The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
An Australian Hero
identifying the forces operative, so the picture of the landscape changes
through which this stream, let alone Bold Jack Donaghue, The Wild Colonial
Boy, runs:
It was for the sake of five hundred
pounds I was sent across the main
For seven long years in South Wales
to wear a convict's chain.
Chorus
Then come, mv hearties, we'll roam the mountains high!
J
O
Together we will plunder, together we will die!
We'll wander over mountains and we'll gallop over plains—
For we scorn to live in slavery, bound down in iron chains.
Trapped by the police, the Wild Colonial Boy responds:
"Resign to you—you cowardly dogs! A thing I ne'er will do,
For I'll fight this night with all mv might," cried bold Jack
Donahoo.
"I'd rather roam these hills and dales, like wolf or kangaroo,
Than work one hour for Government!" cried bold Jack Donahoo.
And like the multitude of Australians who later at Gallipoli as wild colonial
boys fought all night with all their might like wolf or kangaroo, Bold Jack
Donahoo met his death, the difference being that while he fought against
* to too
the government the ANZACS fought for it—and the British crown as well.
In his memoir, Goodbye to All That, the English writer Robert Graves cites
his countrymen's wide-eyed view of its white colonial troops in WWI. They
were barbarians, anarchic and bloodthirsty, preferring to bayonet than to
shoot, and the recent Australian revival of the case of Breaker Morant in the
brilliant film of that name (directed by Bruce Beresford) illustrates one of
the political uses of that image, namely the deployment of Australians as
barbaric counter-guerrilla troops by the British high command in the Boer
War, fighting fire with fire, in a manner of speaking.
* to to ' r o
Encouraged by the high command to reproduce the British view of their
colonial selves, atavistic and wild, these colonially constituted Australians
could nevertheless be court martialled by the British and executed by firing
squad, as was the Breaker, for being too colonial, in this wild sense, when
their deeds, or rather misdeeds, became an excuse for Germany to threaten
joining in the war on the side of the Boers.
From the film (which was photographed in South Australia) one would
hardly know that there were any Black people in South Africa, and this
surely accentuates the fact that the white Australian troops stood in a similar
mythic relation to the British officers and crown as did the Blacks of South
Africa (just as the Blacks of Australia, the Aborigines, subject to genocide in
the years prior to the Boer War, stood to the White Australians). It should
also be appreciated that Breaker Morant—named 'Breaker' on account of
his horse-breaking prowess—was not an Australian by birth or upbringing.
Instead his Australianness lay in his being an outcast Englishman, one
banished from the blessed isle to the sunburnt country on account of some
unmentionable affront to English middle-class manners. Thus his character
combined both the attraction and repulsion with which Australians tend to
view Britain, and the heroic image bestowed on him by this recent and
sophisticated film is stirring testimony to this. His aristocratic, English style
is in fact the source of his attractiveness to an Australian audience; his being
outcast by England makes such appreciation licit.
But when I asked Sid about the Breaker he replied, "Yes, Harry Morant
you mean," and paused. "He was a bad one that fella." But he couldn't or
wouldn't say any more. He looked a little uncomfortable and I was somewhat
taken aback at what amounted to a curt denial of the story made by the film
out of the Breaker's death as a heroic victim of colonial manipulation. What
more might Sid have known, I asked myself.
But here obtrudes another and more pointed question as to whether the
story the storyteller of war might want to tell is freely available, anyway.
Might it not be a fragmented experience or one beyond communication that
is perforce altered as soon as it is moulded by the narrative form ready at
hand—in this Australian case the narrative not just of sacrifice whose blood
nourishes the idea of the nation, but also of the battler who, in the tragedy
of always losing, gains heroic status because he has stuck to the rules of the
egalitarian game and refused the enticements of rank and power? Such a
man might be hard to push around. That is true. But he is also a man who
may not merely accept defeat but feel ennobled by it. Under appropriate
conditions it may in fact be very easy to push such a man around. How the
storyteller might evade this fate of narrativization instead of fueling it is one
of great questions posed for the politics of cultural opposition in our time,
and this question might be answered by posing another. Now that the very
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