theHarvester Caseversus rugby players meeting in Bateman’s Hotel in the
same year to found a League to better their recompense. The contradictions of
the two spheres produce the contradictions of Australian society.
This contrast has sometimes resulted in direct confrontation, with the
victory sometimes swinging one way or the other:‘early closing’laws ultim-
ately retreating, but Darwin’s Chinatown ultimately destroyed (Christie
1995).
This contrast has sometimes produced a living contradiction, perhaps most
saliently in pre-1960s Australia; a dry Canberra versus a wet Queanbeyan; a
ludicrous literary censorship that was lackadaisically enforced; a Darwin‘a free
and easy town where everybody mixed with everybody’and‘where social
classes and racial communities were strictly segregated’(Christie 1995); a severe
White Australia policy that was yet in some ways a‘legalfiction’(Baker 1966);^32
an Australia that, for all its prohibitions, was‘tolerant’in a‘raffish’way.
Sometimes the two coexisted side by side, almost complementing one
another: plenty of bushrangers, but no lynch mobs;^33 an antagonism towards
police, but a‘surprising amount of deference to persons in authority by
subordinates’(MacKenzie 1961);^34 strikes endemic but, with some exceptions,
orderly (Walker 1986).
The incongruities of twentieth-century Australia might be seen as the mani-
festation of the simultaneous strength of societal technology and fraternity.
Yet in the twenty-first century societal technology appears to be eclipsing
fraternity. Union memberships wilt while their bureaucraciesflourish and
fester; political parties decline into recruitment agencies for political careerists;
the sense of guild shrivels in the workplace while‘management’is rampant.
The popular and graphic emblem of Australian fraternity has long been beer
drinking: in 2013 half as much beer was drunk per head as forty years before.
3.6 The Underlying Causes
The retreat or advance of the spheres of life prompts the fundamental ques-
tion: what is the source of their being abnormally large or small?
Most accounts of their shrunkenness or overgrowth have drawn on just two
types of explanation:‘cultural–historical’or‘economic–environmental’.
(^32) A total of 17,000 Chinese were admitted to Australia during the 1920s. A greater number,
however, left. 33
34 ‘Kangaroo court’is not of Australian origin, but Texan (Richards 2015).
The Eureka Stockade? One future Conservative prime minister of Great Britain was‘aghast’at
the‘submissiveness’he sometimes encountered on the goldfields (Gascoyne-Cecil 1935, p. 19).
‘The legend of the independent, free-thinking Australian mind has long puzzled...observers, who
saw on every hand evidence of spineless timidity in the face of authority’(Penton 1943, p. 11). See
the same in Crawford (1952, p. 46) and Robinson (1985, p. 16).
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism