Why every week is Bush Week

Daniel Lewis
September 29, 2007

ALMOST 50 years since it was published, Russel Ward's book The Australian Legend still explains why politicians give generous sums of money to drought-affected farmers. It also explains why most Australians think it is money well spent.

Ward - a colourful historian at the University of New England in Armidale who died in 1995 - argued that Australians traced their national character, their "legend", back to the bush.

In Australia's infancy people in the cities were not so different from the British, while the tough bushmen were unique in the way they spoke, dressed and behaved. "Life in a bark hut on the Bogan necessarily changed a newcomer's manners and ideas more rapidly than life in a George Street cottage," Ward observed.

"The man from 'up the country' was usually regarded as a romantic and admirable figure. The attitude towards him was reminiscent … of that towards the 'noble savage' in the 18th century."

As the 19th century closed and Australia approached nationhood, the legend was furiously romanticised and seared into the minds of urban residents by writers such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson and artists such as Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin.

"Australians generally became actively conscious … of the distinctive "bush" ethos and of its value as an expression and symbol of nationalism," Ward said.

"[The legend] perpetuates as ideals the qualities which were characteristic of … Australians who, at the advancing edge of settlement, did rather more than their share to make our country what it is."

Its legacy is that even though Australians are an overwhelmingly coastal and urban people, the bush is still seen as a sacred site intimately linked to their image of themselves and therefore a place worth preserving.

Ward mostly traced the legend to "common folk" such as drovers, bullock drivers and shearers, rather than farmers, but nowadays the farmer symbolises the bush in the eyes of those in the cities.

The Prime Minister is acutely aware of this emotional reality.

In October last year, John Howard went on a historic drought broadcast of ABC radio's Country Hour program that went into capital cities for the first time.

"We must maintain our faith as a nation in the farming community," he said. "We would lose something of our identity as a nation, an important part of our psyche as a nation, if our rural communities fell below a critical mass. The essence of being an Australian includes the bush being part of our existence."

This week the Federal Government announced $714 million in drought aid on top of the $430 million extra announced last week, which was on top of $2 billion since 2001. There is more income support, more interest rate subsidies, more money for financial and emotional counsellors.

Explaining his generosity, Howard again harked back to the mythical status of the bush. "We have to as a nation preserve a farm sector," he told Channel Nine on Wednesday.

"It would be unthinkable if we … didn't have the bush in the future, if we lost our rural communities. And therefore we have a special obligation over and above the economic value of farms - and they are of enormous economic value to the country - we've a special obligation to provide what has been the heart and soul of this country in many ways ever since it started."

Historians gathered at the University of New England this week for an Australian Historical Association conference where examination of Ward and The Australian Legend featured prominently before the book's 50th birthday next year.

Dr Frank Bongiorno, from the university's School of Humanities, said The Australian Legend was one of the country's most influential history books, perhaps only second to The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes.

The conference remarked on the durability of Ward's observations on the link between national identity and the bush.

"The idea that the outback or the bush is what's distinctive about Australia is still very strong," Bongiorno said, citing the grief over the death of Steve Irwin. "Steve Irwin wasn't an urban image."

The notion that Australia had to have a vibrant inland "remains powerful". Bongiorno said the plight of farmers demanded assistance, but "you can't help but feel there's also a mythological side to it".

Not all Australians, however, have been seduced by the legend.

Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute says propping up farmers in times of drought is "a very expensive way to maintain a national myth".

And in many a pub in western NSW, cockies still stew over their schooners and curse the Herald's economics editor, Ross Gittins.

In 2002, as Australians were giving millions to the Farmhand appeal, Gittins wrote that those donating were showing as much kindness as people who gave a drug addict another hit. "Farming must be the only for-profit industry in the country that passes round the hat whenever profits slip," he said.

"If any city businesses tried that, we'd laugh them to scorn. But when Dad and Dave do it, we dig deep. And if we don't, our vote-chasing politicians do it for us. It's amazing how the politicians (and talkback squawkers) who carry on about the evils of welfare dependency rush for the taxpayers' coffers at the first sign of a cloudless sky. Mention the word drought and the cities fill with people who like to imagine they're soft-hearted, but are actually soft-headed.

"We've got to stop acting as though drought is some utterly unexpected act of bastardry on the part of the Deity - that it's as unpredictably devastating as the Newcastle earthquake. Talk about slow learners. Europeans have been here for more than 200 years but we still haven't twigged that droughts are frequent and reasonably predictable events. In a country such as ours, droughts are simply a matter of efficient farm management. Make a note: droughts aren't bad luck, they're bad management."

In his book Drought: The Red Marauder, published in 2005, the historian Michael McKernan similarly argued that Australia's farmers had been slow in coming to terms with drought.

"Drought is the Australian story," McKernan wrote. Yet despite its horror and repetitiveness, "it would rain for the farmer and hopes would revive, and the drought would be forgotten - until the next time".

He concluded that farmers had "finally woken up" to the fact they lived on a continent repeatedly afflicted by drought, finally shaken off the "cultural baggage" of a European outlook and started taking drought preparedness seriously.

"Indignant surprise was, until very recently indeed, the usual response to drought. We all should have come to expect it. And, I'd suggest, we do now, at long last, expect drought in Australia and prepare for it."

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