3
Theories of Australian Exceptionalism
William O. Coleman
How to explain the distinguishing, the singular, and the exceptional of Aus-
tralian society? To ask this question is to bring to mind Australia’s physical
environment—the ultimately remote, dry and level landscape; or, even more
quickly, to conjure up Australia’s Hogarthian historical origins. But these
flights of thought reach too deeply, too quickly. The investigator’sfirst task
is to diagnose, and only then to pathologize. Thefirst task of this enquiry is to
identify the condition that underlies Australian exceptionalism, and then to
explain how that condition came about.
There are several contrary diagnoses of the condition that lies beneath
Australian exceptionalism. The most popular turn on the alleged slightness
of vertical relations (‘egalitarianism’) and the supposed thickness of horizontal
ones (‘mateship’). But other investigations have repudiated these analyses,
and have located the source of exceptionalism in quite different provinces of
life; in bureaucracy, or even in the strength of economic calculation operating
in an abnormal context.
The rival theories of Australian exceptionalism may be usefully organized by
taking each to amount to a claim over the location in the social organism of the
condition that produces exceptionalism. It is argued in this chapter that the key
theorists of exceptionalism—Russel Ward, Louis Hartz, W. K. Hancock, and
A. F. Davies—were identifying one province of life as yielding exceptionalism
on account of its supposed atrophy, or hypertrophy, relative to‘normal’condi-
tions.These include‘status’,‘fraternity’,‘autonomy’,‘societal technology’.Why
these social arenas were atrophied or hypertrophied was typically then traced by
these authors to one of two possibilities: either an enduring physical reality, or
some cultural legacy of Australia’s historical origins.
It might be said the advocates of these alternative analyses both too much
agreed, and too much disagreed. There is too much disagreement in that the