Reviews of Vincent Buckley, Cutting Green Hay: Friendships, Movements & Cultural Conflicts in Australia's Great Decades, Melbourne: Penguin, 1983, $7.95; and Murray Walker, Making Do: Memories of Australia's Back Country People, Melbourne: Penguin, 1983, $6.95.

This book is, in its way, a hymn, critical yet heartfelt, to two decades in particular, 1945-1965. This period has never had its due and it frightens people in retrospect as much as it unsettled them at the time. It was a period of expansion and proliferation in every cell of the culture; so that the Australia of 1960 was startlingly different, at least to the local person, from that of 1930. To say this is not to promote a new version of the myth of coming of age (a vacuous notion, if ever there was one) but to point out where I think the areas of rich plantation and rapid growth were (xii).

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modest: to examine the obstacles which have prevented it from com ing to the light by examining his own experience. Paradoxically however, the personal pressure here makes for detachment—as Ricoeur has remarked, it is the absence of a philosophy of imagination which makes for the unbalanced presence of 'imagination', as a mode of fantasy rather than of creation, of the mediation of the three-fold opposition of voluntary and involuntary functions within willing. The play of images in Cutting Green Hay puts the reader in possession not only of Buckley's experiences but also of his understanding of them, reconciling the arbitrariness and determinism implicit in the account of his Irish background, his childhood dur ing the Depression, his school years with the Jesuits, the war and the debates of the 50's and early 60's. As 'light' of motive, the image gives reasons for deciding which in no way reduce the causes Reading this book thus anticipates the conjunction between objective 'truth' and knowing self which in my view is the goal of cultural understanding and which, significantly, Joseph Furphy worked for in Such is Life—still a crucial book for the understanding of our culture. Furphy's account of his purposes in fact, sums up also what Buckley is trying to do, to write 'fiction [which] may be truer than truth itself, since the latter, often anomalous and untypical, is always part hidden from view' to reveal the 'latent meaning' of Australia which is hidden beneath the appearances and still waiting for interpretation (Furphy, 1982: 406,65). Moreover, like Furphy, Buckley associates this truth with the speaking subject, not just with impersonal and abstract knowledge. So this introduction concludes:

But when all is said and done, I have written primarily in enjoyment of the past, about the life and lives which formed me: from my Irish ancestors, the anonymous kindred whose suffering lasted so sordidly long, to individuals and groups with whom I have worked, played, quarrelled, made plans, or discussed the flux ions of old age (xii).

Nor does this lessen the critical faculty. Buckley's account of the Australian society he grew up in has an existential sharpness and weight that make it more telling than a merely statistical, merely theoretical account, though it could be substantiated in those terms:

However much it valued initiative, it was not merely individualist it was restrictive and dulling . . . It was a desperately hard continent, in which an urban society had settled down to be smugly comfortable; and in it one experienced an intense undefinable longing, a primal nostalgia, for self-transcendence and completeness (xi).

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the actual experience of living here, in this place and time. Society for him is to be defined as 'the habitat constituted by human beings and their doings' (xii). Consequently the tropes, the forms of discussions and discovery proper to this society will need to arise from the human beings, from the awareness or lack of awareness which constitutes this habitat. Everything therefore ultimately depends upon 'the self of the narrator,' though in this kind of book—as distinct from the poetry which is Buckley's main vocation—it 'does not need stressing [though] . . . it can be deduced, or seen in silhouette as the light falls on the places where he lived with others' (xii).

But what of Walker's book? For once perhaps it is possible to judge a book by its cover, with the title, Making Do: Memories of Australia 's Back Country People superimposed upon a cover golden with an abundant sun beaming out benevolence as if it were an advertisement for solar power, on its striking inset, the photograph of an archetypical bush-battler, Tess Alfonzi, standing at the door of her house, mug of tea in hand. The introduction confirms this genuflection to the shrines of Aussie piety. Leaving Melbourne 'in a mood of restrained excitement,' Walker went off, he tells us, in search of the 'real Australia,' the 'Australian folk culture [which] comes from inventive people making do and surviving in the bush'(3) But this vision of a society of equals rests on something less rational and humane, something more mythical and therefore more potent, a sense of nature—romanticised—as an empowering force. Where Buckley's sense of truth is ironic, to interrogate and be interrogated by the self, Walker's is ecstatic. Travelling inland means travelling away from his own limitations, to be taken up into a larger framework in which the pressures of the individual self and of its historical context disappear, giving way to nature's tune:

I travelled at a good time of the year. There was no dust, mostly moderate temperatures, but fewer hours of daylight than in summer. My life was nearly always ordered by natural forces, and although that constricted me at times, I was mostly in an exalted state: in harmony with the earth and the sky, and with most of the people whom I met (4).

