gentlemanly status; and the prejudices against‘trade’so characteristic of the
professions—law, medicine, civil service, and engineering—which predomin-
ated among the‘massive’immigration of mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois
to Australia.^9 In 1911 not one manufacturer held a place in Victoria’s Upper
House (Serle 1967), and, remarkably, there was just one in the lower chamber
between1856 and 1881 (Parnaby 1967, p. 89). Could Australia’s inheritance of
traditional status structure in a truncated form have been less congruent with
wealth than the traditional structure in its complete form? The matter is
speculative.
The relative scrappiness of social structure may be a case where an absence is
not explanatory, and social structure might be best treated a blank card in the
explanation of Australian exceptionalism. The inscrutability—or vacuity—of
Australia’s social structure may be why, despite massive effort (Encel 1970),
the country still awaits its scientific divination or, indeed, its novelist or
playwright.^10
3.2 Fraternity
If the awry angles of Australia’s vertical gradations are of arguable significance
in explaining her exceptional aspects, perhaps the strength of horizontal
bonds is more useful. In taking this hypothesis we turn from a striving for
status to another province of human existence,‘fraternity’; a province born of
an impulse for comradeship, fostered by shared if perhaps distinctive experi-
ence, directed by the common sense of the average mind, constrained to
spurn the renegade, and precipitated by collective actions that amount to
rituals of oneness (meals, ceremonies, marches, strikes). The province has a
particular valency with youth; it is congruent with an uninhibited, extrovert
disposition. It in no essentials conflicts with the quest for status. But as vertical
relations can be confounding of horizontal ones, the repudiation of vertical
relations can mean fewer potential obstructions to live out fraternity. Thus,
while the province of fraternity is not specific to the working class, it lives
more easily there. The repudiation of vertical ties that accommodate
the province also obviously correlates with an‘anti-authoritarian’(i.e. anti-
authority) posture, and the province of fraternity tends to leniency of group
(^9) In 1891 three of the six colonies’Chief Justices were Anglo-Irish. See O’Farrell (1993) for the
leading role of the‘Anglo-Irish professional classes’in Melbourne in the nineteenth century. One
biographer of H. B. Higgins notes‘Anglo-Irish of Dublin of those days despised commerce as a
career 10 ’(Palmer 1931, p. 23).
American social pundits seem to conjure easily with issues of status (for example, Brooks
2001). By contrast, the most memorable Australian critic of the subject is a comedian, Barry
Humphries.
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism