Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Who was Ned Kelly?

Who was Ned Kelly?

It is possible that I don’t know enough about Australia to write accurately about that country. On the other hand, many New Zealanders may know less. I don’t mean objective facts – imports, exports, rainfall, population. These clutter up the mind and obstruct understanding. I mean the special smell of the Aussie, the way he appears to others and the way he looks at himself. A couple of generations back the Kiwi learnt something of this from the bush balladeers, Paterson, Lawson and Ogilvie. In half the farmhouse kitchens andpage 689 rabbiters’ huts of this country the thin tattered books were read and recited. Thus curiously the national myth we understood best was Australian, not New Zealand – the bushfires roared, the bullock-drivers cursed, the stockmen cracked their whips, all a little larger than life in a region of our own minds. And with it we acquired our share of socialism in politics.

Knowledge of another country generally begins with the spectacular and exotic: the kangaroo, the platypus, the fist-fight and the swear-word. But I suspect that the ordinary Australian shares a great deal with his New Zealand cousin – each is a branch of the tree of Western man, that tree which is tougher than iron, whose sap is money and whose leaves are abstract thought. Thus the pains of the Aussie may well be the pains of the Kiwi.

Perhaps the true image of Australia would be a country girl come to town, Queen of the Wool Festival, standing awkwardly in front of the cameras, with her eye on a steady man and a house in the suburbs, and her heart hidden under a tea cosy. It is not a cheering thought. I know the lady well enough from her New Zealand counterpart. The same vacant doll’s eyes: the same certainty that only cranks love truth and only queers write poems.

It is an image of arrogant prosperity. The Aussies, when they brag, go a long way to confirm it. But bragging is only an aspect of the world of mirrors by which Western man tries to conceal from himself his anguish and his doubt of personal identity. I think the real Australia is less successful and more human.

Some time ago, in a Wellington hotel, I met an Aussie professional gambler. A redfaced hulk of a man in his late forties or early fifties, he was lying in bed with a bad attack of brewer’s asthma; and he talked to me for a little. Apparently he followed the gambling schools in a kind of seasonal migration from Australia to New Zealand to Hawaii, a bird of passage dodging among storms.

He had something in common with other Aussies I have met – a dogged belligerence that covered, like a lid, a bottomless sense of being in the wrong. I remember the housemaid coming into the room to give him a piece of her mind – he had done or said something that offended her – and how he accepted it without protest, as if it was his natural due from life. I think he saw, behind the housemaid’s hard face, the image of an aunt or a mother – someone permanently and bitterly in the right, whose voice echoed in the rooms of childhood. And the sound of that voice reassured him. She was in the right, he was in the wrong, and so the world turned round on a firm hub. It would never have occurred to him, I think, that any other order was possible, or that the solitary sensitivity he carried through life like useless luggage might have received a better welcome.

The same reactions are often visible in the adult male Kiwi. But I think the Aussie wanders more, expects even less, and is even more markedly a stranger in his own house.

page 690

This Aussie had a romantic view of his own upbringing. The Mum, the Dad, the brothers and sisters, in the old homestead with the rose trellis at the back door, were great people. They still waited, in a foggy area at the back of his mind, and worried about the black sheep of the family. Perhaps if he had been able to see them differently – to see more exactly the grim shack or suburban box from which he had fled like an opossum from a burning tree, and the real companions of that first ordeal – then he might have been able in turn to break free from the death-march of hotel rooms and easy money and frayed nerves, and in some way have become glad to be himself. But he was trapped by his idea of his own iniquity, a sad sheep in wolf ’s clothing.

They seem to breed the women tough in Australia. I remember staying about thirty years ago with a great-aunt in a Sydney suburb. Her house stood in a patch of uncleared bush. I remember watching the bulldog ants marching aggressively over the sun-cracked ground at her back door. Huge brown spiders used to scuttle up the walls; and the girl who helped in the house used to knock them down nonchalantly with a broom. A New Zealand girl would have stood and yelled.

My gambler acquaintance did not hate women. But he did not like them much either. I think he had found the Aussie women too tough for him. He did not feel they would ever join him to the earth he had come from, or give him a place of rest. His masculinity had been bent back on itself like the club root of a tree growing in a stony soil.

This kind of thing may account for the ideal of ‘mateship’ put forward by Henry Lawson:

O rebels to society,
The outcasts of the West!
O broken eyes that smile for me,
O broken hearts that jest!

It is a comradeship established on the edge of despair, between men wandering or working together, in which all faults are accepted or overlooked. I have a great respect for Lawson. He cuts away the pastoral dream and shows the harshness of Australian farm life, and the deep solitude of the individual Aussie, his barren eccentric freedom and his unused sensitivity.

Perhaps I build too much on a small knowledge of those who wander inside or outside Australia – the people of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll – but it seems to me that a hatred of established authority lies deep in the Australian mind. I envy Australia the bones of her dead convicts. The Aussie has the ghosts of his great-granduncles to remind him that the society he lives in (like any other human society) is a prison cemented by the blood of underdogs, and that men are not capable of much justice. The Kiwi finds this more difficult to realise. Unless he was born a Maori, his view of the law andpage 691 the State is consistently biased towards approval – a few things like income tax may irritate him, but on the whole he accepts the status quo and feels glad to see the cops around.

I see the convicts as the fathers of the Utopian socialist dream of the underdog which springs up in Australia again and again like grass on the plains when the drought has broken. At the building of a palace, the kings of the old civilisation would kill a slave or two and bury them under the doorstep. The ghosts of the slain would then function as guards and doorkeepers. So under the doorstep of Australia – that welcome mat of dry earth and scrub which the visitor sees first when his plane noses in from the Tasman – the bones of the convicts lie to remind the world that no society is just.

And who was Ned Kelly? I remember the striking pictures of a modern Australian painter who shows Kelly as the man in the iron mask, riding among the flowers of the Australian spring, or striding out to his last stand from the burning pub at Glenrowan. John Manifold speaks of a friend who died in Crete in almost the same way:

He also spun his pistol like a toy,
Turned to the hills like wolf or kangaroo,
And faced destruction with a bitter joy.

His freedom gave him nothing else to do
But set his back against his family tree
And fight the better for the fact he knew

He was as good as dead. Because the sea
Was closed and the air dark and the land lost,
‘They’ll never capture me alive,’ said he . . .

I think this tremendous nihilist courage may have been handed down from those who died on the gallows or under the lash. It has little to do with the noise of radio commercialism that batters the mind in the Australian cities; and it has not bred tolerance of the aboriginals or the New Australians. But it can perhaps carry the iron mountain of the modern world on its back, and not be destroyed or cry out under the weight.

1965 (334)