SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING MP
AUSTRALIAN BOOK PUBLISHERS AWARDS, SYDNEY 26 JUNE
Ladies and gentlemen.
It's a pleasure to be here tonight on one of the big
occasions in the Australian literary year.
And to be here with an Englishman of such courage and
grace that he is prepared to share the stage with a
notorious Pombasher.
I assure you, John, that I am not.
It is only my enemies who say that I am my enemies, the
British tabloids, and a certain type of intractable
colonial which I'm sure you'd never come across in the
Australian publishing industry.
I'm pleased to be here because I want to congratulate the
industry for holding this first international book fair
in Australia.
It's a very welcome development.
Similar events are held around the world; in fact the
international reputation of some cities is to a
significant degree built on book fairs.
There are book fairs in Frankfurt and Bologna. A US book
fair, and Pacifica in Canada.
They are held in Asian countries.
Until now they not have been held here.
Yet, per capita, Australians read as many if not more
books than any of these places. They buy at least as
many. They depend on books as much.
We are an important market for English language
publishing and, increasingly, for books in other
languages and in translation and it's a vigorous
competitive market.
We gholid celebrate books and their authors.
And their publishers.
And we should do what we can to focus the attention of
Australians on an industry which is a vital supplier of
their cultural needs.
If the word cultural is off-putting, let's say education,
information, communication, entertainment, ideas,
politics, history, stories the skeleton, heart and mind
of a community if you like.
And an essential underpinning and partner of film and
television and many other industries.
And still probably the best measure of who we are, what
we are about, and how well we are doing on the scale of
civilisation. There we have a few reasons why I am pleased to be
associated with the Australian Book Fair and with these
awards. There is another one books offer us a window on to the
world. Just as they do much to define us to ourselves, they can
define us to the rest of the world.
And quite frankly, I think we could do with a bit of redefining.
Visitors like John Mortimer could be forgiven for
wondering why we are so pre-occupied with questions of
identity.
Not only visitors my political opponents describe it as
a distraction, or an obsession, depending on their mood.
But it seems to me a fundamental concern.
In the 1990s we need to be confident in ways that we have
never been, independent in ways that we've never been.
Why? Because all the old supports that gave us both
confidence and a vicarious identity have been pulled
away. The old imperial supports contrived to make the matter of
our independence a secondary concern: for long periods of
our history political expediency made it an illegitimate
concern.
The same reflex governs the conservative knee Jerk today.
As my opponents are inclined to believe only certified
historians, or RSL Presidents, on such matters, let me
quote one W. J. Hudson, the pre-eminent historian of
Australian foreign policy.
In an article published this year he writes:
When independence from Britain came piecemeal in the
twentieth century diplomatic independence 1923,
executive independence in 1926 and legislative
independence in 1931 it came unsought by
Australia. The independence campaign was waged by
Canada, South Africa and the Irish Free State, and
Australia unsuccessfully opposed them. Australia
became independent not by her choice, not when she
wanted it, not as a result of her own efforts and
not because Australians sought freedom to fulfil
their own alternative visions. From the Australian
point of view, Britain abdicated and Australia was
thrust into an independence which she did not want
and which, lest a potential aggressor might think he
had only Australia to face and not the might of the
British empire, she pretended had not happened.
Some Australians some influential Australians still
pretend. Some symbolic vestiges and some attitudes
suggest that thenat~ ion is still pretending.
I don't think that we can pretend anymore in any form.
We will go into the world independent or we will not
succeed, we will go by our own efforts because there is
no one else to help us, we will fulfil our own visions
because no one is going to lend us theirs.
We have always been ambivalent about who we are. Robert
Menzies of course resolved the dilemma by saying wie we
like a child that is we were not so much two people at
once as one caught between childhood and adulthood.
He imagined us in our relationship wi:: thBri4, tain as being
like a youth returning to its mother, the old family as
if back from a spell at Timbertop, or jackerooing.
Hudson uses a similar metaphor but puts a different spin
on it.
When Britain formalised her withdrawal into Europe, he
says, Australians " felt bereft and betrayed".
Australia was like an adult son having affairs
( economically with Japan and militarily with the
United States) but still living at home and, worse
than kicking him out of the old home, mother was
moving house and not taking him with her.
In the 1990s without the slightest disrespect to a
country for which I have the greatest admiration, and to
whose language and institutions I am a very grateful
heir, I want to see us leave home.
Of course, we do not remain there in any substantial
material way but we are there emblematically and to a
degree psychologically, and it would be much better for
us in the real world that we now inhabit if we removed
the emblems and excised the doubts.
We need very badly that spirit of independence and faith
in ourselves which will enable us to shape a role for
ourselves in the region and the world.
I mean a faith that is deeper than the mix of chauvinism
and expediency which has tended to shape our political
culture: and a degree of confidence which will allow an
image of us to form that is both more helpful and much
closer to the truth than the lingering stero-types of
gormless men, and shrimps and barbecues.
In this connection I might tell you that yesterday I
presented Australia's Second Report to the Chair of the
UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against
Women. The Chair, Mrs Mervat Tallawy, pointed out that, in
legislation to protect and improve the status of women,
Australia was a model for the rest of the-wo'rld,-
surpassed by none, and equalled perhaps only by the
Scandinavian countries.
