Australian Writers' London

"Everyone Else is Here—Why Aren't You?"

— Alex Popov of Oz magazine writes home from London, c.1966[1]

1.

Over the last few years, a profusion of scholarly enquiries into colonial and post-colonial representations of London has come tumbling down the flood. Among the full-length books might be mentioned Julian Wolfreys' Writing London (1998); John Clement Ball's Imagining London (2004); Alan Robinson's Imagining London, 1770-1900 (2004) and John McLeod's Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004).

Useful collections of edited essays have not been wanting either. We have had Feldman and Stedman's Metropolis London (1989); Onega and Stotesbury's London in Literature (2002); Gilbert's Imagined Londons (2002); and Philips' The Swarming Streets (2004). In 1999 the journal of post-coloniality, Kunapipi, devoted an entire issue to readings of the city. And finally, often acting as midwife to these productions, or as a clearing-house, we have the annual conference and the journal Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, which have been active in the UK since 2002.

Despite the quantity, however, it is striking that virtually none of this most recent work is by Australians, or touches on representations of London by Australians. Two exceptions are Andrew Hassam's Through Australian Eyes (2000) and the important essay 'The Metropole as Antipodes' by Angela Woollacott, in the Gilbert collection, but both are (mostly) centred on the late nineteenth century.

The present collection of essays and poems, therefore, may be thought of as an initial, twenty-first century, addendum to slightly earlier works which do deal with this issue, like Roslyn Russell's Literary Links (1997) and Stephen Alomes' When London Calls (1999). All of them, at one level or another, are exercises in the task of what Julian Wolfreys calls in his book 'the rhetoric of imagining London'.[2]

This collection ranges widely. It contains journalism from as long ago as 1866, fragments of autobiography, biography and memoir, cultural history, and critical assessments of books and film. Yet despite such a broad-spectrum coverage, it is striking how often the same themes appear. For a hundred and fifty years or more, Australians have been detailing, dissecting and summarising their love-hate relationship with the imperial metropolis: at certain periods, indeed, they have done so to the point of obsession. If, as Michael Savvas puts it in his essay, the United States has become Australia's Daddy, then England (meaning, almost always, London) has long been Mummy. And it doesn't take much of a cultural psychoanalyst to see the ambivalence, the oscillation of feeling, the attraction and the repulsion, in Oedipal terms. It's quite explicit, in fact, in Victor Daley's well-known fin-de-siècle poem 'When London Calls,' where the city is personified as both enticer and ogress, a tempter for the (male) talented and a seducer of (male) souls. Indeed, as I try to explain in my own paper, 'Writers Negating London,' it was around the date of Daley's poem that colonial writings-back to the metropolis briefly reached a fever pitch of hostility, culminating in apocalyptic denunciations and fantasies of obliteration, taking their cue from native writers like William Morris, Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells.

Daley's over-wrought poem was obviously influenced by the late-Victorian Decadent movement, but its general sentiments can be found both much earlier and much later. As early as the mid-Victorian years, in a report aimed at British readers, we hear the novelist Catherine Helen Spence, who was paying a visit 'Home' after twenty-five years, sounding some familiar chords. She registers dismay at the contrast between the haves and the have-nots in the richest and biggest city on earth; the 'splendid equipages' and the 'ragged beggars' met at every street-corner; the private affluence and the public squalor. . . . One feels that Spence wouldn't have been much surprised by the sordid detail in Laurie Duggan's poem of 1992, 'London Calling': 'beggars on crutches/in Judas Priest T-shirts'; nor about the poet's seeking respite from the rain in a

. . . park shelter, rank

With red wine and dried vomit . . .

'Do foreigners, colonists, and provincials all flock to London to be fleeced, that the city population may be supported?' Spence asked indignantly in the 1860s, as many have asked after her. For this theme too has had a long life, most evidently in comedy films showing naive Australians in London, the prototype being The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), which is analysed here in two separate essays by Giselle Bastin and Philip Butterss; and the theme pops up yet again in Syd Harrex's contemporary 'Aussie in London', who

is shrewd in everything he says

in case there’s VAT on talk.

Another theme, much reiterated since, is apparent in the work of the South Australian social reformer and novelist, Catherine Martin, author of An Australian Girl (1890). As her biographer Margaret Allen explains, Martin invented scenes set in London's East End long before she first set foot in the capital in 1889. Presumably she relied on imported novels and newspapers to supply the local colour. That too was the start of a long tradition. Essay after essay here makes the same point: that Australians' representations of London have long been mediated by books, newspapers, magazines and, eventually, film, to such a degree that the city, on a first inspection anyway, has the air of being an anthology of quotations, or, as Rick Hosking puts it, an 'aggregation of meanings'. That feeling is not, of course, restricted to Australians. The American Henry James noted how, on his first trip in 1855 to the 'world capital' at the age of twelve, the sights of the streets 'had an extraordinary look of familiarity, and every figure, every object he encountered, appeared to have been drawn by Leech . . . and look[ed] more like sketchy tail-pieces than natural things'.

