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    Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America
    Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America
    Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America
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    Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America

    By Don Watson

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    In Rabbit Syndrome Don Watson takes an analytical look at the ways in which the Australian imagination has always been dominated by America. Why are they so much better than we are? Even when it comes to producing books like the Updike "Rabbit" sequence that tell us what we are like? Why are they also a land of executioners who have nevertheless created the least bad empire the world has seen? Can we really expect to be deputies to America? And what about our own sacred story (the progressive one) that we have sold for the sake of the Americanisation of our own society? If we can't have a friendly independent relationship with America, why don't we go the whole hog and join them?

    In a dark, brooding, moody essay, Don Watson plays on the paradoxes of Australia's feeling about America and offers a scathing view of an Australian culture that is asking to be engulfed by its great and powerful friend because the mental process is already so advanced. This is a brilliant meditation round a set of paradoxes that are central to our long-term anxieties and hopes.

    ‘The Australian story does not work anymore, or not well enough … to hang the modern story on … The most useful thing is to recognise that … we took the biggest step we have ever taken towards the American social model. And this has profound implications for how we think of Australia and how we make it cohere.’ —Don Watson, Rabbit Syndrome

    ‘… this is a Quarterly Essay that plays on our most fundamental fears, including the most terrifying of all, that we shall cease to exist because we have never been.’ —Peter Craven

    Don Watson is a historian, author and public speaker. After writing political satire for Max Gillies and speeches for the Victorian premier John Cain, he became Paul Keating’s speechwriter in 1992 and wrote the award winning biography Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime Minister (2002). His Quarterly Essay, Rabbit Syndrome – Australia and America, won the inaugural Alfred Deakin essay prize in the Victorian premier’s literary awards. His other books include Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language, American Journeys and Bendable Learnings: The Wisdom of Modern Management.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateDec 1, 2001
    ISBN9781921825033
    Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America
    Author

    Don Watson

     Don Watson's bestselling titles include Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating Prime Minister, Death Sentence and The Bush, which won the Indie Book of the Year and the NSW Premier's Literary Award. An acclaimed speechwriter and screenwriter, he is also beloved for his columns and essays on Australian and American politics.  

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      Book preview

      Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome - Don Watson

      Quarterly Essay

      Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

      Publisher: Morry Schwartz

      ISBN 1 86395 115 6

      Subscriptions (4 issues): $34.95 a year within Australia incl. GST (Institutional subs. $40). Outside Australia $70. Payment may be made by Mastercard,Visa or Bankcard, or by cheque made out to Schwartz Publishing. Payment includes postage and handling.

      Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to the Editor at:

      Black Inc.

      Level 3, 167 Collins St

      Melbourne VIC 3000

      Australia

      Phone: 61 3 9654 2000

      Fax: 61 3 9654 2290

      Email: quarterlyessay@blackincbooks.com

      Editor: Peter Craven

      Management: Silvia Kwon

      Assistant Editor: Chris Feik

      Publishing Assistant: Sophy Williams

      Publicity: Meredith Kelly

      Design: Guy Mirabella

      Printer: McPherson’s Printing Group

      Image: Mike Bowers/The Australian

      Financial Review

      CONTENTS

      Introduction Peter Craven

      RABBIT SYNDROME

      Australia and America

      Don Watson

      THE OPPORTUNIST Correspondence

      John Birmingham, Paul Bongiorno, Christopher Pearson, Tony Walker, Guy Rundle

      Contributors

      Quarterly Essay aims to present significant contributions to political, intellectual and cultural debate. It is a magazine in extended pamphlet form and by publishing in each issue a single writer of at least 20,000 words we hope to mediate between the limitations of the newspaper column, where there is the danger that evidence and argument can be swallowed up by the form, and the kind of full-length study of a subject where the only readership is a necessarily specialised one. Quarterly Essay aims for the attention of the committed general reader. Although it is a periodical which wants subscribers, each number of the journal will be the length of a short book because we want our writers to have the opportunity to speak to the broadest possible audience without condescension or populist shortcuts. Quarterly Essay wants to get away from the tyranny that space limits impose in contemporary journalism and we will be giving our essayists the space to express the evidence for their views and those who disagree with them the chance to reply at whatever length is necessary. Quarterly Essay will not be confined to politics but it will be centrally concerned with it. We are not interested in occupying any particular point on the political map and we hope to bring our readership the widest range of political and cultural opinion which is compatible with truth-telling, style and command of the essay form.

