‘fighting’‘pushing’‘south...north’(Hancock 1930, pp. 32–3). How, then,
could such a raging wellspring conclude in the tame runnel of economic
enterprise that he surveyed three generations later in 1930? When visitors
could note‘no noisy self-assertiveness’(Fraser 1910, p. 9), an inclination to
only‘grumble’,a‘singular absence’of‘commercial ambition’and‘initiative’
(Moffat in Edwards 1979, p. 49); an evident unwillingness or inability to
‘impose’themselves on newly available lands, which Italian immigrants
were managing to prosper on (Hagan and Turner 2007); a lengthy patience
with a rapidly expanding web of economic controls, both formal and
informal.
To Hancock the key to explaining this transition of Australian history lay
in the configuration that the sphere of autonomy had come to assume in the
face of Australia’s abnormal circumstances. Australians were economic indi-
vidualists: six million little‘silos’. But they had been taught, by experience of
their country’s circumstances, that each silo could be bestfilled by extensive
collective action. Australia’s collectivism, then, was not an ethos(à laWard
and Hartz) but a strategy; it was a collectivism of actions and means, rather
than one of ends and values.‘Mateship’was not an ethic of sociality, but a
technique forfilling the swag of each mate to the full. (‘A fair go usually
means money’: Horne 1964, p. 24). Thus, individualist ends were to be
sought by social means; the reverse of the outlook of Australia’seconomists
of Hancock’sday—who sought the public interest (a‘social’end) through
individualist means—and who were, as Hancock stresses, the object of a
special ire in Australia.
Hancock appears to subscribe to the rationality of Australia’s‘collectivism
of means’, as he frequently repeats that Australia could not have developed
without extensive government action and control. Whence, then, the grim-
ace of distaste and disappointment with Australia that pervades his book? It
partly arises from Australia’s abuse of the potential for collective action: as the
size of‘government failure’through the overprovision of infrastructure was at
least comparable with the underprovision that would have taken place
under a free market. But why was collective action abused rather than used?
Hancock could have answered by observing that self-assertion in the context
of collective provision will manifest itself in accepting benefits but refusing
costs. But rather than simply relying on self-assertion in such a context,
Hancock cuts deeper against the significance of fraternity, by asserting that
a kind negative sociality was tainting Australian society. In Hancock’s mind,
Australian jealousy at one’s brother’s favour was a stronger feeling than any
concern for their ill fortune. Australia’s‘collectivist strategy’was not so much
a solipsist individualism as the issue of a resentful ménage: an anti-social
socialism. This amounts to an ethic that the placings in life’s race should
never alter, no matter how the course might evolve (Hancock 1930, p. 183); a
William O. Coleman