Pursuing the Popular in Australian History

Raymond Evans Clive Moore

Late in 1895, Mark Twain, as an ailing, financially desperate and emotionally depressed man of sixty years, visited the Australian colonies as part of a speaking tour of the Pacific. In the book he subsequently wrote of his travels, Following The Equator, Twain devoted a deal of attention to his Australian experiences and to recording his impressions, as a nineteenth century American, of the Australian char- acter. As an off-shoot culture of the British Isles, Twain noted, these colonials always spoke of Great Britain affectionately as “Home,” as though Australasia were “a young girl stroking mother England’s old gray head.” Yet in many other respects-“dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general appear- ance”-Australians did not seem to differ too markedly from Americans. Their manners were “easy and cordial,” their table-talk “vivacious and unembarrassed” with all the conventional English stiffness, shyness and self-consciousness largely absent.

Yet there was also enough local variation apparent for Twain to be constantly aware that he was in neither London nor New York. Indeed, as an alert visitor, he found the country full of “fascinating things to look at and think about”-things that were “SO strange, so weird, so uncommonplace” that they provided “startling ... con- trast to other sections of the planet.” On the one hand were the Aboriginal inhabi- tants of the Australian mainland and Tasmania who, he wrote, were “wonderful people” and “marvellously interesting creatures”; while, on the other, was the entire, diverting legacy of European culture in the Antipodes. Australian history, although dealing savagely with Aboriginal peoples, Twain observed, was in itself so curious and picturesque that it pushed other local novelties “into second or third place”:

It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh and new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contra- dictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

The Australian people themselves, however, did not seem to be particularly com- fortable with their historical uniqueness. They badgered Twain to exasperation with the question of whether they were more like Britishers or Americans. They spoke in “an unconsciously caressing way” of their British roots. They feted Twain unabashedly as a visitor from a more advanced, exciting overseas culture. And, when encouraged to offer information about themselves, they often felt impelled to

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fabricate. “Local liars” in South Australia told Twain that Adelaide had once recorded a temperature of 172 degrees Fahrenheit. In Melbourne, he was informed that Victoria’s one million people each drank twenty-five bottles of champagne per annum. At Albury in New South Wales Twain sat marvelling from his railway car- riage at the “divine” color of the Blue Mountains-“a softly luminous blue, a smouldering blue, as if vaguely lit by fires within”*nly to be roughly brought back to earth by a local who swore that these were not mountains at all but simply piles of dead rabbits whose exposure and “over-ripe” condition made them appear so ethereally blue.

The tendency to defer constantly to the cultures of others and to lie either dis- paragingly or boastfully about their own implied that Australians of the time were substantially unsure of themselves and unimpressed with a sense of their own self- worth. Only misrepresentation of the place, it was believed, carried sufficient authority to divert or impress. Aboriginal cultures were generally disdained and the Australian environment itself was distrusted and unappreciated. The Australian story was devalued in comparison with the sweeping global saga of British Imperialism or the rambunctious manifestations of American expansionism. Many Australians felt themselves dwarfed by the world. After all, at the time of Twain’s tour, there were only three and one half million of them inhabiting a land-mass the same size as the United States. They were profoundly alienated geographically from their Western origins, closely abutting Asian and Pacific cultures which they feared and detested. Privately they sensed that a contact history of little more than one hun- dred years provided them with little depth of identification with their adopted land. They struggled fitfully to find defining moments with which to celebrate their singu- larity.

Yet the very factors which communicated their special nature to the astonished gaze of outsiders like Twain often tended to be overlooked or dismissed. Some of these, such as the long tradition of convictism or tales of the dispossession of Aborigines, were believed best left alone for honour’s sake. Others, such as the anti- transportation struggles, the Eureka crisis (when rebel gold-miners had clashed with constituted authority) or the massive industrial disputes of the 1890s also provided little cause for civic pride. Even more tellingly, however, Australians failed to per- ceive that their most enduring images of distinctiveness lay in the everyday com- monalities of their urban and rural lives. They missed the compelling irony that what seemed to themselves least exceptional about themselves appeared most arrest- ing to others. Their popular culture, thereby, became the least examined aspect of their social existence, even though, through such an examination, their truly defin- ing characteristics were most likely to be revealed.

