Abstract
In 1959, C. Wright Mills declared – willfully in defiance of the tidal wave of structuralist theories and methods that dominated the social sciences in the second half of the 20th century – that ‘the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise’. The Australian historian David Walker delivers amply on the promise in Not Dark Yet. Here is a book that tells good personal stories artfully connected to the mighty flows and ebbs of historical change so that one and both are illuminated with fresh critical insight on society. Besides, it is a good read – sobering, wise, and good-humoured in equal measure.
It begins with a jolt, a visceral shock. Within one week in November 2004, the author lost over 90 per cent of his vision. He has not been able to read a book since. Perhaps emblematically, the last book that he read was Frederic Prokosch’s The Asiatics: A Novel (1935). To a self-avowed reading addict and book collector this was a devastating blow. But Walker is also one of Australia’s finest cultural historians and, along with Don Watson, perhaps also its wittiest. His private tribulation is a loss to public intellectual life here and elsewhere.
Walker has made three critically important contributions to Australian cultural history. His first work, Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Cultural Identity (1976), recounts an underappreciated period of Australian public intellectual life, of a generation of writers seeking to develop a post-colonial, national literature and culture in the first half of the 20th century. It has long been a conceit of the baby boomers that intellectual life in Australia starts with them. Walker blows raspberries behind their back for too few have read Dream and Disillusion; perhaps the title is too haunting. It seems Walker is not easily dissuaded, for his next major title was no less challenging: Anxious Nation. This time round, though, he garnered more acclaim. The subtitle must have done it: ‘Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939’, for here is an historical theme that resonates with a renewed self-consciousness about Australia’s place at ‘the arse end of the earth’, betwixt and between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Anxious Nation explores Australia’s responses to China, Japan and our near northern neighbours, not just in official government and academic discourses but in popular culture of radio, films, magazines, novels, travel guides, advertisements, and pamphlets of civil society in general.
Anxious Nation was intended as the first of a projected trilogy covering the whole span of the 20th century. That the mooted second and third volumes of this study now look to remain in the mind’s eye of Walker is our loss – a grievous loss not only because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the literature and popular culture but because he is one of few in this field to understand that Asia is not for area studies specialists alone but represents whole worlds within and next to our own. The days of writing Australia through and from Oxbridge should be done and dusted. That they are not is an obstacle to clear thinking about the antipodes of the 21st century. This is not to deny Australia as Britain’s antipodes for at least the past three centuries. Neither is it a reason for the dominant Anglo-centric cultures of Australia to stop enjoying and playing off our cultural inheritances and motifs in the creation of our own worlds. Nevertheless, the growing presence of Asian cultures and peoples in our everyday lives, institutions, markets and public cultures is reason enough to change our lens of interpretations of our cultural flows, and of the region’s and the nation’s emergent narratives, cultures and scenes.
What is a historian to do when he is blindsided by his new infirmity? How can he function without access to archives, books, and all the paraphernalia of official documents, journals, diaries, letters, advertisements, and pamphlets that make up the imaginary worlds of our societies, past and present? Walker turns to his biography, and with the help of his own family and a new computer, large-print graphics, voice recognition programs and whatnot, he posits his own life as a family history but set in and through the larger vicissitudes of lifecycles, generations, and historical change across society and the world.
David Walker’s turn to ‘personal history’ is not only an inspired move to deal with a personal calumny but a masterstroke in recapturing the panoply of colonial and regional cultures and societies of Australia. New world settler societies are less complex than old world civilizations but they are not without their own difficulties and conundra that sometimes are better opened up by the aperture of our sociological lens being focused on the quotidian as much as on the larger scale, impersonal forces, flows, processes, and systems. Walker’s family history opens up whole vistas and stories of cultural traffic in the most parochial of places and ‘ordinary’ of peoples. Take the surprising find of a hidden member of the Walker family – Luke Hedow Day – a young Chinaman born at sea en route to Australia to escape anti-Christian persecution in southern China. Luke was a successful citizen of the town of Burra, a copper mining and farming town 200 km north of Adelaide, in the late 19th century. He was a local storekeeper and market gardener who married into a branch of the author’s ancestors in 1894. They were unable to have children so there is no Chinese line in the Walker genealogy, but a Walker was to marry their adopted daughter. Not Dark Yet provides, through a close reading of the town archives of newspaper reports, town council minutes, and community organizational leaflets, as well as family letters, a nuanced picture of the relations between the Chinese and Europeans in the town, of the importance of the Chinese in food production and commercial trading, and of the changes in public discourses that turned racialist during periods of economic depression and pending world war.
