Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America
By Don Watson
()
About this ebook
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.
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.
Read more from Don Watson
Watsonia: A Writing Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome
Titles in the series (93)
Quarterly Essay 7 Paradise Betrayed: West Papua's Struggle for Independence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 15 Latham's World: The New Politics of the Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 9 Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 2 Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 1 In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 8 Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 37 What's Right?: The Future of Conservatism in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 3 The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 11 Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 10 Bad Company: The Cult of the CEO Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 14 Mission Impossible: The Sheikhs, the U.S. and the Future of Iraq Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 6 Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 19 Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party's Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 13 Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 21 What's Left?: The Death of Social Democracy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 30 Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 17: ‘Kangaroo Court’: Family Law in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 39 Power Shift: Australia's Future Between Washington and Beijing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 52 Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 29 Love and Money: The Family and the Free Market Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 18 Worried Well: The Depression Epidemic and the Medicalisation of Our Sorrows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 20 A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 38 Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 36 Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 42 Fair Share: Country and City in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 32 American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 33 Quarry Vision: Coal, Climate Change and the End of the Resources Boom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related ebooks
Quarterly Essay 2 Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChristos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique: Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 3 The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 56 Clivosaurus: The Politics of Clive Palmer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 45 Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quarterly Essay 29 Love and Money: The Family and the Free Market Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 30 Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Tongue is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quarterly Essay 35 Radical Hope: Education and Equality for Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 71 Follow the Leader: Democracy and the Rise of the Strongman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quarterly Essay 49 Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 47 Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 40 Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBad Cop: Peter Dutton's Strongman Politics; Quarterly Essay 93 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNative Son Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCoonardoo Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Ghost And The Bounty Hunter: William Buckley, John Batman And The Theft Of Kulin Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 8 Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 37 What's Right?: The Future of Conservatism in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNo Road Out: Yarrabah Mission Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 54 Dragon's Tail: The Lucky Country After the China Boom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 21 What's Left?: The Death of Social Democracy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 51 The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quarterly Essay 6 Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 78 The Coal Curse: Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 65 The White Queen: One Nation and the Politics of Race Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDonald Horne: Selected Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Anthropology For You
The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way of the Shaman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Preacher's Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Psychology of Totalitarianism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How to Survive in Ancient Egypt Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Rootworkers & Hoodoo in the Mid-South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bruce Lee Wisdom for the Way Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future---Updated With a New Epilogue Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Quarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome
0 ratings0 reviews
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