3.7 The Inertial Society
It is easy to see that environmental–economic and cultural–historical expla-
nations of Australian exceptionalism attach different weight to the contingen-
cies of her history. In most environmental–economic explanations, the long-run
destinationisnotalteredbyshocksalongthejourney.Yes,shockshave
consequences, but their consequences are passing, and the more distant
the shock the less consequent it is. The system, in other words, is‘stable’.The
simplest cultural–historical explanations, by contrast, implicitly endorse a cos-
mology of an unstable system; whereby the more distant a shock is, themore
important it is, with the original shock seemingly the most important of all.
Thus, the cultural–historical theorist is tempted to trace everything back to a
year zero, the motley infancy of European society in Australia. Corruption in
the NSW police force? Remind the reader that thefirst constables were convicts.
Corruption in public offices? Speak of the Rum Corps. Industrial disputation?
Call to mind the‘work ban’applied by the Marines in the service of Governor
Phillip. But such extended lines of descent are inevitably arguable.^40 And, in
any case, they are not necessary for some cultural sway. For the cultural–
historical theorist is entitled to invoke a‘stable’system oftwo(or more) possible
long-run destinations, with the implication that a sufficiently large shock may
alter which road is being travelled. The upshot of such multi-equilibrium
system is that larger shocks—which, on account of being larger, are rarer and
so probably older—are‘determining’the way recent shocks are not; and yet the
year zero—the year history supposedly unloads its burden on posterity—need
not be literally thefirst year in the society’s annals. Society’s trajectory could be
altered at a later date in the crucible of some crisis. A cultural–historical theorist
of exceptionalism could, for example, hold up the traumas of the 1890s as the
furnace that melted the inherited norms of liberal Britain and hammered them
into a new mould. It was in 1889 that the APA Building (‘the Australian
Building’) was completed in Melbourne, and was perhaps for some months the
tallest building in the world. But in the four subsequent years, Victoria’sreal
gross domestic product (GDP) was to fall by 16 per cent.^41 The subsequent
harrowing decade was, of course, the midwife of the Australian Labor Party
(ALP), Australia’s singular industrial relations system and, above all, the Feder-
ation of the Commonwealth of Australia.
‘Stable’and‘unstable’do not exhaust the cosmologies of explanation: there
is a third cosmology. This does not contend that shocks long ago are more
important than recent ones; or that recent ones are more important than
(^40) In fact, the NSW police force was completely re-established in 1862.
(^41) Male suicides in Australia averaged 15.3 per 100,000 pa in 1881–85. They averaged 20.2 per
100,000 pa in 1901–05.
William O. Coleman