Australia

On long-distance flights, airlines compete for first-class passengers with sumptuous menus and little gifts—slippers, socks, perfume. Qantas, the Australian airline, also had a surprise in store for us: an S-shaped plastic hook. Woolworth style, attached to a piece of cardboard which contained the following printed instructions:

I never had a mental image of Australia. With most countries, whether one has been there or not, one tends to associate some picture or symbol, however naïve: geishas for Nippon, bullfighters for Spain, and so on. But Australia was a blank in my mind—kangaroos are not people. and the convict ships are as remote as the Pilgrim Fathers. But that plastic hook and the napkin with the hole in it did the trick for me: they became a symbol of something in the Australian character which is both touching and putting off—goodwill devoid of grace, a down-to-earth pragmatism that can be aesthetically offensive, a culture that is deliberately, almost defiantly, suburban.

Filling Space

Australia is a suburban continent. Its cities spread shapelessly like ink on blotting paper, because there is such a vast amount of empty space available. The continent has an area thirty-two times the size of Great Britain, inhabited by less than twelve million people. On the British Isles you have to share a square mile with five hundred other people, in Australia with three. Australians have the biggest housing plots per capita in the whole world. Melbourne has a quarter of the population of London, but covers an area twice as big, which means that a Melbourne family occupies eight times more living space than a London family.

Seventy to 80 percent of Australians own their own houses. The average house has more than five rooms, with less than one person to each room. It is a single-floor bungalow, mass-produced in weatherboard, red brick, or asbestos cement. It has a front lawn and a small garden, possibly with a couple of gum trees. It may look shabby or posh according to the suburb in which it stands. Ninety-three and one half percent of the population of Sydney, and 92 percent of the population of Melbourne, live in suburbs outside the municipal boundaries. To paraphrase Parkinson’s Law, cement tends to expand to fill the available space.

If one of the dominant features of Australian life is suburbanization, another is urbanization. Less than 15 percent of the population live in rural areas, and less than 5 percent are actually engaged in farming. Australians enthuse about the bush, but they live in cities. They are in fact the most highly urbanized nation in the world.

So the continent holds two world records: first, in cramming nearly everybody into the towns; second, in providing them with such lavish amounts of living space per head that the towns keep bursting at the seams and spilling their contents further and further away from the center into the blue yonder. The first process precipitates urbanization, the second suburbanization; the first concentrates, the second dilutes. If you were to draw the map of Australia in the manner of an astronomical chart, the big towns would not be stars but spiral nebulas.

Staying home

Needless to say, the gradual shift of people from the center to the periphery is noticeable in European and American cities, too; but in Australia it has been carried to such extremes that the very concept of the city is beginning to lose its meaning, and “urban civilization” is replaced by “suburban civilization.” In Melbourne or Sydney, it may take an hour to get from one’s suburb to the center. As a result, these capital cities, each with a population of well over two million, have no night life— which, after all, is an integral part of urban civilization. King’s Cross, the Piccadilly Circus of Sydney, is long before midnight as dead as an abandoned gold-digger town.

A social survey in a representative suburban housing estate showed that 98 percent of the residents never go out in the evening except on Saturdays. Eighty-five percent watch television daily for all or part of the evening, their TV sets turned on for an average of close to thirty hours per week—four hours per day. And Australian television has to be seen to be believed. The week we arrived, Mr. Arthur Cowan, general manager of the Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations, bluntly declared in a speech: “We know that there is no real demand among viewers for cultural programs”—by which he meant “classical music, art, and sculpture.” And the Australian writer Keith Dunstan reported: “Five radio stations out of six and three television stations out of four give us nothing but football on Saturdays.”

The survey just quoted included a questionnaire; one of the questions was what the subject would do if he were suddenly given ten thousand dollars to spend. Only 6 percent “mentioned the idea of a trip.” And when housewives were asked what they would do if they had more domestic help, only 17 percent “had the idea of going out more.”

