Between Poles: Fear and Radicalism

The time: 1949-1972

In 1972 I was eleven years old, growing up Blak in rural NSW in a large, extended Wiradjuri working-class family. Neither of my parents finished high school (my mother didn’t even get to start it). No one in the older generation of my family had completed high school. Everyone who worked was an unskilled labourer – my mother a housekeeper and cleaner, my father a wool-presser. 

I grew up in a country-town with a mixed demographic – predominantly settler and local Wiradjuri families. No one in my community talked about tertiary education. Not because there were no aspirations; and not because there was an innate lack of intelligence among the rural working class – but because there was no money. Very few people could afford the living expenses and tuition fees to send their children to metropolitan or large regional tertiary institutions. Scholarships, awards, and bursaries were hard to come by and required exceptional grades or scores and often extended to mainly vocational professionals such as teaching.  

Social mobility was limited – if not totally stagnant. Working-class kids had little chance of breaking the socio-economic cycle of previous generations. Barriers to cultural capital, such as entry to higher education, to health and civic infrastructure, to equal rights and equal pay for women and First Nations peoples, to equity in housing and income were thick and high. Discrimination against First Nations Peoples, women, single parents – again mainly women, peoples from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds – was de rigueur. This was the future I faced along with my siblings, community, and all those whose lives were at the cultural and socio-economic intersections of the racially and culturally marginalised post-second World War unskilled, manual labour force. 

There was little visual representation of Australian culture on either commercial television or the national broadcaster. My childhood and adolescence were a smorgasbord of American sitcoms, serials, and movies. Same with the local radio stations – kids in my primary school class would have been hard pushed to know a single Australian band, much less have an album by one.  

Australia existed under the shroud of a cultural cringe – like some quaint subordinate land down-under that was a handmaiden to, and a pale shadow of, Britain. The shame and embarrassment of all things Australian permeated all levels of society. Even though I couldn’t articulate it at eleven, the bristle, the dismissive quips about Australiana – from TV, to music, to clothes, to the vernacular – was ubiquitous. Nothing cool was Australian. You could be forgiven for growing up thinking there was nothing to be proud of in the nation. 

My father, educated to age fourteen, an unskilled rural labourer, and descendant of an Irish Catholic line, was a member of the Australian Workers Union, and a card-carrying Labor voter. No stranger to swearing (expletives formed a natural and integral part of his vocabulary), he blamed Australia’s cultural cringe and polarised wealth and opportunity squarely on the Menzies era that dominated Australian politics from 1949 to 1966 – all his adult life thus far. In colourful, blunt language, my father berated the state of the nation to me, his eldest daughter, daily. 

My mother, the youngest of twelve and descended from a large Wiradjuri family who never left the river, the Marrumbidya (Murrumbidgee), that was their Country, was barely literate, and had not attended school beyond Year 3 or 4. Her eleven siblings, all of whom grew up around the river, had varying degrees of literacy, but none beyond the age of fourteen. Just two of my Aunts remained in school until their early teens. My Grandmother had spent her whole life slaving on the block allocated to the settler farmer who married her in 1908. Before that she worked in domestic service on other rural properties in the area. My Aunts too had all worked in domestic rural labour. 

As a precocious and inquisitive child growing up in a house with these three generations of women, I couldn’t help but notice how they, while less overtly political than my father, lamented in their everyday talk that nothing had changed in this nation for Blakfellas, the rural poor, or the working class. And without articulating it directly, through listening to their talk, I came to realise and understand that I existed at the crossroads of all these things – I was Blak and a descendant of rural poor and working-class stock; and I was the next generation about to be affected by the national stagnation and lack of opportunity for education and wealth that they lamented. This was my earliest awakening to what is now called intersectionality. 

Australia showed little appetite for change in the decades after the Second World War under successive conservative governments. The national narrative promoted a mythscape of uneventfulness in the nation’s history and ‘settlement’. An uneasy veneer of contentment was embedded in the educational and social agendas – be grateful you live in a peaceful country, with a stable government; don’t question the system. The myth of meritocracy reigned. 