Nowhere in the image we present to the rest of the world
nor, I suspect, in our self-image is there a
reflection of that fact.
It would do us good if Australians did know that, and if
the rest of the world knew it.
It would do us good psychologically.
And because we have learned things in getting there and
so have skills and experience which other countries need
it would do us good materially.
I think our ignorance of these things comes from that
same abdication of responsibility for our own destiny,
and our own history.
Let me quote another historian, Professor Stuart
Maclntyre of Melbourne University, who said recently:
Australian history lacks a civic dimension that
would record how it established its forms of selfgovernment
and the values for which the polity
stands. Just as a survey revealed that more
Australian schoolchildren knew of the Constitution
of the United States of America than the
constitution of their own country, so Washington and
Martin Luther King are more celebrated figures than
Wentworth and Catherine Helen Spence. Our interest
in the past is an interest in family history but not
civic history.
How else could we consider removing Caroline Chisholm
from our currency the most signif1fit woman of our
colonial history, and one engaged in the most significant
phenomenon of aiL our history immigration.
The fact is that for a very long while the focus of our
historical interest was not our own history.
In the age of multicultural Australia we have not by any
means entirely replaced the old sentiments with
unequivocally Australian ones.
Indeed, in a sense, multiculturalism combined with the
lingering Britishness of the place to circumvent the
emergence of a singularly Australian identity to replace
the old imperial one.
As Professor Maclntrye says, " at the very moment when
Australia asserted a more forward-looking and pluralist
identity, the public culture lapsed into inarticulacy."
Again, it seems to me, the questions of identity, image
and our place in the world are linked.
We have very rapidly transformed ourselves from a
notoriously xenophobic and insular society to one which
has the beginnings of a reputation for its remarkably
successful multicultural experiment.
But that success does not form a significant part of our
image abroad, and we do not take much pride in it here.
Nor do we take sufficient advantage of the skills,
experience and cultural insight which our multicultural
population offers us in international business.
The Japanese will tell us that their success is built on
their uniquely monocultural society.
The fact that we can't do that should not concern us
the United States achieved phenomenal success from a
multitude of cultures.
I believe we can too.
But I think we have to make clear that our belief in
liberty, tolerance, equity and the encouragement of
ethnic diversity in no way compromises our expectation
that the first loyalty of all who make their home here
will be to Australia.
In the 1990s I think we should make it clear.
As a simple step in that direction, I believe the Oath of
Allegiance sworn by new citizens at naturalisation
ceremonies should proclaim unequivocally their loyalty to
Australia and the things we believe Australia stands for
including liberty, tolerance, social justice those
very beliefs which underpin multiculturalism.
As Professor Maclntrye says, there is at present " no
doctrine of citizenship.. The new citizen swears an oath
to abide by the laws of her or his new state, but these
laws are not spelt out, nor is there any elaboration of
their guiding principles or the ethos they encompass."
My own feeling is that the truth about us is more
profound than we are accustomed to admit.
We are still very often described as a place which is
" 1new" or " young". But Australia is n= young.
The truth about the continent is that it is the oldest in
the world and the continent shapes our culture.
The truth about the Australians who were here before 1788
is that they lived in the oldest continuous civilisation
in the world and they have shaped our culture.
The truth about the people who have come here since is
that they brought cultures as old as Europe's, Asia's,
the Middle East's.
The truth about Australian democracy is that there are
few older.
The truth about the first few years of our nationhood-is
that we were in the vanguard of social and democratic
progress. Just as it is true that we are once more.
We are a mature social democracy in need of more
direction and cohesion than we have so far had, and more
confidence than we have presently but mature and robust
nonetheless. A mature social democracy, ladies and gentlemen, with a
remarkably active publishing industry and literary
culture.
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A mature social democracy in which the people read books.
And involve themselves in the arts to an extent at least
equivalent to other cultures. And seek to make civilised
lives. And think and invent.
And they write books they win Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer
and other international prizes.
They win Au tralfan prizes. Many Australian prizes.
I wonder if any other country has more literary prizes.
Increasingly they have an international profile in the UK
and the USA.
I hope that increasingly they will be read in Asia that
this book fair will mark a turning point in the
internationalisation of our cultural industries, and that
the book world will do all it can to develop export
markets in our region.
I cannot stress too much how important that task is.
That answer to our biggest contemporary problem
unemployment the answers about our economic future, are
bound to our success in Asia.
And our success there, like our success at home, is bound
I believe to many of the issues I have talked about
tonight. Books already play a vital role in carrying the message
of who we are: the message that this is a culture of
imagination and sophistication.
It is also a culture like the nation itself of vast
unrealised potential.
No industry will play a more significant role in
realising it than the publishing industry.
None will do more to shape and project our identity.
I hope that tonight I have made reasonably clear why I
think this task is so very important.
So I congratulate the industry for this week's great
convention. I also congratulate all those who have been short-listed
for these awards and, of course, all those who have
won.
And I thank you very much for giving me the opportunity
to speak.
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