Why? The answer is perhaps that in Lhe dreary confines of suburbia there is nowhere to “go out" to except the petrol station. In spite of the immensity of its open spaces and ocean beaches, Australia can give the visitor a feeling of claustrophobia. Or perhaps one should put it the other way around and say that a suburbanized culture tends to be affected by agoraphobia—a fear of the open spaces of the mind. The simplest defense against this danger is conformism, which in the Australian middle classes has been carried to even more stilling extremes than in the United States. By a perverse twist of history these two continents, pioneered by the most adventurous, “rugged individualists,” produced the most philistine societies of our century (with South Africa as a runner-up). And paradoxically, conformism breeds loneliness. The thinlipped “yes” of conformity is not an advanced form of human communication; nor is its loud-mouthed, matey variant. Australian crowds have a smell of loneliness—you can feel it in the bus, in the pub, at the races, on the beach.

So, I am told, has Australian sex. Since I had no firsthand experience of it, I have to quote a social worker, the Reverend Roger Bush, reporting in the Sydney Sunday Mirror on “a problem rife in the tidy wilderness of suburbia.” The problem is wife-swapping. The Reverend describes the case histories of four couples in a suburban neighborhood, who for six months swapped wives regularly every couple of weeks by drawing lots, until their marriages went to pieces. All four men belonged to “the white-collar, junior executive classes.” “They’ve had no decent form of entertainment available in their own social groups and not been able to afford the long treks to the bright lights for entertainment. They are the victims of the poverty of their own existence in the affluent society. ... I have already counseled the victims of wifeswapping arrangements from seven different Sydney suburbs, and I know of other cases which have occurred in the smaller cities of New South Wales.”

No doubt it will turn out to be a short-lived epidemic like the Hong Kong flu. Another curiosity is the “hambone”—a male striptease act performed at private parties, and, according to Craig McGregor’s excellent Profile of Australia, even as a public show at King’s Cross— though I do not know whether it still exists. At the same time, the vice squad wages an all-out war against homosexuality. Judging by official statements, it is a major problem in Australian society and probably will remain one so long as it remains punishable among consenting adults.

“Populate or Perish”

This, roughly, is the somewhat depressing picture which many visitors form after a few weeks in Australia. But although I believe it to be a truthful picture as far as it goes, it is nevertheless superficial because it fails to take into account the radical change the continent is undergoing. Its effects are as yet scarcely noticeable, but they are bound to transform the Australian profile within the next two or three decades.

The nature of this transformation can be summed up in a few figures. In 1947, when the Australian government embarked on its mass immigration policy, the country had a population of seven and a half million. In the next twenty years, Australia took in more than two million immigrants, only a third of whom were British; two thirds came from the Continent. In 1947, 90 percent of the population were of British origin. Today the proportion has fallen well below 80 percent, and in another twenty years it is expected to fall to 60 percent. In other words, by 1990 four out of every ten Australians will be of Italian, Greek, German, Maltese, Hungarian, Polish, or Turkish origin. From an ethnically uniform continent Australia is being rapidly transformed into a cosmopolitan mosaic.

The mass immigration program, with a present intake of 150,000 people per year, aims at a population of around thirty million by the end of the century. It is guided by the slogan “Populate or Perish.” Its psychological origins date back to the early war years when Australians discovered with a shock the vulnerability of their underpopulated continent, The invasion of New Guinea brought the Japanese to their doorstep; even more traumatic were the effects of a minor Japanese air attack on Darwin, and the ineffective shelling of Sydney by Japanese submarines, At the Evian Conference on the refugee problem in 1938, Australia refused to take in any German Jews threatened by extermination, with the frank statement; “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” After the war, its attitude changed to the opposite extreme. Australia accepted 170,000 refugees from D.P. camps in Europe, and embarked on a mass campaign to woo immigrants from all over Europe. Even the White Australia policy is no longer enforced quite so rigidly; there are some 12,ooo Asians studying at Australian universities, and some 30,000 Asians have become permanent residents or even citizens.