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acts and effects on the other. What makes bush people so enduring and adaptable is thus 'a quality of being Australian'—a notion Walker attributes to C.E.W. Bean but which Bean shares with Hegel. The power of nationalism in Australia has perhaps been under estimated, but its totalitarian implications, implicit here, certainly have been. In Walker's Australia individuals tend to become a function of nature. This is clear at White Cliffs, for example, where Walker arrives to put up his tent 'beside a huge peppercorn tree in a shallow valley surrounded by a huge heap of opal mullock' then to be taken up into a kind of trance, gazing across 'kilometres of gibber-strewn plains. All . . . quiet and eerie' (55). Next day, sure enough, the spirit of place materialises in George Prentice, opal miner, 'blessed with a gift' for the opal, its obsessed servant. Harold Dell, master butcher at Wilcannie, tells how his father belonged in Australia as soon as he arrived because 'he must have had a roving spirit'(35). Above all, drinking becomes an effect of landscape. Bet ween Wilcannie and the opal fields at White Cliffs the pubs 'were regularly spaced so that the mullocky with his loaded wagon and team would be close to one when the day's work was done' (47).

Holistic thinking of this kind may represent a stage in the making of a culture, setting up the idea of a people and their moves as part of a larger framework which provides not only for identification but also for evaluation of people, places and events. But this stage, the era of the 1890's and early 1900's has passed. Walker's attempt to revive it, however, is significant, representing as it does the opposite—and more popular—pole to Buckley's endeavour, with its em phasis on the individual thinking and feeling in search of identity and understanding. Where Buckley attempts to question ideology, interrogating his memories of childhood and his Jesuit schooling as well as the later ideological debates at Melbourne University, Walker endorses it, presenting a world

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night,

I was met with a barrage of missiles and things like that . . . They were coming in on motor bikes in the night breaking the glass and lighting fires. Boys stoned me, as well as the little kiddies, some of 'em would be no older than three. (93)

There were very few men in Broken Hill that didn't drink in those days, or very very few. Broken Hill was one of the places where weekends were absolutely bedlam: the men would be drinking and they would be getting into trouble. I would take mine out walkabouts or in a horse and cart, and he could take his drink with him. I was always interested in wildflowers but became interested in different kinds of rocks (98).

The point at issue is not whether Frank or Tess were right or wrong but the dramatic way in which Walker presents questions of value—and the fact that this is the way generally favoured in our society as a whole does not make it any less a matter for concern. As Hannah Arendt remarks, in dark times, times in which public life is breaking down, the temptation is always to substitute warmth for light.

Seen in this context Buckley's irony takes on a positive value. Where Walker, romanticising the past, becomes its victim, he questions it and thus achieves, if not mastery, at least a measure of self understanding. Buckley's first chapter, 'Self-conscious and Australian', addresses itself to the myths Walker embraces so enthusiastically, looking back to the nineteenth century and finding there, among the Irish migrants at least, a 'fatherless malaise', a 'blankness about origins' which he then links with the failure to relate properly to the land. According to him, Australian country people have little love of the land:

. . . there seems little tenderness for soil and plant, so little sense of kinship with beasts, so little sense of the seasons as providing an active metaphor for human life, or of the earth as a mother . . . The land is a breeding ground and killing ground. The cattle are lovely in their usefulness (9).

was a good wife. She was the one what would help her husband in every way that she could. She used to do the watering in the vines while I was driving a steam engine to pump the water on for her, and at dinner time we'd go home and find the dinner cooked in the stove. She'd put it in the stove before she went out in the paddock, and we got along that way (13-14).

What was most obviously missing from [the] lives [of the Irish migrants was the mythic sub-stratum of the Irish religion in which

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they took such a psychological interest. Because the Irish past the reality of Irish imaginative experience, had been snipped away from their beliefs, they lived a foreshortened religious life, often intense and sometimes generous, but lacking in psychological substance. Further, they lacked all sense of themselves as having a defined and important family history, for they were the inheritors of Anonymous Man (11-12).

Why this is so emerges if we examine Walker's assumptions. Essentially they are those of the nineteenth century working class. Parts of European culture detached from the whole and transplanted to new soil tend to lose the stimulus to change provided by the whole and to lapse into the kind of immobility evident not just in Making Do but elsewhere in discussions of Australian culture (Hartz, 1964). What Walker is praising here is the 'philosophy of the alehouse bench', the philosophy of hedonism and practical materialism which was the product of the pauperism and lassitude of the English work ing class situation in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, however, it no longer corresponds to the actual situation but represents a sentimental projection, marking the transition from class consciousness to self consciousness which means the end of radical

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politics. It also means the end of individuality, even of the humane. 'The world is not humane', Hannah Arendt remarks, 'just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse' (Arendt, 1970: 24).

In Cutting Green Hay, however, it has become just that. Contesting the spell of objectivity, the submission to the whole, the totalitarian pressure registered so strongly in Making Do, Buckley appeals to the imagination, contesting the void by naming it and thus achieving a measure of freedom even as he acknowledges necessity. The return to the past is not necessarily repressive. The discovery of origins can be the discovery of self-truth. Arguably this discovery is the central need for any understanding of a culture which has been largely based on disguise. If Buckley's project develops into a more general critique of the imagination and of the imaginal mediations by which self and culture are constituted, Cutting Green Hay may prove to be a seminal work.

University of Western Australia