10/12/07: layers of ancient scrutiny.(views and prejudice against the English people)

IN MY FORTY-ONE YEARS in Australia I believe I have heard the English disparaged more often than I have heard Aborigines disparaged, and I do not count in this the well-disposed chiacking directed at The Poms which, in the early months of my arrival here, struck me as kindly and essentially welcoming rather than spiteful.

The disparagement comes from grievance and the heat of that grievance is always a little startling. How have the English, as opposed to the British, as opposed to the English-speaking world, brought this ressentiment upon themselves?

The fact that the charges are, as a matter of historical accuracy, often simplistic, smaller than imagined, or fantasised entirely, can do nothing to dissolve the heat or persistence with which they are made. Some vexation in our time wants an anti-English cast of mind in place, and interestingly it remains anti-English. It is the English, not the British, who oppressed Ireland and America's thirteen irresolute colonies, and who bombed Dresden. It is the English who whinge, are dirty, parochial, rude, so disappointing, who constitute a declining or even disintegrating society and yet are the world's only imperialists with exclusive rights in the exercise of snobbery. And it is the English who, on the most preposterous suggestion of my ex-federal MP, owe Australia massive environmental compensation for ringbarking the continent's trees.

I can well believe there survives a type of English hauteur that holds colonials to be inevitably coarse. I meet this type most often when it is being caricatured by Oz nationals venting the above obscure grievances. Respect, liking, some good-natured envy, are the sentiments I recall being volunteered when Poms attitudinise about the Oz.

So the problem arises. English-born as I am, how do I think through an acceptable patriotism? The luminous, resilient contribution England (and Britain) have made to the civilisations of the world gives me pride. At the same time, like most of my fellow citizens here, I commit myself to the distinct contribution Australia makes to the same enterprise.

If I identify, say, the immediate three items that come to mind expressing my allegiance to England, what might they be? Certainly the more pastoral parts of Vaughan Williams' music, the gypsy wildness of the 1950s countryside around the garrisons where I grew up, and the magnificent calm of Churchill's wartime speeches. What arrives if I do the same for my Australian allegiance? I conjure Monaro and South Coast landscapes, the one blonde and austere, the other green, opulent, intrigued with mirror lakes and intimate valleys. Then I take Furphy's Such Is Life and Paterson's "Man from Snowy River" in the one grab because both these works present such a genuine spirit of welcome. And third I recall the spontaneous generosity of those who slept on the floors of their college rooms that I might get good rest in their beds, who then paid for my breakfasts so that I, along with other dissidents in those early 1970s, might confound the appalling conscription laws by playing hard to catch.

These images of my bi-focal allegiance are not exhaustive, but each has the effect of making a place dear, allowing me to be pro patria in one case and pro patria in another. But bi-focal allegiance is forever the New-chum's dilemma, and this grows ...