Waiting

The formidable process of selftransformation in which the continent is engaged raises equally formidable problems. But so far the average Australian seems either to be unaware of them or to ignore them with a shrug. The immigrants keep pouring in; their presence, amounting to one in five, is felt everywhere. The attitude of the true-bred Australian is not hostile; he just pretends that they are not there, with the slightly embarrassed look people have when traveling with strangers in an elevator.

I visited some of the dismal immigrant hostels: Nissen huts in former army camps, where new arrivals are housed until they find more permanent accommodation—which may take anywhere from six months to two years. These hostels are for the vast majority of immigrants their first experience of their future country, and they come as an ugly shock. Some are well run, others less so, but all have the depressing atmosphere of an army camp. An Australian senator, J. P. Ormond, denounced them as “disgusting and degrading.” This is certainly not what the immigrants expected—nor what they were led to expect by the alluring handouts of Australia House.

It could be objected that the families of agricultural laborers from Southern Europe or of unskilled workers from British industrial slums had lived in even worse conditions. This may be true, but psychologically even a hovel of one’s own may seem preferable to a concentration camp without barbed wire. This comparison is less frivolous than it may seem, because most immigrants on arrival have no alternative but to go to a hostel—and, what is worse, without knowing when they will be able to get out of it.

The cause ol this misery is the housing shortage. Only 4 percent of housing in Australia is “publicly owned” (the equivalent of British council houses and flats) , as compared with 25 percent in the United Kingdom. The average waiting time for a family cottage varies from two to four years, according to the area; and far from giving priority to immigrants, different states require different periods of residence before an immigrant can even put his name on the waiting list.

If, on the other hand, a man with a family tries to buy a house from a private owner, there are various public organizations which may assist him with a loan, provided he can pay a cash deposit of at least $2400, and in Sydney or Melbourne closer to $3600. But few among the hostel population have that much capital (immigrants from the United Kingdom arrive on the average with less than S720, after having sold their possessions at home), and while they are in the hostel, they can save very little.

Wages are high, but so is the cost of living. A toolmaker with wife and three children, who may earn $54 a week, has to pay $28 a week for his family’s board and lodging in the hostel. According to the 1961 census, only 14 percent of immigrants succeed in buying a house within the first five years of their arrival. The others stay in a hostel for one or two years, then move into a rented house or flat, which may cost about $28 per month in the cheap inner suburbs. About a third of the immigrants are trapped there forever.

All this refers to the lower-income classes among immigrants—but about 90 percent belong to this category, and less than 10 percent to the professional and semi professional classes (among the British, 16.4 percent). A large proportion arrive by “assisted passages,” which means that the fare for adults over nineteen is only about $24 per head, while any amount ol children travel free. This, of course, means an immense investment on the part of the Australian government, and it is a surprising lack of foresight that no commensurate effort has been made to provide housing for the people they were so anxious to attract. Largely as a consequence of this, in the year 1966, 18,300 people, among them 10,500 Britons, returned to their country of origin; some statisticians put the number of returners as high as 16 percent of the annual intake.

An interesting sidelight on the reasons why Britons emigrate was recently provided by an opinion poll. Apart from the answers one would expect—general dissatisfaction with conditions at home, hope for material betterment, and so on—one curious factor emerged: the “last-straw effect.” Families may for several years vaguely talk of emigrating until some trivial grievance—a penny added to the price of beer or a leaking pipe—precipitates the decision. Then they take the plunge, without proper preparations.

Melting caldron?

Oddly enough, the Italian and Greek immigrants find it generally easier to settle down than the British. They move in with relatives or friends in the little Italys and other ethnic enclaves in the poorer suburbs; conditions may be cramped, but nevertheless preferable to die Nissen hut, and they can start right away saving up for a house. They are also traditionally more enterprising in various trades, from cafes and grocery shops to market gardening. According to the 1961 census, 20 percent of Italians and Greeks were employers or self-employers as against 12 percent of U.K. immigrants (what’s happened to the Nation of Shopkeepers?).

