has made Australia richer, or poorer; fairer or unfairer; wiser or stupider....The
ultimate concern of this volume is withwhyAustralia is like that.
1.3 Planet Australia
Why Australia is‘exceptional’has received only intermittent scrutiny. This
inattention is doubtless in part the human failing of taking for granted what
endures. More than a century ago Australia was most conspicuously distin-
guished from its parent society by the provision of railways by government.
This had significant impacts (see Chapters 9 and 13, this volume), but it seems
to have provoked more scrutiny from outside of Australia than within
(Acworth 1892), and was explained away to British visitors as simply a matter
of applying to railways the method of supplying postal services. Today the
contrast endures—with passenger railways (outside metropolitan Victoria)
remaining a matter of government administration—yet the difference is even
less remarked, even if the Post Office of the UK (now a market institution) will
no longer serve to normalize it.
But the lack of scrutiny is not just a consequence of inattention; it is also the
effect of a certain system of proprieties having established itself in Australia.
Any system of proprieties reigns by silences as much as by pronouncements:
some things are not to be spoken of. And so it is with Australian excep-
tionalism. Thus, A. F. Davies records publicly the simple truth that Australia
is acutely bureaucratized, and for this is‘never forgiven’by some of his peers
(Walter 2007). Thus Australia’s most learned scholar of legislation, Geoffrey
Sawer (1952, p. 213), writes of the‘conspiracy of silence’regarding the inten-
sity and extent of judicial legislation in the Australia. Similarly, the impact of
unions is somehow never mentioned in the studies of Australian public
administration (see Chapter 14, this volume), or even superannuation (see
Chapter 10, this volume). The corruption (‘rorting’) that blights state utilities
and agencies may make news, but never scholarly journals. Indeed, unlike the
USA, the public’s offence at corruption seems mild.
A silencing effect can also come from being preoccupied with Australia to
the exclusion of other societies. The past cultivators of the Australian differ-
ence have been reasonably described as‘obsessed’with Australia (Boyd 1972);
an obsession epitomized by that‘map of Australia’that any book on Australia
once seemed of necessity to begin with, and which excised all trace of the
neighbouring world. Thus there was a‘guiltless incuriosity’about New Zealand
(Davies 1985, p. 248); and comparative studies were cautioned against as
potentially‘very dangerous’(Gollan 1965, p. 1).
This incuriosity about alternatives in space is matched by a parallel incuri-
osity in time: Australian historians seem to have had little interest in the
The Australian Exception