      INTRODUCTION

      This is not an essay about Australia locked in the embrace of America as the two nations go to war over terrorism in Afghanistan to find the ghostly trail of bin Laden. It is not in the first instance an essay about foreign policy at all. Don Watson, the fourth of our quarterly essayists, has been closer to the centre of power than any of his predecessors but this is in some respects the most literary of the Quarterly Essays so far – a ruminative, sceptical look at the received idea of our relationship with the United States which is tinged with a melancholy whimsy and everywhere invokes the ghost of the ancient Australian irony and stoicism which Watson is inclined to suggest has vanished from the earth and never amounted to much anyway (not in an imaginative landscape that includes Lincoln and Sherman and Judy Garland and the reimagining of history by the great John Ford).

      Don Watson was trained as an historian and influenced both by Greg Dening’s variety of anthropological relativism and by the idealism and trailing banners of Manning Clark whom he defended with some subtlety as a case of history reborn as farce. Watson went on to become a farceur himself, albeit a politico-historical one, when he became one of the authors of the Max Gillies show. And then, famously – not without drawing obvious comment from Andrew Peacock – he became the speechwriter and then the advisor of Paul Keating.

      Rabbit Syndrome is an attempt to put Australia and the culture of anxiety about Australia in a globalist perspective while still retaining an Australian accent, no matter how swish the suit is. And in Don Watson’s case the verbal cut is as elegant as the national voice is distinctive and modulated even if part of the trick with this partly satirical essay is to suggest that Australia is the arse-end of the earth. At least as much so, he insinuates, as it is the best country on earth which is one of the abiding myths he does not so much repudiate as deconstruct, tracing fine lines of paradox and forever shadowing any posited value with the tracings of its opposite.

      The man from Gippsland who went on to ventriloquise first for a great Melbourne comedian and then for a Sydney streetfighter tempted by the spectre of statesmanship is one of those voices who has an affinity for Hibberd, for Furphy, for Lawson. Watson’s vision of Australia – which takes the form of constantly refusing to believe in an Australian vision – is in that line of melancholy scepticism which is central to whatever tradition we have.

      Hence his peculiar relation to that old Australian chestnut, that old Australian cliché, A.A. Phillips’s Cultural Cringe. Watson’s position is that of someone who says that he has nothing against the Cultural Cringe if there’s something worth cringing about in our culture. And before the charge is laid too readily against him – as it will be – it is worth remembering that Phillips, fifty years ago, wrote in a context where Australian writing, Australian culture, was liable to be derogated whereas the opposite is likely to be the case today.

      In any case Don Watson is addressing himself to the predicament which Henry James dubbed the Complex Fate, apropos of America. What do you do when everything that feeds your imagination, that defines your sensibility, comes from a world elsewhere? For the cultivated nineteenth-century American paradoxically occupying the site of his nation’s great Renaissance, this was Europe. For Watson, with a complex irony that is the opposite of naïve, it is America.

      He devotes some time to tracing the archetypal divisions, for an Australian of the boomer generation, between Britain and America. He notes the limitations of the American product (the supposed lack of the sense of humour we share with the Ealing comedies and John Cleese) and then, notwithstanding their grandstanding war movies, the enveloping majesty and seductiveness, the power and the glory of an American culture without which we would not be what we are. Indeed the way we imagine ourselves would be inconceivable in a quite literal sense.

      Here we come close to the tendency towards historical idealism that is central to Watson’s cast of mind. Not the lofty-minded pursuit of ideals (he has little truck with that) but the deflected philosophical idealism that says the way we think and believe and mythologise the world has a significance and an interest that material conditions and political events cannot in themselves capture or disclose.

      Hence the centrality which this essay gives to the Rabbit novels of John Updike. On the one hand they represent for Watson a kind of pinnacle of contemporary literary achievement which Australian writing can barely hope to match (how could the social conditions combine to register this kind of book?) and on the other they disclose a matchless social panorama at every point. This may seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy, whichever way you look at it: only Americans can produce writing this great and what’s great about this novel is the America it represents. But it would be wrong to dismiss Watson with a too-easy theory, a too-easy logic. At one level he is dramatising the fact that powerful American culture speaks to us in ways our own generally does not but what is most interesting here is that this leads him to his central move – Rabbit can be taken (the author chooses to take him) as a metaphor of Australia.

      So Rabbit, this powerful representation of American hopelessness, is also a representation (in the mind’s eye of the essayist) of us. What may be disputed in the given instance is liable to be true allegorically and by general extension, and so it goes through the widening circles of social and political paradox which Don Watson traces.

      America, however flawed its mighty empire may be, is a more benign empire

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