Australian history itself has also been very slow to come to terms with the truism that the most compelling observations can often arise from a thoroughgoing investigation of the obvious. To begin with, Australian historians spent a long time grappling with uncertainty about whether their country actually had a history of any kind worth studying, resulting in its academic teaching and sustained research being mainly a post-war phenomenon. Secondly, they labored under elitist assumptions that the popular equated only with vulgar and intellectually unrewarding pursuits, so their uneasy reactions towards even the best their society had to offer were com-

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pounded when considering its “low-brow” cultural activities. In Australian acade- mic eyes, therefore, popular culture became rather like poisoned earth-toxic and infertile. There was absolutely no point in cultivating it intellectually.

Yet the paradoxical position that studying the Australian people should not nec- essarily involve studying what most of those people did for most of the time could not be maintained forever. As official, mainstream historiography ceded gradually and grudgingly to labor history, people’s history, women’s history, Aboriginal, race and ethnic relations history, gay history, cultural studies and the like, the elitist fal- lacy was increasingly laid bare. Perhaps the study of the ordinary, the subjectively familiar, could, after all, reveal complex and extraordinary insights across time and place. Perhaps the common assumption of inferiority was in itself a cultural blind which camouflaged popular culture’s compelling nuances, its creative flexibility, its emotional and bodily pleasures, its categories of manipulation, its window onto past and present lived experience or even into the national soul.

What the historians had traditionally disdained, moreover, librarians and archivists had similarly and almost uniformly ignored, so the problem of popular culture’s academic elevation lay not simply in historiographical rectification but even more profoundly with the availability of sources. For popular culture was gen- erally treated as it was so widely regarded-as disposable rubbish. Films, television productions and radio performances had often been either wantonly destroyed or simply allowed to rot. Comic books, popular magazines, pulp literature and ephemera were regularly considered not worth keeping. The circus, music hall, vaudeville and burlesque had ceded no sustained archives or centralized collections. Popular musical recordings only survived perilously in private holdings.

Several of the pieces in this collection directly address this basic problem of accessing fugitive sources. David Headon, for instance, examines snippets of sur- viving silent f i lm-one as short as ten seconds in length-which fleetingly reveal Australian sporting icons; while Jeff Brownrigg reviews the vast popular recording retinue of music hall performers, Florrie Ford and Billy Williams, only tenuously preserved on fragile wax cylinders. Alan Mayne and Tim Murray explore silences of a different kind-revealing how urban archaeology has been creatively employed to revivify the often historically mute cultures of “Slumdom and Brotheldom” in inner-city Melbourne and to display glimpses of “the real,” normally obscured by the attraction of the stereotype. Other writers show how fruitfully the popular may be accessed through either historical moments of transgression or celebration. For it is at such times that the greatest amplification of sources occurs. Ian Duffield’s examination of the “jester” convict, “Billy Blue” reveals how study of the transgres- sive individual can illumine both patterns of public power and more hidden instances of private being, thus rescuing the socially lowly from historical oblivion. Richard Waterhouse and Maryanne McCubbin both choose expressive, celebratory instances, in 1913 and 1934, respectively, to investigate fluid interchanges between rural and urban cultures on the one hand and imperial and national mythmaking on the other.

Yet others approach the challenge of researching the popular historically via the personal and experiential. Thus John Rickard’s boyhood fascination with radio broadcasts of wrestling contests provides the vehicle for a wider overview of profes-

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sional wrestling in Australia from the 1900s to the 1950s; and Judith Smart’s own tussles with her youthful soul before the persuasive onslaught of the Billy Graham Crusade opens a path to an historio-sociological investigation of the latter’s barn- storming presence in late-Fifties Australia. Wendy Holland, in turn, intensely per- sonalizes her quest into the puzzle of Harry Cardella, a famous Australian eques- trian performer, in order to explore the historically shifting phenomena of Aboriginality, the often pitiless world of Australian race relations and, ultimately, her own identity as one of Cardella’s descendants; while Ann McGrath re-enters her adolescence by virtue of a well-thumbed copy of The Female Eunuch and a disarm- ingly frank teenage diary, compiled in 1972. In the process, she speculatively reviews the methodological pitfalls and insights of self-reflexivity for historians, as they are simultaneously situated as interrogators of the cultural past and as self- disclosing artifacts and subjects of that past.

