable support and for publication subsidies.

And to Neville Meaney for his guidance on a great and illuminating scholarly journey that began in February 1997 - I am sure current and former PhD students will agree with me that Neville's monthly Balmain seminars were convivial yet compelling, occasionally light-hearted yet unfailingly rigorous.

And I think they would also agree that the Meaney approach to history - that we should first and foremost ask the right questions, avoid absolutes, and recognise that because history is always a 'focus of passion, a field for argument and a basis for judgement', that all the historian can hope to achieve is to 'mediate the passion, clarify the argument and enlighten the judgement'.

On this occasion, it would not be entirely unreasonable to ask: why another book about national identity?

And it would not be unreasonable to ask further: why another book about Australian prime ministers?

I hope that this book provides some answers to these and other questions, because, like American historian Robert Dallek in his recent biography of Jack Kennedy, I too agree with the observation that 'the outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before.'

My question in this book is to ask how Australia's prime ministers have defined the nation and its place in the world.

How their own pasts have shaped the way they think about the nation - and what holds it together.

And how their speeches can illuminate much about the general problem of how to understand Australia's experience of nationalism.

Now suspicion of rhetoric has been with us since Plato, but it has become all too easy to dismiss a politician's words as 'mere' or 'empty' rhetoric, a grab bag of platitudes designed to trick or manipulate the people. It's too easy to argue that they'll simply say anything, anywhere, anytime, as long as there is a vote in it.

This is persiflage. It demeans the importance of rhetoric and its capacity to give expression to the ideas and the words that give meaning to the life of the nation. It ignores rhetoric as the vital nexus between the government and the people.

This issue of 'national identity' continues to be one of the great historical problems in Australian political culture.

Why is this so? Why is it still so troublesome? Two reasons, I believe, can help us in understanding this phenomenon.

Firstly, because the intensity of the British race patriotism that was for so long the focus of Australian loyalties is so at odds with the conventional wisdom that Australia has been multicultural from the beginning - it is as if to even contemplate Australia's Britishness is to risk being labeled old-hat, or a closet monarchist, or someone aiming to reestablish the Australian branch of the League of Empire Loyalists.

Secondly, because it is an affront to many that when this idea of Britishness imploded in the 1960s, there was not a sufficiently clear or strong sense of Australian nationalism waiting in the wings, ready to swoop down and carry the nation towards independence and that Eldorado of all nationalists, the satisfaction of being 'a nation at last'.

And the result has been that the identity debate has so often been characterised by an emotional muddle and a rhetorical dilemma.

The Prime Ministers, for the most part, have approached this question of nationalism and community in different ways.

The option of skirting gingerly around the problem of identity has not been an option for them.

It has been fundamental to their time in office.

And this is what this book is about - their struggle to come to terms with the changing circumstances and how they communicated this change to the Australian people.

It's a process that can help us to think beyond the stereotypes so often attached to those who've occupied the Lodge.

And so:

Rather than think of Whitlam as the fervent nationalist unleashing waves of bombastic flag-waving to the tune of Little Pattie and the It's Time jingle - think more about Whitlam as the great internationalist - the one who actually wanted a 'benign and constructive nationalism' for Australia that meant generosity at home and promoting mutual respect between nations abroad;

Rather than think of Malcolm Fraser's line 'Life wasn't meant to be easy' as symptomatic of old-fashioned, hard-edged tory paternalism, think more about it as the mantra of a Cold war warrior - with Arnold Toynbee in his back pocket - fearful of Soviet hegemony and concerned that the West was succumbing to the same complacency that allowed Hitler to catapult the world into total war in the 1930s;

Rather than think of Bob Hawke as a folksy populist calling for a national consensus, think about how his Congregationalist faith conditioned a commitment to the 'brotherhood of man' and the way in which Hawke connected this to a view of social democracy, and think about a young man who at Oxford immersed himself in Australia's distinctive labour tradition of the 1890s - the moment when Labour opted for parliament over the picket lines; think about a political figure who was originally seen as being on the left of the union movement presiding over the transformation of the Australian economy in the 1980s.

Rather than think of Paul Keating as the epitome of the NSW Labor right and as one of the architects of Australia's economic liberation, think also about his tribal appeals to an old-left radical nationalism, as the possessor of a national story that had heroes and villains, vandals and vagabonds, Horatios and Humbugs, and which was still awaiting, impatiently, the great moment of Australian independence.

Inevitably in taking this study right up to the present, there will be the question of distance. And there will be the ongoing question of what role historians have to play in helping Australians to understand the present:

Allow me only to say this, that I agree absolutely with the great historian and hero of the French resistance - Marc Bloch, who wrote in his classic work, The Historian's Craft, that 'the scholar who has no inclination to observe the men, the things, or the events around him will perhaps deserve the title of a useful antiquarian...he would be wise to renounce all claims to that of a historian.'

I hope this book will stimulate further debate on these central figures;

On the vital importance of rhetoric as that which shapes the political culture of the nation; and

On the necessity to think rigorously about the idea of nationalism.

But above all this evening, I wish to thank my wife Priscilla - who has been the ultimate source of strength and comfort through the life of this work, who has had to deal with all the angst and the worry, which I am extremely good at, and who has never once complained at all the times when we had to sacrifice time together for the sake of the book. I thank her for all the reassurance, the patience and her rock solid conviction in my ability to finish it. I simply could not have done this without you.

Thank You.