It’s Time  

In 1972 a change was in the air. The momentum intensified in November of that year. The nation saw its first election campaign theme song, delivered by a slew of Australian performing artists, with Tony Barber, Barry Crocker, Lynette Curran, Little Pattie, Maggie Tabberer, Col Joye, Graham Kennedy, Jack Thompson and others coming out in support of the Labor Party and its leader, Gough Whitlam. The song, ‘It’s Time’, boomed across the black-and-white TV sets of Australia. It was a sign of a nation on the brink of change.  

Gough Whitlam launched the ALP’s campaign from Blacktown Civic Centre on November 13, 1972. The location of the venue was as significant as the content of the opening speech delivered there. Whitlam’s reason for choosing Blacktown was symbolic; it was representative of the outer suburbs of major cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane where the ALP was building new constituencies. The suburb was also chosen as it typified the continuing failures of the incumbent conservative government to listen to, much less address, the needs of growing outer-city suburbs around planning, infrastructure, services, and allocation of resources at both a federal and state level. 

The It’s Time speech, written by ALP adviser and speech-writer Graham Freudenberg, was broadcast nationally. It focussed on the nation’s economy, healthcare, education, city planning, and the Vietnam War. 

I can still feel the optimism of the impending changes permeating down from the adults in my home and in my community. The opening lines of the speech were a light-bulb moment for eleven-year-old me. 

Whitlam opened with: 

Men and women of Australia! The decision we will make for our country on December 2 is a choice between the past and the future, between the habits and fears of the past and the demands and opportunities of the future. 

I realised then what my father had been saying about ‘the manufactured inequality of the nation’, and what my mother’s family meant when they lamented the lack of changes and opportunities that they had experienced in their lives and that still existed in mine. It was Whitlam’s use of the word ‘habits’ that really struck me. It was a habit of previous governments to perpetuate the wealth and cultural divide that was stagnating the nation. It was not organic, not part of a natural order of things where some are born ‘to have’ and some are born ‘to have-not’, not a chance of birth that smart kids who were born to working class, poor and/or Blak families had no pathway to, or means for, tertiary education; or that some could afford the healthcare they needed while others suffered and died through lack of it. It was not a fait accompli that some could afford and continue to accumulate property, while others had none; or that women from poor, working-class backgrounds were trapped in violent abusive relationships because they couldn’t afford to get out of them and/or raise the children from such relationships on their own; or that men received higher wages than women who did the same work, just because they were men; or that young men from working-class backgrounds were conscripted to Vietnam, while those from wealthy backgrounds could avoid it by opting for a tertiary education that was out of the financial reach of the working classes. Nor was it an accident that the history and culture that my generation and those before me were taught at school positioned Australia as the handmaiden of England, and that all its art, literature and performance should seek to emulate the English. Australia, according to this narrative, had no history before 1788, and from then onwards it was a story of triumph, expansion, and pastoralism. 

All these inequalities, cultural biases, and exclusions were by design – constructed by the political, economic, and social policies of governments whose best interests were served by the growing divide it caused. And all this could be undone, torn down, by a different raft of policies. 

The It’s Time election campaign sought to address many things that were articulated in Whitlam’s Blacktown speech with special focus given to the national economy, healthcare, education, city planning, the Vietnam War, and the arts. The campaign concentrated on the mistakes made by the previous government, that had held power for twenty-three years, particularly those made by the incumbent Prime Minister, William McMahon. 

The Liberal-Country coalition narrowly avoided defeat in the 1969 election despite an eighteen-seat swing towards Labor. The ALP won a majority in the two-party-preferred vote but had insufficient seats to form government. Between 1969 and 1971, the Coalition fell further behind in the polls. Prime Minister John Gorton resigned after a no-confidence vote in 1971 and McMahon took leadership of the party.  

Television and ABC radio were the staples of news in my home; one was always blaring in the lounge room and the other in the kitchen. I loved current affairs and the Irish nuns in the working-class Catholic primary school I attended, even though they were not eligible to vote because they weren’t Australian citizens, had no qualms about being overtly political or staunchly anti-royalist and anti-imperialist, calling for and encouraging us to think about the radical changes needed to overturn what they called ‘bleeding obvious Aussie inequality’. My teachers devoted a ten-minute slot every morning, straight after religious education and just before math (which I hated), for current affairs. My news in 1972, along with that of others from similar Blak and working-class backgrounds, was always about politics. Even to primary school children, it was clear that McMahon was no match for the fiery intellect and charisma of Whitlam; or that the Coalition government was lagging in the polls. Most obvious, though, was that Australia was ripe and ready for a change. 

