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THANK YOU, AUSTRALIA

FORTY years ago this week -- on February 7, 1963 – a callow, but bearded, journalist sailed through the Sydney Heads on the mv Wanganella after a stomach-churning voyage across the Tasman into the vast unknown. It took about three days but seemed like three squeamish weeks of feeding the fishes in mountainous seas.

He arrived with forty dollars and no job. Forty years down the track…. not much has changed. Things have almost gone full circle.

That teenaged optimist was me.

I snared a job as a police rounds reporter on the now-defunct Sydney Sun after short stints on the equally defunct Taranaki Herald and Christchurch Star across the ditch.

Then, after a decade in New York covering North and South America as a foreign correspondent I returned to Australia to become editor of the paper that gave me my start in this country. That led to Australian citizenship and a continuing love affair with this place.

This fortieth milestone, plus the passing of another Australia Day, has made me reminisce more about where I have been, what I have done, how Australia has changed, and what it means to me.

The physical evidence is simple. As the Wanganella rust bucket lurched up Sydney Harbour in 1963 the only “ skyscraper” on the skyline was the original AMP building at Circular Quay. But the famous “coathanger” bridge was as awesome as the postcards and newsreels promised.

Now, both Sydney and Melbourne have CBD towers piercing the sky and bridges and tunnels few of us dreamed of.

Back then I had already read about Nino Culotto and John O’Grady’s “They’re a Weird Mob” and so words like refo and wog and wop and dago didn’t surprise me. Or, to be honest, offend me. Neither did Abo back then.

As a Kiwi I had been tagged a “pig islander” and had heard every joke imaginable about sexual congress with sheep. Even when I returned to this allegedly enlightened country in the 1970s another newspaper editor disparaged me as a “ white boong”.

I am old enough and ugly enough to remember life before genuine multi-culturalism. The Sunday night “nasi goreng” at the “Chows” in Chinatown or lining up with your own saucepan for some takeaway fried rice and sweet and sour pork.

The six o’clock swill and BYOs and no Sunday shopping which epitomised governments telling you what is good for you. And the Bolte and Askin and Playford governments banning books and movies and stage plays while crooked coppers took money to preserve the backyard abortion factories and illegal prostitution and SP bookies and illegal gin joints flourished.

It was in this reflective, forty years on, mood that I came across a slim but important book by New South Wales Premier Bob Carr.

It is called What Australia Means to Me. It was published on Australia Day 2003 with the imprimatur of the New South Wales Australia Day Council. And I will concede it comes out when Carr is facing a state election in a few weeks.

I was so impressed by it that it prompted a letter from me to the Premier. It is only the second letter of praise I have ever written to a politician. (The first was to Jeff Kennett for buying back and tearing down the Gas and Fuel towers. I am still not sure Federation Square should not have been left as a park).

Bob Carr’s observations on patriotism were so cogent that I told him I was sure only modesty kept his own book out of his list of Essential Books About Australia. In fact, in these uncertain times, I feel it is the most incisive and important book I have read in years about this country.

The back cover blurb about dreamers and zealots says it all – especially when last week Victorians were being urged to recite banal and jingoistic rubbish called the Australia Day Commitment at their January 26 barbies.

They printed the words on a million colour cards and I made the point on the Internet: We aren’t all brave. We aren’t all open and we certainly aren’t all tolerant. We don’t all stand here equal. And some Australians don’t feel free.

Carr wrote: “ I want a patriotism based on things as they are, not a vision of what dreamers or zealots would like us to be. It would acknowledge the dark side of our beginnings, our failings as well as our achievements”.

Hidden away in the collection of Carr speeches and homilies and, I suspect, some injected hyperbole from Bob Ellis, is this gem from the former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, John Douglas Pringle. As a desperate Republican I wish I had written it.

Pringle wrote about our past and our historical commitments in his own book Australian Accent nearly fifty years ago. He said:

“ When all is said, everything that Britain could do for Australia as a nation was done long ago. Britain discovered Australia (for the Europeans), founded her as a place to dump her criminals, governed her, peopled her, nourished her and finally set her free.

“ Australia long ago repaid any debt there was a hundred times over with the blood of her young men killed in three wars.

“ There is nothing to regret; the slate is rubbed clean. Australia’s future is as an independent nation”.

That was written fifty years ago, ten years before the Wanganella carried this hopeful scribe across the Tasman and long before I turned my back on the place I now call the Land of the Long White Shroud and became an Australian citizen.

You don’t do it lightly. Both my parents were alive when I decided to renounce my birthright. They didn’t like it but they understood. I felt a fraud NOT being a citizen of the country which has nurtured me and honoured me (and jailed me) and rewarded me handsomely.

Often, in a heated talkback conversation on radio, a caller has handed me the ultimate, but predictable, putdown: “ Why don’t you go back to where you came from!”

And I have (frivolously) explained that I am more of an Australian than them because I CHOSE to be one. Was not the product of some possibly drunken horizontal folk dancing.

Unfair, but a confession forty years down the track. This country has enhanced and enriched my life more than I could have ever dreamed when the old gut-churning Wanganella waddled up Sydney Harbour on February 7, 1963.

Thanks Australia.

hinch@hinch.net

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002