Not Dark Yet gets us to think afresh about our places in the world and view Australia as peculiar indeed even if these patterns and processes of culture-making are the same (at least analogously) across history and the world over. Perhaps a country family of law-abiding, quiet, Tory-voting, secular Methodists is not the most promising field for a picaresque romp across Australian culture, but it is their very anonymity and quiet collective character that provides a canvas and a set of vivid portraits for understanding Australian society writ large. Here in this book are the stories of colonizing; of land settlements and the Goyder Line; farming and gardens; immigration and multiculturalism; world wars, cold wars, and Vietnam; education and welfare systems. But here too are the minutiae and the quotidian aspects of modernity: of magazines and posters, of encyclopaedias, scouting manuals and Biggles, first radios, stereos, and televisions, of modern kitchens, of trains, planes and automobiles but of bikes and caravans as well, of cinemas and tourism, of public health crazes and teenage fads.
It is the way Walker puts the two together that demonstrates his acuity as a cultural observer as much as he is an historian who delights in storytelling. Three chapters in particular vividly capture post-war mid-century, middle Australia: ‘The Virile Vanguard’ (on the family car), ‘Our Arkley Home’ (on suburban home life), and ‘World Travellers’ (the author’s parents, Gil and Glasson, embark on their first trip overseas and during six months ‘discover’ Asia, Egypt and Europe in 1963). It is one thing to note the events, stories and changes, it is quite another skill to tease out their nuances and meanings. On his parents as world travellers, Walker notes: As careful savers my parents saw travel as a better, more improving way of spending their hard-earned money than smoking or drinking. Travel broadened the mind. While they understood there were some risks involved, they strove to be independent, doing things their own way if possible before resorting to an organized tour. That said, they were not big risk takers. There was no white-water rafting down the Limpopo … none of that. Above all, overseas travel confirmed their status as modern people who were able to talk about the countries and customs they had experienced.
On the one hand, travelled provincialized their own worlds: ‘After Hong Kong, Adelaide’s lights did not seem quite so marvelous anymore and we heard less of them.’ On the other hand, it reveals what it meant to be an Australian. David’s parents did not feel the need to advertise their nationality: ‘being Australian provided an opening for conversation rather than an assertion of difference’. And again, in Greece, Glasson reports ‘we felt we were among people we understood. Their standards of behavior were the same as ours.’ The son ruefully responds: ‘I am surprised to read this. I was unaware that back in Adelaide, Gil and Glasson felt any affinity for the Greeks, yet here they were in Athens embracing them as their own.’ It is in the specificity of their experiences and self-reflexivity in their travel diaries and slides that Walker patiently builds this wider societal picture: ‘Without the camera there could be no truly satisfying tourist experience and no slide evening.’ The cumulative power of the stories and reports give credence to Walker’s concluding summation of his parents as world travellers in a way that intellectuals’ pronouncements on Australia do not: In the monuments, castles and galleries of Europe, Gil and Glasson experienced the power and immediacy of European history and civilization. Here they could relax and enjoy themselves. Moreover, Europe confirmed their suspicion that Australia was a nation without a history or none worth speaking of. It was all too recent and lacking in grandeur. They failed to note the long Aboriginal past. They saw no history there.
That was 1963. The bloody force-field that was the Second World War takes up a number of chapters in the differing fates of David’s various uncles – Laurie, Alan, and Eric. I read Chapter 11, ‘Wizard of Fires’, to my dying father. Like the author’s Uncle Alan, my dad had also joined the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF) during the Second World War and trained as a fighter pilot in Edmonton, Canada. Much to my surprise, as I read aloud, my normally taciturn father jumped ahead of the narrative offering razor-sharp recall of the empirical detail of life in the airforce. My father was not atypical of his generation of young provincial men who were not given to confessional modes of reflection but who loved the ritual and cadence of storytelling that in its substance and rhythms was liturgical in its form even as it was sociological in its content – social, that is, with a gemeinschaft focus that only hinted at the gesellschaft dimensions and contexts in which these ordinary blokes performed their duties. The events and figures might have been in 1943–1945 but they were sharply etched in dad’s mind’s eye, matched perfectly by the text I was reading to him. I would read a sentence and out would flow a story or two that not only gave a vivid depiction of mates, bosses, and locals but also of technical aspects of planes, flight logs and training schedules, barracks and their dimensions, the winters and the Rockies. From the trivial to the epic, the particular and the sublime, no detail was lost to my father that would not then be immediately confirmed by David Walker’s artful reconstruction of his Uncle Alan’s story. We might concede that all our memories are perennial reconstructions of our pasts but, if so, they sometimes can be uncannily matched between strangers – in this case between a certain Alan Walker and Stuart Hogan. Thanks to writers as sensitive as Walker, these are memories that are not lost to eternity but carried forward across the decades, placed in new contexts and all the more meaningfully for that, as we readers try to make sense of what that most bloody of centuries has bequeathed us – even to folks down under in the southern hemisphere, whose travails and sufferings in global wars when compared to their northern confreres were relatively dissimulated by distance.