Both Holland’s and McGrath’s contributions also reveal how inextricably cul- tural studies are linked with perceptions of race and gender. In an ethnically diverse and gender divided society-not to mention a class-structured one-such connec- tions are indisputable. Holland’s piece, in particular, adds a new dimension to the ongoing Australian debate about stolen Aboriginal children by her reflections upon whether the circus world functioned as a haven or realm of exploitation for the Aboriginal worker. Other contributors also examine potent racial themes; Waterhouse’s article on taming and conceptualizing the Australian bush revisits images of frontier racial conflict, while Mayne and Murray’s reconstruction of life in central Melbourne illuminates aspects of multicultural interaction among the Italian, Irish, Syrian, and Chinese communities. In particular, John Foster’s review of comic books in mid-century Australia discloses fundamental images of Aborigines, Asians, Africans, and Europeans, imprinting impressionable young minds with potent stereotypes which, once imbibed, proved difficult to escape, yet, over time, provided a shifting interpretive terrain. Foster, too, deals with gendered imagery, more rigorously investigated in the works of McGrath and Margaret Maynard. Maynard, for instance, examines changing female bodily perceptions, as represented by the reshaping of the fashion model, both human and porcelain, from the 1920s to the 1990s. In this examination, she charts an alarming slide from endorsement of the plump and robust body to admiration of the anorexic and skele- tal, while holding out some hope for female revisionist intervention and re-engage- ment. Australian class relations and intercessions are also fundamentally profiled in popular cultural sources. In this collection, Bryan Jamison has employed a class cultural analysis to explore the taut relationship between middle class youth reform- ers-the rational recreationalists-and working class youth, in this case the news- boys of Brisbane, typified by the press as “street arabs” and “larrikins.”

The history of Australian popular culture is, by and large, a complex story of intercessions. The new society was British-derived and, largely, British-settled, so that its earliest and most enduring engagements were with British cultural forms- British mores, British sports and British entertainments. We catch a sense of this from the powerful Imperial sentiments shaping attitudes towards the Australian bush in Waterhouse’s paper; and from the commotion, detailed by McCubbin, surround- ing the purchase of “Captain Cook’s cottage” for Fitzroy Gardens in 1934. Yet even more remarkable is the long-standing and ever-burgeoning impact of the United

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States upon the Australian people. The United States played little part in the found- ing of the Australian colonies and its direct, migratory input has also remained mar- ginal. But, nevertheless, its culture, particularly its popular culture, has exercised a profound and mesmeric influence. From the early nineteenth century, American popular literature, song and dance, theatrical entertainment, comedy, technology and architecture have been avidly accepted. Minstrel groups, circuses, wild west shows and vaudeville were eventually superseded by American film, recording, radio and television. The compelling impact of this massive cultural presence is reflected again and again throughout this collection: in Foster’s comic papers, in Rickard’s wrestling matches, in Headon’s sporting clips and even Holland’s stolen Aborigines. Smart’s Billy Graham and Duffield’s Billy Blue are equally American derived. Similarly, Jamison’s moral reformers appear to have been profoundly influenced by American models, particularly the YMCA. Mark St. Leon’s account of “Yankee” circuses and wild west shows in Australia displays the connection comprehensively and reveals how much the very nature of Australian circus was moulded by the American prototype. Overviewing the twentieth century in turn, Ben Goldsmith pro- files the local impact of Hollywood and Detroit in his comprehensive account of the love affair between the drive-in and the automobile.

Although Great Britain was Australia’s colonial metropolis, therefore, the United States has operated increasingly as a metropolis of the mind, particularly as its economic and military hegemony has expanded. Yet we should nevertheless be careful to emphasize that both these cultural impacts have historically met their fair share of local opposition as well as being transmuted by indigenous emphases and preferences. They take their places-albeit commanding ones-within a culture which battles hard to define its distinctiveness, but which itself is composed of a patchwork of almost 150 ethnic fragments, of contesting generational, regional, class and gendered inflections, and of a monumental, vintage contest between Aboriginal and European cultural systems.

Probably Australia’s cultural exclusivity lies within this very confusion, and reveals itself only in the perpetual unfolding of a never-to-be-resolved process of cultural resolution. The devil is decidedly in all the detail-and no wonder that fin de sitcle colonials found it easier and more heartening to tell their “beautiful lies” to a bemused Mark Twain than to persist honestly with the more prosaic facts. Popular cultural historians, however, enjoy no such luxury and persevere with the compul- sion that it is in the “small things forgotten”-to quote James Deetz-that the crux of our life-ways is best recaptured.

Raymond Evans is a Reader in History at the University of Queensland. He has also recently edited Everyday Wonders, Australian Popular Culture, for the Journal of Australian Studies 58 (1998) and published Fighting Words, Writing About Race (University o f Queensland Press, 1999).

Clive Moore is a Reader in History at the University of Queensland. He has recently edited (with Kay Saunders) Australian Mascuhities: Men and Their Histories for the Journal of Australian Studies 56 (1998) and (with Mary Kooyman) A Pupua New Guinea Political Chronicle 1967-1991 (Crawford House, and C. Hurst & Co., 1998).