James Jupp - The English in Australia

James Jupp,

The English in Australia

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004

Pp. viii + 216.               Paperback        ISBN 0 521 54295 2

James Jupp reminds us that census data shows Australia to be the ‘second most English country in the world’, both in the family origins of its own population and by comparison with other countries of settlement. In this overview, he attempts to identify and assess the impact of the ‘invisible immigrants’, as Charlotte Erickson called their English and Scots counterparts in the United States. The task is conceptually difficult. European settlement in Australia occurred at precisely the moment when Englishness in the home islands was deliberately merging itself into a ‘British’ identity. As a result, there is a lack of distinctive and genuinely collective symbols to represent England, and two of those few, cricket and the Anglican Church, have operated in specifically Australian channels down under. Indeed, cricket illustrates a further twist in the definitional problem, by which Australians evolved a sense of themselves within a professedly ‘British’ context while sharply rejecting a hotchpotch of perceived ‘English’ characteristics, stretching through the social spectrum from hauteur to whingeing Pommery. Jupp’s approach to these problems is to combine sensible comment with extensive examples, sketching the migration process while highlighting individuals who have contributed to social and political development. It does, however, leave many questions still to be answered. Take the question of regional concentrations. There was some continuing West Country quality to the New Plymouth colony in New Zealand, largely because it struggled to attract newcomers, but elsewhere in the antipodes local groupings were largely of Irish or Scots origin ─ which points up Jupp’s own reservations about including the South Australian Cornish under a general English heading at all. Even to define English influence in terms of birthplace is open to challenge. John Quick, one of the visionaries of the federation movement, left Cornwall as a baby. Wimmera-born Robert Menzies imbibed an imagined England through his Cornish grandfather. In any case, what was English influence? In a slightly tongue-in-cheek chapter, Jupp refers to the ‘tragedy of English food’, but it may be doubted whether Scots and Irish influences on Australian cuisine were any tastier. In passing he also suggests that ‘part of the English inheritance has been urbanisation in large coastal cities’. Of course there are superficial links: four mainland state capitals have a beachside suburb called Brighton, while eccentric Perth has a Scarborough, but this is surely the result of parallel developments in a worldwide trend. In England every Birmingham has its Coventry, every Manchester its Bolton, a system of satellites and urban hierarchy markedly absent in Australia. We have to dig deeper to solve the problem. What did the staff of Farmer Brothers mean when they praised their founder in 1874 for the possession of ‘unobtrusive’ virtues ‘which are never wanting in an English gentleman’? What prompted Dan Deniehy’s comment in 1854 that Henry Parkes ‘has not too much of the Englishman in him, but of “Englishmanism” about him’? Deniehy, the locally born Irish Catholic, accepted that the distinction was ‘subtle’ but he was confident that it would mean something to the ferociously Scots Presbyterian John Dunmore Lang ─ and this at a time when Parkes was confidently reshaping the Australian identity in his own democratic image. One possible way into the maze might be through shuffling the variables. Jupp reminds us that Catholicism did not override nationality in the case of the emigration promoter Caroline Chisholm. John Bede Polding might provide fertile ground for study. This ‘thorough Lancashire man’ was despatched as Australia’s first Catholic prelate with a thinly disguised government mandate to subordinate the turbulent Irish to English Benedictine calm. After a discouraging third of a century, he still urged the Vatican that an English successor could transcend the quarrels of Orange and Green and ‘would be more acceptable and, should difficulties arise, more conciliatory’. But perhaps any point in the question is simply fading away. Jupp concludes on a bleak note, with the once-central English becoming regarded as foreigners, marginalised along with the increasingly irrelevant distant monarchy. This is a useful and thought-provoking study which should form the basis for further evaluative study.