Inside Australian Culture , livre ebook

Inside Australian Culture

Anthem Australian Humanities Research Series

The nAhtsurtmeA Hun iaalestinimacraeseR seireS h
incorporates a broad range of titles on the past, present and future
of Australia, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic
texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being
undertaken in the field by both Australian and non­Australian scholars on Australian
culture, society, politics, history and literature. Some of the most innovative research
in both the traditional and new humanities today is being done by scholars in the
Australian humanities, including literature, history, book history, print culture,
cinema, new media and digital cultures, gender studies, cultural
studies and indigenous studies.

Series Editor

Robert Dixon – University of

Sydney, Australia

Editorial Board

Alison Bashford – University of Sydney, Australia
Jill Bennett – University of New South Wales, Australia
Nicholas Birns – Eugene Lang College of the New School, USA
Frances Bonner – University of Queensland, Australia
David Carter – University of Queensland, Australia
Barbara Creed – University of Melbourne, Australia
Martin Crotty – University of Queensland, Australia
Paul Eggert – University of New South Wales, Australia
John Frow – University of Melbourne, Australia
Ken Gelder – University of Melbourne, Australia
Helen Gilbert – Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Gerard Goggin – University of Sydney, Australia
Bridget Griffen­Foley – Macquarie University, Australia
Ian Henderson – King’s College London, UK
Jeanette Hoorn – University of Melbourne, Australia
Graham Huggan – University of Leeds, UK
Catharine Lumby – Macquarie University, Australia
Martyn Lyons – University of New South Wales, Australia
Andrew L. McCann – Dartmouth College, USA
Ian McLean – University of Wollongong, Australia
Philip Mead – University of Western Australia, Australia
Meaghan Morris – University of Sydney, Australia
Stephen Muecke – University of New South Wales, Australia
Deb Verhoeven – Deakin University, Australia
Gillian Whitlock – University of Queensland, Australia

Inside Australian Culture

Legacies of Enlightenment Values

Baden Offord, Erika Kerruish,
Rob Garbutt, Adele Wessell and Kirsten Pavlovic

Foreword by Ashis Nandy
Afterword by Vinay Lal

Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2014
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © 2014 Baden Offord, Erika Kerruish
Rob Garbutt, Adele Wessell and Kirsten Pavlovic

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Offord, Baden, 1958–
Inside Australian culture : legacies of enlightenment values / Baden Offord,
Erika Kerruish Rob Garbutt, Kirsten Pavlovic and Adele Wessell ;
Foreword by Ashis Nandy ; Afterword by Vinay Lal.
pages cm. – (Anthem Australian humanities research series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978­1­78308­231­5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Australia–Civilization. 2. lavcoaiA–suulseia. tralS3. Cultural pluralism–
Australia. 4. aNitnolac ahartceristics, Austrailna ..5 Australia–Civilization–English
influences. IKe. uirr .III –1civolvaPtersKi, n.rEkihs ,.IG .aI tt, arbu 196Rob,
IV. Wessell, Adele. V. Title.
DU107.O36 2014
994–dc23
2014016247

ISBN­13: 978 1 78308 231 5 (Hbk)
ISBN­10: 1 78308 231 3 (Hbk)

Cover image © Rob Garbutt

This title is also available as an ebook.

C

O

N

TEN

TS

Foreword. Is Australia a Victim ofthe Ethical Limits ofthe Enlightenment?
A Modest Foreword for an Immodest Venture
Ashis Nandy

Preface and Acknowledgements

Chapter One. Introduction

Part One: Getting Inside Australian Public Culture

Chapter Two. The Enlightenment and Tradition in Early
Colonial Society

Chapter Three. Australian Values and Their Public Culture(s)

Part Two: Three Moments of the Enlightenment

Chapter Four. Moment One. An Act to Regulate Chinese
Immigration (1858): Celestial Migrations

Chapter Five. Moment Two. Cubillo v. the Commonwealth(2000):
The ‘History Defence’ – Standards of the Time

Chapter Six. Moment Three. Australian Localism and
the Cronulla Riot (2005): The ‘Barbaric Law’
of ‘He Who Was There First’

Part Three: Working with the Necessary Other

Chapter Seven. The Closing of Public Culture to
Communal Difference

vii

xiii

1

15
33

47

63

79

97

vi

INSIDE AUSTRALIAN CULTURE

Afterword. The Emptiness Within and Without: Enlightenment
Australia and Its Demons
Vinay Lal

Notes

Index

115

123

143

Foreword

IS AUSTRALIA A VICTIM OF
THE ETHICAL LIMITS OF THE
ENLIGHTENMENT? A MODEST
FOREWORD FOR AN
IMMODEST VENTURE

Ashis Nandy

For more than two hundred years, the Enlightenment vision and the values it
sanctions have provided the standard by which all cultures have been judged
in the civilised world. It has shaped virtually every new imagination of a
desirable society and every radical intervention in societies and states, even
when – during this same period – Enlightenment values have also often been
used to justify some of the major projects of Satanism in our times.
Everyone has the right to one’s own clichés, as C. P. Snow used to say, so I
reaffirm my belief that human beings, given enough time, opportunity and a
culture of impunity, can turn any theory of salvation – secular or nonsecular –
into its opposite. For instance, not only did the participants in the Atlantic
slave trade find support in the idea of infrahuman Africans being brought into
civilisation, but some who penned the world’s first democratic constitution
did not find it abnormal that they themselves had large, private retinues of
slaves. Nor did the colonial powers in Asia and Africa hesitate to borrow from
newly fashionable theories of evolution to justify their colonial conquests
and to look at the colonised as newfound apprentices who would, in the long
run, ‘Europeanise’ the globe. I, for one, find it impossible to trace the ethical,
intellectual and political trajectory of the nineteenth century and the first half
ofthe twentieth century without referring to the Enlightenment and the age
of reason.
The two World Wars finally broke the spell. The use of nineteenth­
century biology and eugenics, particularly the idea of natural ‘selection’ and

viii

INSIDE AUSTRALIAN CULTURE

the principle of ‘the right to destroy life unworthy of life’, were so blatant
and thorough in Germany – Robert J. Lifton points out that these ideas
were there since the 1920s, and did not emerge fully formed until the Third
Reich – that even in Europe and North America there are now murmurs
that earlier popular explanations of the barbarism of Third Reich as a
betrayal of the Enlightenment cannot perhaps be taken as the full story. The
simple­minded works of the likes of Erich Fromm, which saw Nazism as a
pathological expression of an irrational fear of freedom and modernity, have
given way to a more nuanced reexamination of the European heritage itself.
After all, as early as the first decade of the twentieth century – when the
Enlightenment values were well in place – the genocide of the Hereros and
the Namas had already occurred, the concentration camp had been ‘invented’
and deployed by the British in South Africa, and famine had already been
used as an instrument of state policy in Ireland. Among the later works on
Nazi Germany, there has been, firstly, a vague, hesitant recognition, and then
a more self­confident diagnosis of the role that was played by what I can only
call pathologies of scientific rationality and perhaps of reason itself. That is
the story of the European Holocaust as told by a whole series of scholars, from
Hannah Arendt to