Between November 13 and December 2, I went on the road with my father through country towns across the south-west slopes of NSW to campaign for Whitlam. It was the changes and reforms the ALP promised to healthcare, education, and Indigenous affairs that my family and I were really fighting for. These were the three unaddressed areas of Australian society that excluded us and people like us. The neglected state of Indigenous affairs caused further exclusion and discrimination against us. Despite the referendum to complete the citizenship of Indigenous people under the Holt government in 1967, no further measures had been taken to address the rampant social and economic discrimination against the nation’s First Peoples. 

My family’s spirits and sense of hopelessness against what had previously seemed an unreachable and unchangeable system were buoyed by Whitlam’s promises of free universal healthcare, better funding for schools, especially those in rural and economically disadvantaged areas, alongside the abolition of tertiary education fees, and the introduction of a means-tested tertiary allowance. The Whitlam government’s reforms to the neglected state of Indigenous affairs, its references to ‘self-determination’ and Land Rights, its introduction of an anti-discrimination bill, as well as equal wages for women and support for single parents, also brought new hope. 

The Politics of Envy 

In those weeks before the election, we drove across a lot of Wiradjuri Country, through towns such as Wagga, Cootamundra, Junee, Temora, Leeton, Griffith, Narrandera, Dubbo, and Wellington. We sold raffle tickets, worked on information stalls, and put up placards and posters. We attended ALP meetings where I sat at the back and listened to the aspirations and rising optimism of the various local branches. Many of these towns were in conservative electorates; and many, like the town I grew up in, Gundagai, were de facto governed by a local pastoralist elite. The backlash from that sector was loud and obvious. 

Some people yelled at us. Most of what they said is not fit for publication, but can be summarised by the following: Why should we pay other people’s medical bills? Why should we pay for other people’s children to be educated? Why should our hard-earned money be taxed for others? You’re all a pack of communists! You’ll all send the country broke! The ‘hard-earned money’ they referred to, was the transferred accumulation of intergenerational wealth and assets; and what they feared most was equality or any semblance of it. 

Without having the words to articulate it yet, what I was witnessing at the time, along with all those campaigning for the change, was the politics of downward envy – and the fear that the rights certain privileged sectors of the Australian population were accustomed to enjoying without question were about to be extended to the rest of the population. The right to universal healthcare, the right to affordable education, the right to a discrimination-free workplace, the right for people to end unhappy and abusive relationships – in short, the right of many to have the agency and resources better to control, plan, and manage their futures was being repositioned as a privilege by those who’d always enjoyed it. Or as handouts to those who were seen as somehow less worthy than the monied and the propertied.   

It was only as a young adult years later that I had the words to articulate this. It was the prevalence of these sentiments that ultimately led to the unconstitutional dismissal of the Whitlam government three years later. And it is these very sentiments – the politics of envy and fear – that have stymied radical reform in Australia ever since. 

The Victory and the Changes: 1972-1975 

Whitlam won the election with 67 of the 125 seats in the lower house – a margin of nine seats with more than a 2.5% swing towards the ALP. The changes and reforms Whitlam’s administration made were swift. My family embraced this raft of changes like people whom until recently the nation had forgotten. Because it had. 

That the Whitlam government passed 203 bills in its first year – more than any other government had in any single year – shows how transformative it was, especially for those most excluded: women, the working-class, First Nations peoples, and immigrants.  

The new government delivered on its promises in education, healthcare, and Indigenous affairs, three of the critical parts of its reform agenda. Alongside the changes to tertiary education (tuition fees would be abolished in 1974), it created a Schools Commission to allocate state funding to public and private schools with greater equity. According to the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University, funding for government schools increased more than seven-fold and more than doubled for non-government schools. The 1973 Health Insurance Bill proposed a universal health insurance scheme called Medibank that eventually passed in 1974 despite strong opposition. The reforms in Indigenous affairs were among the most contentious and arguably remain so today, from the adoption of the policy of self-determination, enabling Indigenous communities to make their own decisions, to legislating for Land Rights (including, in August 1975, restoring to the Gurindji people their traditional lands in the Northern Territory), to the creation of the Aboriginal Land Fund. 