On the other hand, these ethnic enclaves have a tendency to turn into ghettos, with all the ugly possibilities which that implies. The city areas in which they congregate, such as Melbourne’s inner suburbs, consist of old derelict buildings not much better than slums. According to a recent survey, a third of all students in forty-two inner suburban schools were immigrants, many of whom were unable to speak English well enough to receive proper tuition. Yet only two of the schools were able to assign special teachers to help these children. The child then “leaves school with a smattering of information and a superficial knowledge of English which will probably keep him behind a sales counter for the rest of his life,” or, alternatively, doing the types of menial chores which true-bred Australians are less and less willing to do.

Similar handicaps await young apprentice craftsmen, whose qualifications are not accepted in Australia and who are thus forced into semiskilled or unskilled occupations. As for the liberal professions, only British and some American degrees are recognized; doctors, demists, vets, engineers from the Continent have to follow courses and sit for examinations after their arrival, with no certainty that they will pass. Skilled tradesmen are up against the same barriers; most of them are recognized in Australia as assistant tradesmen only.

The overall effect of these restrictive provisions is a kind of “unnatural selection” which works against the badly needed professionals and in favor of unskilled and semiskilled laborers, who are not always of the most desirable human material. If this policy continues, Australia will soon have a large proletariat of foreign origin superimposed on the suburban idyll. Instead of a melting pot it may become a caldron.

Asian or Western?

Thus the “Populate or Perish” program is itself beset with perils. To aim at thirty million by the end of the century means to quadruple the population within a span of fifty years, a rather unique experiment even in the age of the population explosion. Taking an optimistic view, some of the difficulties I mentioned may be no more than teething troubles; but the problem of the Australian future goes deeper than that. The search for identity has become a fashionable phrase, but in Australia it is a real problem and a haunting one. It has two related aspects, one internal, the other external.

Looking inward, there is a general uncertainty whether the desirable aim is the melting pot, out of which the third generation of immigrants is supposed to emerge recast to fit the Australian way of life, or whether it is preferable to aim at unity-indiversity, by preserving the cultural identity of the various groups in the ethnic mosaic. And should the mosaic include Asians, such as Hong Kong Chinese and Fiji Indians? The American and Canadian precedents are much discussed, but are more confusing than helpful.

Turning to the world outside, the question arises whether Australia is an Asian country—and if not, what else? Nominally, Australians are still “British subjects,” although the government is bringing in legislation to alter their status to “Australian Citizen and British Subject.” But as the Bulletin wrote recently, “What does British subject mean? The answer is—nothing at all. We are not subjects of Great Britain. We do not share either the duties or the privileges of the people of that kingdom.”

However, to Australians this is not a question of international law, or even of national pride, but of security and survival. As another leading Melbourne paper wrote: “The old certainties have begun to dissolve, and Australia is now being swept swiftly and erratically towards an Asia in which the domination of Western power can no longer be taken for granted. The final retreat has sounded for Britain’s garrison forces in Malaysia and Singapore, and the British Fleet, for generations the guardian of Australia’s aimless isolation, is sailing for home. A new hesitancy now runs through American policy. . . . Australia can no longer trust its security and its survival to the presumed patronage of powerful friends. . . . Australia must now dare to stand with and by its nearest Asian and Pacific neighbours.”

That sounds nice, but how can you become an Asian country if you discriminate against Asian immigrants? On that question the paper remains silent, and the politicians remain silent, although to a large extent the problem of Australian identity hinges on it. In an age of increasing racial and ethnic tensions it is a terrifying decision to make—and it can only be made by the Australians themselves; all pious liberal advice from outsiders tends to oversimplify the problem and to ignore the bitter realities of group psychology. One cannot help sympathizing with the predicament of a nation which, descended from truculent forebears, tried to cultivate peacefully its little gardens on an inhospitable continent, and to create a suburban idyll in an unidyllic age.