26 January: Boreham on Australia

Australia Looks Back
Australia Day reminds us that history has its stately sym-bolisms. What could be richer in figurative significance than the dramatic episode that we commemorate today, on Australia Day? A British fleet anchors in a lonely antipodean bay; the ships of an ancient people find themselves surrounded by the strange vegetation of a new world; and, out of this fusion of antiquity and novelty, a nation is born. It is the privilege of young nations like ours to erect their distinctive civilisations on the sturdy foundations laid by peoples whose annals are rooted in the events of centuries extremely remote. Australia had not to grope her way, blindly and painfully, to principles of government and methods of administration. She inherited the experience of mature nations. She was able to start at the point that they had reached as a result of ages of careful thought and anxious experiment.

It is good for each successive generation to be reminded of the incalculable debt that it owes to its ancestors. Each good custom that has come down to us is but the solitary survivor of a hundred gallant but futile attempts. The ninety and nine perished; the hundredth proved its worth and secured recognition; and we by inheriting the record of its success, are spared the tiresome necessity of making a long series of disastrous ventures. This impressive principle confronts us at every turn. We seldom sit down to table, for example, without eating things that are mixed and mingled in the most incongruous way—lamb with mint sauce, beef with horseradish, jugged hare with red currant jelly, boiled mutton with caper sauce, strawberries with cream, and so on. One shudders to contemplate the nauseous conglomerations that must have been tried and tasted before these appetising combinations were at last launched upon the world. We are spared all that. Our predecessors sampled thousands of sickening concoctions, and we are content to enjoy the luscious fruit of their researches.

Civilisation As The Apex Of Evolution
A principle that operates in this way in relation to things comparatively trivial operates even more effectively among matters of greater moment. Take our system of jurisprudence. Every primitive people possesses laws, law courts, and lawyers of some kind. When the Spaniards under Cortes and Pizarro penetrated the aboriginal civilisations of Mexico and Peru, nothing impressed them more than the provisions under which justice was administered. Among the Aztecs, Prescott tells us, a supreme judge, appointed by the Crown, sat in each of the cities of Mexico, with absolute jurisdiction in both civil and criminal cases. Among the Incas, the system was only slightly less elaborate. Those who once revelled in the romances of Fenimore Cooper will never forget the simple but stately forms of justice obtaining among the Indian tribes of the great American forests. Captain Cook tellingly describes similar institutions among the most ferocious of the South Sea Islanders.

But when we turn from these primitive codes of barbarism to the complex and dignified system with which Australia inaugurated her history, it is like passing from the grey dawn to the blaze of noonday. The constitution of the courts: the conditions under which the judges held their appointments: the statutes by which their decisions were determined: the laws relating to the sifting and valuation of evidence; the very etiquette governing the external affairs of tribunals—all this had come into being as a result of an age-long process of historic evolution. Australia took the whole thing over, just as it stood.

Australians As Heirs Of All The Ages
Again, Australia is not finding it easy to create a distinctly indigenous literature, not because of any aesthetic deficiency or intellectual poverty, but because of the extreme difficulty of shaking herself free of the monumental traditions that she has inherited. Walt Whitman always denied the existence of an American literature. He maintained that Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Emerson, and all their kind, instead of inaugurating a new literature, had simply augmented an old one. They wrote pure English; they modelled themselves on the great English masters; they recognised the classical English tradition; and what they gave us stands as an integral part of the English literature. All this demonstrates, not only the immensity of the difficulty by which Australian writers are confronted, but the vastness of the treasure comprised by their patrimony.

Moreover, it is right that we should recall, at every suitable opportunity that the best life of the younger nations—America and Australia—is rooted in the mighty spiritual pulsations that swept the Motherland. It would be easy to show that the sturdy faith of Abraham Lincoln, which has exercised so creative and abiding an influence in shaping the destinies of the Western World, was derived through the camp meetings attended by his immediate antecedents and through a sequence of similar links, from the altar-fires lit by the English Puritans. In precisely the same way, we in Australia owe the brave testimony of Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden, our pioneer preachers, to the new life that surged through English thought and action with the great evangelical revival of the eighteenth century. These first chaplains were selected for their Australian appointments by men like William Wilberforce and Charles Simeon, who themselves owed simply everything to the gracious movement, that like a wind from heaven, had swept over the Homeland, affecting everybody and transfiguring everything. This illustrates in a vivid way the vital principle that a young nation, born of one that has attained maturity, is enriched for all time by the wealth that it so gratefully and proudly inherits.

F W Boreham

Image: A fair dinkum Aussie icon