existence of these ballads thanks to some Scottish neighbours of his in Sydney
(Hirst 1996). There is an uncomfortable sensation that the mid-twentieth-
century vogue of these ballads was not much more than an exercise in
revivalism and fakelore (Davison 2012).
If the current of Ward’s cultural electricity is weak, the pat functionalism of
his material account of the foundation of collectivism is wholly inadequate.
Ward assumes that a certain practice will spring into existence if it is useful to
the group. But as long as Old Adam prevails, no decision is taken simply
because it is advantageous to the group that it advantages. It is taken because
it is advantageous to the decision-maker who makes it; and decisions with
such advantages may, notoriously, be costly to the group. Old Adam may have
expired on the frontier. But Ward gives no argument as to why individual
motivations would so shift on the frontier, and no evidence that Old Adam
did not prevail in point of fact. The undisputed social aspects of bush life—
such as mutual assistance in bushfires—have equivalents in coastal environ-
ments. The anti-social dimension in bush life, from cattle doffing to bush
ranging, is notorious. The rural unions of the workers Ward lionized were
constantly dogged by the calculus of the individual.
Ward’s use of the shearer as both the epitomization and the proof of bush
mateship has been undercut by the work of historians who have demytholo-
gized the legend of shearer unity (Merritt 2008, O’Malley 2013). Shearing was
ridden with division and rivalry,^13 reflecting an‘urge to compete with one
another’on the‘highly competitive environment’of the shedfloor (Merritt
2008, pp. 64, 83). Most damaging to Ward is the value set that underlay these
behaviours.‘Many rural workers [adopted an]“ideology of self-help”’(Merritt
2008, p. 57) and‘hoped to become the equal of their employers, or their
masters, not the equal of shed hands, burr cutters and sundowners’(Merritt
2008, p. 63). Such ambitions may have drawn on the ambiguity of the impact
of those‘sundering distances’that Ward invokes. The author of‘Waltzing
Matilda’was also the author of‘The Man from Snowy River’. Ward’s account
of the bushman as independent and self-reliant easily lends itself to the
individualist‘pioneer legend’, and in several accounts toindividualism(for
example, Spate 1968, p. 47; Pike 1962).
3.2.2Louis Hartz
If Ward invoked the aesthetic to rivet the supremacy of fraternity, Louis Harz,
inThe Foundation of New Societies, used the‘realm of meaning’to secure the
(^13) ‘While the work that shearers did...left them with much in common, the bonds so created
did not produce a fraternity that held together across districts or even within sheds’(Merritt 2008,
p. 64).
William O. Coleman