Gregory Melleuish - Cultural Liberalism in Australia: A Study in Intellectual and Cultural History
Gregory Melleuish
Cultural Liberalism in Australia: A Study in Intellectual and Cultural History
Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995.
Pp. viii + 226. Hardback 0 521 47444 2; paperback 0 521 47969 X.
John Gascoigne has written an important and illuminating book, which Cambridge University Press has handsomely produced. Not so long ago, textbooks portrayed the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as a Franco-Scottish affair, with the occasional despot thrown in. Now we have come to think of an English and American Enlightenment as well: Gascoigne himself has reinterpreted the 'Unreformed Cambridge' of the century before 1789. Now he turns to Australia from 1788 to the 1850s, offering a tightly argued and richly documented scholarly manifesto which insists that Enlightenment ideas left a 'deep imprint'. The book is organised into three sections. The first, 'Contexts', considers religion and politics. The second and third are grouped under the title 'The Possibilities of Improvement', moving through the land and the mind and the less hopeful topics of convicts and Aboriginal people.
So notable a book deserves the compliment of rigorous criticism. First, Gascoigne's definition of the Enlightenment is broad. While this reflects recent scholarship, it sometimes creates a broad net, especially in the discussion of religion, where both Evangelicalism and atheism are swept up in the analysis. Secondly, there is some problem with the periodisation. Looking at seventy years of the Australian experience is defensible as intellectual history, since ideas do not operate in sound-bite time. However, the grouping of disparate examples from different decades occasionally gives the impression of sleight-of-hand. A more serious criticism is that there is only passing recognition of that perennial obstacle to attempts to trace continuity in reformist ideas, those three decades of repression from the early 1790s that seemed to drive British liberalism underground. The hiatus was all the more obvious in colonies founded as prisons and run by the military: even Wentworth had to launch his path-breaking demand for civil rights in 1819 from secure exile in England. Thus it is possible to be impressed by Gascoigne but hold to the general view that, after about 1830, political issues arose in New South Wales through appropriately modified transfer from Britain and with a time-lag somewhere between a year and a decade.
The umbrella classification and the long time-period thus become two aspects of the same problem. Yes, we can hear the voice of Tom Paine at Eureka, but it makes more practical sense of the diggers' protest to associate it with the near-contemporary ideas of Physical Force Chartism than to trace it back to The Rights of Man. Given that prisons formed a crucial test-bed for Benthamite principles, it is ironic that Utilitarianism, that key expression of English rationality, made so little headway in the dismal first forty years of Australia's career as a penal hell. It was not until 1833, a year after Bentham's death, that Governor Arthur claimed to have successfully introduced the principle of classification into Van Diemen's Land, and a further six years before Maconochie's short-lived experiments on Norfolk Island. The phrase ancien régime is not much evident in Gascoigne but, in penal terms at least, the New South Wales that began in 1788 and was left to fester barely supervised through the Revolutionary Wars was at least as much a product of the bad old days as the child of Voltaire and Priestley. The attack on transportation, so long and fruitlessly voiced by Bentham himself, made little headway until the Molesworth Committee, an enquiry that is surely best tagged as a product of the Reform impulse of the 1830s.
Such a study faces a particular problem of evidence, since only a minority, arguably unrepresentative, intellectualised the world around them. As index clusters confirm, we encounter the same few people time and again: Watkin Tench, the reflective and surely atypical Marine officer on the First Fleet, Governors Macquarie and Bourke in New South Wales, John Lillie and John West in Van Diemen's Land. However, the history of ideas must operate on the assumption that theories articulated by the few suffuse the inchoate thinking of the many. A more fundamental challenge would ask how far imported or adapted theory was really required to make sense of the antipodean world. To take an absurd example, convicts were notoriously disrespectful of private property, but this does not prove they read Rousseau. It was quickly apparent to the least cerebral European that small groups of Aboriginal people were virtually incapable of either resisting or adapting to the sudden shock of colonisation. It was easy to conceptualise them as lacking advanced social structures, and sooner or later somebody would say 'Hobbes'. Bar-room talk would naturally assert that colonists who fenced or farmed the land were more entitled to claim ownership than nomads, and eventually somebody would say 'Locke'. But scattered references do not prove that Hobbes and Locke were crucial in the formation of a colonial mind-set: indeed, the striking point may be not how often, but how rarely, the first generations of white Australians appealed to European political theory. Lastly, it is worth stressing that Enlightenment intellectual processes were diametrically opposed to our own. Modern non-Marxist discourse holds that if a theory consistently fails to conform to the facts, it must be modified or abandoned. For the eighteenth-century expert, theory was dogma and examples were judged accordingly. Thus Enlightenment belief in human equality might seem to favour Aborigines, but Enlightenment assumptions of human perfectibility proved disastrous. When Aborigines spectacularly failed to conform to structured expectations that they would start moving onward and upward, they automatically relegated themselves to sub-human status.
To a remarkable extent, the rational and confident qualities that Gascoigne associated with the Enlightenment appear in Melleuish's categorisation of Cultural Liberalism. The distinguishing nuance is that Cultural Liberalism sought the greatest happiness of the human soul. His focus is on the twentieth century, by which time such ideas had become naturalised in Australia and formed part of its national identity. Seeking to examine just how that elusive ephemera, a tradition, actually operated, Melleuish looks afresh at such figures as Shann, Eggleston, the Palmers, Barnard-Eldershaw, Hancock and Childe, sometimes in unexpected groupings. Melleuish is convinced that Cultural Liberalism is dead in Australia, to the impoverishment of debate about the direction of Australia. The tradition appears to have been crushed in the Manichean choice posed by the Cold War between Catholicism and Communism. Thereafter, one was re-branded by Vatican II, and the other collapsed under its own weight, leaving successor ideas such as deregulatory economic liberalism while the 1990s campaign for a republic was mere 'bunyip nationalism'. (The unpersuaded may note that Cultural Liberalism appears to have vanished at about the same time as that other nod towards external value systems, the cultural cringe.) For Melleuish, the coup-de-grace came from two writers, Manning Clark and James McAuley, whom some will now see as merely fascinating diversions from the intellectual mainstream. For Manning Clark, Australia was not just a colony, but rather the cosmic battleground of great forces, one of which was Enlightenment, the 'cool reason' that he imaginatively glimpsed struggling against 'dark passion' in the face of Arthur Phillip. This definition was narrower than Gascoigne's, while Cultural Liberalism offers more spirituality than his world of rationality. Yet it may be that Gascoigne has taken up Melleuish's challenge to rediscover a tradition of enrichment of the human condition by resurrecting Clark's focus on a lost legacy of eighteenth-century thought.