It's notable that James exemplifies his sense of déjà vu with a derogatory illustration. He says it was, specifically, the 'damp blackness' of Leech's blotchy cartoons, thick with chiaroscuro, that familiarised him, long before he saw it, with the dreary 'aspect of Baker Street in December.'[3] So even the sophisticated Henry James was not above a jeer at the metropolis; the kind of jeer which, in antipodean terms, might be called the Cultural Cringe Inverted.

There are plenty of examples of the Inversion in the present collection, for London has long been the metaphorical site where 'Australianness' can be tested—tested, and then found (in many cases) to be materially, and even morally, superior. As Susan Hosking comments in her discussion of White's The Twyborn Affair (1979), one way of inverting the Cringe was for the colonials to seize the role of 'colonizers' of London for themselves: an attitude which has been minutely dissected, in the case of Australian women visitors and sojourners, by Angela Woollacott, and for Australian non-staying visitors, by Andrew Hassam.[4] Another mode of Cringe Inversion is the one described by Graham Tulloch in his survey of the attitudes of the Australian-Scottish popular essayist Walter Murdoch (1874-1970). Murdoch fully accepted the cultural primacy of the imperial metropole, but simultaneously disparaged it by quixotically insisting that London is as provincial, in its way, as 'Dead Dingo Creek,' news which might have soothed Murdoch's readers but isn't likely to have cut much ice in Chelsea or Bloomsbury. At its worst the Cringe Inverted can lead to what David Malouf calls 'reciprocal contempt':[5] London is a mass of 'innumerable little self-satisfied coteries' (Murdoch again); Australian women are so crude they use Airwick as a perfume, and so on and so forth.

2.

Still, familiar and long-lasting though these themes have been, the present essays, arranged in roughly chronological order, show clearly enough how attitudes have shifted greatly over the last thirty years or so. According to Frank Moorhouse, the 1970s form a ridge in time after which writers, at least, stopped going to live in other countries almost by reflex action, just as soon as they could rustle up the price of a ship's passage. This change is most explicit in Tom Shapcott's reminiscences of his first foray into London, in 1972, where the keynote is disillusionment. In a poem on the same theme, 'London 1972' he comments:

Everyone I met in London came from elsewhere

And even those who stayed could not put down roots.

The generalisation of the second line cannot literally be true: thousands of professionals and office workers, not to mention the spouses of Britons, must have done just that over the decades, though largely voiceless in history. Yet Shapcott's sense of baffled alienation is real enough, even if expressed in the poem in comic terms:

Once,

In the urinal at Piccadilly Circus

A man in a shabby overcoat gave me a look –

Is, at last, some intimate contact with the natives about to be realised? But no.

He turned out to be David Malouf.

London ages you.

Small wonder that Shapcott's memoir ends with the suggestion of making a new start, back home: 'We enjoyed ourselves, and we remained outside everything. . . . It all seemed too far away and so self-enclosed. I realised that "home" was back where I came from and that it was a surprisingly rich territory to explore, after all.'

That is certainly the new spirit, miles away from the hangdog sentiments of Henry Lawson's poem 'The Rush to London 1900' where the return journey is practically equated with failure, failure particularly obvious on arrival, when on the dock is standing just 'one that waits in shine and rain,/Where forty cheered you going'. Seventy years later, Peter Porter's grim comment 'I know, and they know, I will never get in’ —a broad judgement on the impenetrability of London socio-literary circles—expresses a similar feeling. But wasn't the sentiment a bit melodramatic, by that date? Porter, after all, stayed in England, and, presumably, got 'in,' to his own satisfaction at least. And doesn't it beg the question, which is, rather: Did one want or need, in fact, to get 'in'? The answer to this, which seemed so obvious up to forty years ago, today is not so clear-cut.

