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

The Nervous System
An Australian Hero
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the type of mateship or use of it that the official voice of the burgeoning
nationalism rested upon. But what happened was that Sid's bullet hit the
major artery in his mate's thigh and blood fountained out in such quantities
and speed that he lost consciousness and was unable to fire back at Sid.
"What could I do? Me mate was lying there dead and I had to go and
fight and probably get killed too?"
"What happened?"
"Well, he got carried away and I went to see him months later in hospital
in England and he was havin' a fine time sittin' up in bed with the nurses.
His leg was withered, but ... he told me things was bonza and he was poin'
home to Australia and was gonna marry one of them nurses."
Years later Sid met up with his mate dressed up in his uniform and medals
and plumes in his slouch hat. It was ANZAC Day and they marched together
with their medals, Australian heroes.
I asked him about his contact with British soldiers. He remembered
meeting up with five and later seeing only two of them. The other three had
been wiped out by a shell. One of the survivors, a young kid really, told him
about it and went on to say that he'd heard his mother was in prison in
England for stealing firewood from the landed estate near her home. With
o
o
the submarine blockage the British people suffered many hardships and she
could not buy fuel.
"I looked at the young fella," Sid told me, "and I said to him, 'Look it's
a funny thing yer know, mate, but it wouldn't matter much who won this
flamin' war. Yer three cobbers arc dead and yer ol' mum's in prison . . . No!
It wouldn't matter who won this war!"
The U-boat blockade had a momentous impact on the fortunes of a small
firm in Australia too. Its name was Holden and it had been started in 1854
by an Englishman of that name who created a leather and saddlery business.
Moving into carriage-making in the early 20th century, the Holden company
was able to take advantage, in 1917, of the market opened up for the
manufacture of car bodies on account of the Government ban on the
importation of complete vehicles, consequent to the threat to shipping lanes
posed by the U-boats. By 1923 Holden Motor Body Builders had become
one of the largest industrial enterprises in Australia and signed an agreement
with General Motors Export Company to manufacture car bodies, in return
for which GM agreed to supply designs, data, and technical "know how."
On November 29th, 1948, General Motors Holden unveiled the 48-125, the
first "Australian" motor car.
We had got to the end of our test drive and when we opened the glovebox
to get the car's papers there fell out a postcard. It was from Russia and
Sid asked me to read it. An old Australian friend of his had sent it as a
memento of a tourist trip and was lauding the virtues of the Soviet Union,
its full employment and so forth. It turned out that Sid was not only
sympathetic with communism but an ardent Stalinist. I kept thinking back
to the way he loved the centralized automatic control of Australia's Own,
the Holden; how you could raise and lower everyone's window from the
driver's panel, and so forth. Like everything else about Sid, here at least the
control mechanism was clear and up front. But with a democratic state
apparatus and its associated civil culture a different type of control exists,
one that uses mateship and oppositional practice, for example, in a way such
that people feel they are doing something natural, not imposed. C.E.W. Bean
had said, for instance, that the British Empire at the time of WWI was an
organization of semi-autonomous parts—in keeping with liberalism. "The
British policy," he wrote in the official history of the War, "left it to whatever
virtue and good sense existed in each portion of the race to see the need
. . . and this was precisely the opposite," he went on to say,
to that of the rigid and calculating organization upon which the German
Empire was built. It was of the essence of liberalism: it avoided all imposed
control and placed its trust in the good sense and feeling inherent in men
left free.
But there is no freedom outside of culture, and for many of these men the
culture of nationalism their colonially created image as bushmen and as
ANZACS helped weave together became their shroud, as it will for others
to come—especially if Sid, the old bushman, has his way. Asked how he
could justify Stalin's slaughter of millions of Russian peasants in the 1930s
he instantly responded, "Why! The same thing has to happen here. They're
just a lot of Cocky Farmers, you know!"
I drove off newly possessed by Australia's Own.
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