“At home in our own skin” is a phrase used elegantly by David Malouf in a poem written for Chris Wallace-Crabbe as his fellow poet approached his 80th birthday. Malouf, one of Australia’s finest living writers, turned 80 on March 20. Two books, Earth Hour (a poetry collection in which the Wallace-Crabbe poem appears) and A First Place (a collection of essays written between 1984 and 2010) have been published to celebrate this milestone.
I mention the phrase because Malouf — who I was chuffed to see in conversation with the Australian’s Chief Literary Critic, Geordie Williamson, at Balmain Town Hall on March 19 — does seem at home in his own skin (and this is excellent news because, as one over-zealous audience member interjected, we love him.)
I also mention the phrase because our bodies are the means through which we experience “a first place”: our land of origin, with all its familial, geographical, cultural, architectural and environmental specificity. And I relished the visceral and sensual details Malouf wove so deftly through essays that intelligently ponder what it is that distinguishes Australia as a nation and Australians as people.
Other critics have written incisively about A First Place and why its contents are significant (see two of these in The Saturday Paper and The Sydney Morning Herald). Rather than duplicate their efforts, I’ve extracted a number of quotes from the book in the hope that Malouf’s thought-provoking prose will tempt you to read further.
As Malouf said in an interview with SBS, the book is an attempt to make people “look at their own lives and ask questions about what kind of country we want to be, questions about how we came to be the country we are”. It seems an important time in our nation’s history to do this.
On his childhood in the late ’40s and early ’50s
A time of boils and chilblains and whitlows, and mouths open wide each morning in the winter for the daily spoonful of cod-liver oil and malt, with a block of camphor in a flannel scapula round our necks … All this, along with Milk of Magnesia, castor oil in its own blue bottle, and Antiphlogistine plasters to be boiled up and slapped on the chest, is so ancient and unimaginable, so unlike any Australia that most Australians have a personal experience of today, that we might be talking of galingales and syllabubs or the relics of saints. It is my childhood.
— from “Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance” (2003)
On the environment
“There is, always has been, something rootless and irresponsible about our attitude to the land. We treat it, we go at things ‘as if there were no tomorrow’, using, wasting, making the most of everything while it lasts, stripping assets, taking the short view, as if we had no responsibility to those who might come after because we have no sense of what lies behind. We took the land, grabbed it by main force, so we miss the sense of it as being a gift — something to be held in trust and passed on. Perhaps a deep awareness of history has less to do with the past than with a capacity to hold on hard to the future.”
— from “Putting Ourselves on the Map” (1998)
On Australia as an ‘open experiment’
In daring to become a diverse and multi-ethnic society, an open experiment, we run more risk perhaps than most places of breaking up, of fragmenting. But we have faced that danger before. What got us through on those earlier occasions was neighbourliness, the saving grace of lightness and good humour, the choice of moderation over temptation to any form of extreme. These characteristics of our society are still visibly alive in the present; in occasions we take for granted, and so much so that we fail sometimes to see how rare they are.
— from “Putting Ourselves on the Map” (1998)
On the survival of the planet
What we are being prepared for by all that space-adventuring was an apprehension that may be essential now to our survival, and to the survival of the planet itself: a vision of where we are, and all it involves in the way of loyalty and affection and concern, as “global” and the problems we have to resolve as equally “global”. The awareness is evolutionary, and the rapidity with which it has occurred is as astonishing, and as indicative of what is human and remarkable in us, as the moon-walk itself.
— from “The Eighties, a ‘Learning’ Experience” (1989)
On how land shaped the nation
The desire of ordinary men and women to become property owners was the making of this country. To own a piece of Australia, even if it was only a quarter-acre block, became the Australian dream … Not everyone [convicts] ended up as a merchant prince. But when all the savageries have been taken into account — and the disruption and pain of leaving loved ones and a life, however unsettled, that in their mind, and in their hearts too, was home — transportation worked for most of these men and women. To suggest otherwise is to deny the extent to which so many of them did change and become active citizens who made our world.
— from “A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness” (1998)
On Bennelong’s inclusive view
But Bennelong … had behind him the strength of a culture that in being old had developed, in its long view of things, an extraordinary capacity to accept change and take in what was new and must be adapted to. It is in terms of that long view that what we have made here will be judged; and in the shaping of a collective consciousness, mixed but truly native, Bennelong’s inclusive view, his imaginative leap, may turn out to have been the most important element in the first and fateful meeting of two worlds.
— from “A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness” (1998)
On complacency and mediocrity
Like all forms of strength it [the adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon “habit of mind”] has its weak side: anti-intellectualism and complacent philistinism; a preference for moderation that can all too easily become mediocrity — deficiencies that Charles Darwin identified in the new colony as far back as 1836, along with material progress and the energy that produced it, and which, as they dismayed him then, would dismay him even more perhaps today. But the strengths are real ones.
— from “Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance” (2003)
On ditching the White Australia Policy
A whole complex of changes in the sixties determined our move away from the White Australia policy. Some of them were local — from like the Yes vote in the ’67 referendum that was the culmination of twenty years of slow change in our thinking about the place of Aboriginal people in our society but also in our history. Others were part of a general move, in nations like our own, to a rethinking of racial attitudes under the influence of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Others again were determined by our need to be more open-minded in our dealings with the world, with thinking again about the kind of country we wanted to be and the way we wanted others, now, to see us.
— from “A Spirit of Play” (1998)
On the Anzac story
These [thousands of war memorials] are mourning places that mark a national tragedy: a recognition of the loss and grief as being central both to the community, the nation — 62,000 men, mostly young men, lost from a population of fewer than four million — and to families and lives. That, a binding of people at every level in a shared grief, is what “coming of age” might be about, and explains the power of Anzac Day, and how it has come to be chosen, by the people themselves, as our day of national unity …When young people these days are drawn to Anzac, it is partly, I think, because they are moved by the drama of youthful death, and partly because, in a nation that makes so little of public ceremony, this day offers a larger, and more solemn view of what life may be, than is general in a culture whose norm is chatter, noise, almost continuous sensation.
— from “The States of the Nation” (2010)
On our responsibility
What each of us takes on, at whatever point we enter it, is the whole of what happened here, since it is the whole of our history that has created what now surrounds and sustains us. We cannot disassociate ourselves from the past by saying we were not present. It is present in us. And we must resist the attractive notion that the past is, as they say, another country. It is not. It is this country before the necessities of a changing world changed it … As for the wish to return to the past in the belief that it was somehow simpler and more truly “Australian” because less diverse — all one can say is, there are no simplicities, there never were. Life is always more complex than the means we have for dealing with it.
— from “A Spirit of Play” (1998)
A book of breadth to savour
UQP Poetry Editor, Felicity Plunkett, said that when she first read Earth Hour she was taken by its hospitality, agility of step, warm sidelong wit, reticence and humility. The pieces in A First Place, including the Boyer Lectures of 1998, “The Making of the Australian Consciousness”, and a Quarterly Essay from 2003, “Made In England”, which make up a goodly proportion of it, also contain these qualities. The breadth of ideas and the graceful, yet rigorous, manner in which they are broached makes this collection a “must read” for every history lover and student (if not for every Australian).
Geordie Williamson said that when he read A First Place it was the first time he really felt pride in our nation’s achievement.
Me too.
Feeling this pride has (strangely) helped me feel more at home here.
At home in my own land.
At home in my own skin.
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