It is not, of course, that London is any less of a world city than before. Its rich centuries as a colonial headquarters, centuries which have stuffed its museums, libraries and societies with all the booty of empire, give it a density of cosmopolitan texture that even New York cannot match. But it is no longer unique in the way Richard Jefferies defined its uniqueness a century ago:

London is the only real place in the world. . . . The cities know that they are not real. They are only houses and wharves, and bricks and stucco; only outside. The minds of all men in them, merchants, artists, thinkers, are bent on London. Thither they go as soon as they can. San Francisco thinks London; so does St Petersburg. . . . Now, the heart of the world is in London.[6]

No longer; for the accessible culture of the whole English-speaking world (to range no further), from the most popular to the most highbrow, is now an embarrassment of riches. There is simply so much on offer, everywhere, all the time, that the specific merits of London-based culture must be diminished relatively, even for the most anglophile consumer. It was the erudite David Malouf who made the point à propos popular culture, that the audience for a whole week of British programs on the ABC is tiny, compared to the British audience tuning in to a single episode of Neighbours.[7]

And there are other reasons why London should have loosened its grip on the antipodean imagination. There has been the imaginative 'discovery' of the Asian neighbours, either mediated through Kipling and Forster first, as with Christopher Koch, or by sharp-eyed artists like Bruce Petty, in Robert Phiddian's account of his career. And obviously the Boeing 747, which put London about a day's journey from anywhere for a price which fell steadily for the next thirty years, was a key factor. Semi-permanent exile—in either direction—has been watered down to a stopover, a presentation at a conference, even a single night's seat at an Albert Hall concert. As Laurie Hergenhan shows wittily in his essay, nowadays the act of 'writing London' can have various prepositions inserted between the words – to, from, back, in, out of, against – without the geographical positioning, either literal and metaphorical, of the writer being of much moment.

One might argue that, even in the case of the Aussie media superstars, the label of 'expatriate' has become almost obsolete. Is it useful, really, to know exactly how much of each year Germaine Greer or Clive James or Peter Carey spend in London or Melbourne? In the global village, Hergenhan says, 'what vestiges of the local ('Australian') lurk beneath the cosmopolitan dazzle, remains a complex question, and one that in the future may even lose relevance'.

Some would say it has lost it already. One notices how our cultural arbiters have adopted a new verb remarkable for its evasiveness: 'based'. This or that writer, musician, actor no longer 'lives' somewhere: he or she is 'based' in Sydney or Adelaide, London or Los Angeles, as though to imply that, if you should call them, expect to get the answering machine. This is, of course, mere journalistic citizen-of-the-world puffery, utterly irrelevant to the lives of most people, but on the metaphorical level it does suggest a less emotional attitude to the ex-imperial capital, the place once called, so poignantly, 'Home'. Home is no longer where the heart is. Home is where you hang your hat. Perhaps that is why the more recent of the memoir-pieces collected here have a somewhat valedictory air about them, as though memorialising a dream from which the authors have now awoken.

****

WORKS CITED

Alomes, Stephen. When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain. Cambridge UP, 1999.

Ball, John Clement. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Feldman, D. and G. Stedman Jones, eds. Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800. London: Routledge, 1989.

Gilbert, Pamela K. ed. Imagined Londons. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Hassam, Andrew. Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000.

Inglis, K.S. 'Going Home: Australians in England, 1870-1900' in David Fitzpatrick, ed. Home or Away? Immigrants in Colonial Australia. Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, 1992.

James, Henry. London Stories and Other Writings. Edited by David Kynaston. Padstow: Tabb House, 1989.

Jefferies, Richard. The Toilers of the Field. London: Longmans, Green, 1892.

Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, 21:2 (1999).

McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge, 2004.

Malouf, David. Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2003.

Onega, Susana, and John A. Stotesbury, eds. London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2002.

Pesman, R. Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad. Oxford UP, 1996.

Philips, Lawrence, ed. The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004.

Robinson, Alan. Imagining London, 1770-1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004.

Russell, Roslyn. Literary Links: Celebrating the Literary Relationship Between Australia and Britain. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997.

Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens. New York: Macmillan, 1998.

Woollacott, Angela. To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity. Oxford UP, 2001.

[1] Quoted in Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1995, 56.

[2] Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: the Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens. New York: Macmillan, 1998, 10.

[3] Quoted in Henry James, London Stories and Other Writings. Edited with an Introduction by David Kynaston. Padstow: Tabb House, 1989, 1. Leech was the cartoonist for the comic paper Punch.

[4] In To Try Her Fortune in London (2001) and Through Australian Eyes (2000) respectively.

[5] David Malouf, Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2003, 6.

[6] Richard Jefferies, 'The Lions in Trafalgar Square' in The Toilers of the Field. London: Longmans, Green, 1892, 326-7.

[7] Malouf, Made in England, 13. He has a revealing comment on the British gay soap Queer as Folk. In one episode a young man tells a friend about his exciting new love: 'He says I'm the best shag he's ever had. But how can I be? He's an Australian'. This is certain proof that the cultural cringe is dead, according to Malouf.