My father had a lucky war; not so the Walker brothers, Laurie and Alan. My father’s squadron was probably one to two years behind Alan Walker’s training crew. With the Japanese all but beaten, my Dad, a fully qualified fighter pilot, got to hitchhike around the States. Meanwhile, Alan was on duty over the cities of Germany. As the Wireless Operator Air Gunner (WAG) in a Lancaster Bomber, Alan managed the controls of the crew’s intercom system and had to replace any incapacitated gunner as well as be the first aid expert. It was a miserable existence – the WAGs would all have their hearing permanently damaged by having to sit near the fuselage, presuming they survived; life expectancy was not good. For every 100 aircrew in the Lancaster Bomber Command, 51 were killed in action; 9 were killed in crashes in England; 3 were seriously injured; 12 became prisoners of war; 1 evaded capture; and 24 were unharmed. Unharmed is a poor euphemism for survival. Alan survived the war to live on to 2004, but as Not Dark Yet makes clear, no one gets out of war unharmed, least those involved in the attack of Dresden, a cathedral city of no strategic importance in military terms, that caused the devastating firestorm killing over 30,000 civilians and destroying the heart of the city. It was this attack that would ‘later cause Alan the deepest anguish’, an anguish (a ‘torment and guilt’) he carried to his last days: ‘No amount of reasoning could reach him, not that he asked for help … If Alan had fractured his leg he would have seen a doctor, but for a man of his generation it was almost impossible to admit to recurrent nightmares, let alone ask for help in dealing with his demons.’
By the time we return to the author’s place in the scheme of things at the end of the book, we know we are in good hands. Walker is not the solipsistic autobiographer. The hilarious but touching chapter of his own gauche rites of passage at ANU makes us wish for a campus novel a la Lodge, Bradbury, or Clancy. This reader winced in self-recognition of ‘days of wine and rage’ and general hairiness.
The young boy Walker is a lurking presence throughout the book, often to comic effect, and always the older author is self-deprecating and rueful. We are given little vignettes of the skinny, curly-haired, toothy, and short-sighted boy, who – by his own testimony – was clumsy and given to fantasy but who was not without a certain cunning at negotiating all the challenges thrown at him in his everyday world, whether they be his parents, teachers or schoolmates. All the motifs of a provincial aussie boy’s story are to be found here: shop-lifting, catching yabbies, riding his bike, learning to shoot, passing exams (or not), buying his first clothes and records, and best of all his unrequited love affair with Brigitte Bardot. Sadly, readers, she was not aware of young David’s passionate feelings for her. Walker’s harshest critic was his mother (‘a silly galoot’; ‘still acting the giddy goat are we lad?’). She perhaps expected the most of her son, even as she struggled to respect his autonomy (the adult son reports that ‘Glasson was still throwing out things that I thought were mine’). It is fitting then that Not Dark Yet does not end with the author’s own story but rather on the sad last and lost decade of his mother, defeated by Alzheimer’s disease. But as Walker shows us, even in our loneliest of destinies, our world is held up by those around us. As Glasson’s personality fades as her mind deteriorates, so her primary carers – her husband and three adult children – have to rearrange their own worlds. The limits of both institutional and family home care alike are both fully exposed in the process.
We might regret that Walker’s eyesight has suffered macular degeneration but we can be ever grateful that he is still raging against the dark with his inimitable wit, skill and acute historical and sociological imagination. Not dark yet. And if we are not yet reduced to ‘rabbiting reminiscences’, a pastime beloved of David’s own father in his dotage, from whom, the son relates, ‘we heard much more about rabbits than relatives, though the line between the two was often blurred’, our time will surely come. As Dylan put it on ‘Time out of Mind’: ‘not dark yet, but it’s getting there’. Thanks to writers like David Walker, we can face our growing infirmities with courage and humour of the life worth living and the stories to be told: ours and, still better, stories of others.