My family lived a long way away from the far north of Australia where these reforms were implemented; and they did not directly affect or change anything in terms of returning land or recognition of my community’s continued presence on the Marrumbidya. But seeing these reforms carried out visually in the media was powerful and sent a strong message. It was the first time in the colonial history of Australia that any leader from either party had ever acknowledged, much less acted on, the fact that this nation is and always was Aboriginal land. The very mention of the term ‘land rights’ – although not new to us came into the political lexicon for the first time. And, despite many setbacks, broken promises on both sides of politics since, it remains there. The fact that reform in Indigenous land rights is still contentious today is clear evidence of the politics of envy, and of the fear of truth-telling about its foundational narrative that the nation continues to live under. 

But it wasn’t just in Indigenous affairs that Whitlam’s government broke away from the prevailing ‘whitestream’. In 1973, it ended the White Australia Policy which intentionally sought and favoured immigrants from Britain, white-European countries such as the Balkan and Baltic states, and eastern Europe, such as Ukraine and Poland. From the end of the Second World War, momentum away from previously bipartisan polices of assimilation grew. The ALP seized upon and actualised this growing movement by removing all references to race in the new immigration policy, stating that immigrants were now to be chosen based on eligibility and merits, not race, skin-colour, or religion. 

In 1975, after much opposition from the Liberal-Country Party, the Whitlam government also introduced Australia’s first anti-discrimination legislation. Some in the Coalition, such as Senator Ian Wood, argued (as only a white man would) that Australia was ‘singularly free of racial discrimination’. Wood’s comment, although not intended to, evidenced the level of invisibility and lack of voice Aboriginal and culturally and linguistically diverse peoples had in Australia under both sides of politics until 1972. Though the opposition did succeed in watering down the Anti-Discrimination bill, its passing into law was a monumental policy shift in Australia.  

While Whitlam acknowledged that you could not legislate racism or discrimination away, for those like me and my family and community who had never been afforded this right before, the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 really did make a difference. Where I really noticed the impact of this legislation was in the new confidence it gave to Blak women in my family and to my community. I remember being told by my Aunties and my Mother that this gives my siblings, my cousins, my peers and me, the legal right to fight back against the racial slurs and cultural insults that they had endured. Like Whitlam, they were quick to point out that this Act would not magically make these things go away – and sadly, as they also pointed out at the time, the ‘skin-politics’ of the nation will never disappear, but at least, we would have the words, as laid out in the law, to fight back with. 

Blue Poles and National Cultural Arts Policy 

It was Whitlam’s reforms in the arts, and the purchase of the Blue Poles in particular, that left a lasting impact and impression on me back then. My ambitions as an eleven-year-old already lay somewhere between the arts and socio-political commentary, and I realised then that both would be possible. 

In 1973, Whitlam announced the first appointments to a new Arts Council – the Australia Council for the Arts. The establishment of this body, which included many boards and advisory bodies, was integral to ending the cultural cringe and changing national identity through supporting homegrown artistic and creative expression. This was accompanied by funding increases: according to the Art Council’s Annual Report for 1973, it was allocated $14 million in the 1973-74 federal budget, which ‘represented an increase of over 100% over funds provided in the previous year’. In the 1974-75 budget, this rose to $20 million. The nation had never before seen such commitment, matched by dollars, for nurturing uniquely Australian creative expression.  

Alongside advocating for new local forms of artistic expression, Whitlam also brought an outward-looking international focus in the arts (beyond looking automatically to Britain) that would ideally inspire and invigorate what had been a fairly parochial Australian arts scene. The purchase of Blue Poles in 1973 is forever etched in my memory as a radical flash point, both symbolically and literally. For a detailed description of the painting and the events that led to its controversial purchase, I recommend Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting that Changed Australia by journalist and political commentator Tom McIlroy. The title of the work is apt and poignant as McIlroy recounts the effort by Whitlam to drag the nation, kicking and screaming, from ‘adolescence to […] cultural maturity’. 

At the time, I’d moved on to high school in another working-class Catholic school that was shamelessly pro-Labor as much of the controversy around the painting and its purchase played out. My art teacher, Mrs K, adored the work and interpreted it as an expression and impression of the chaos and confusion of modern life. I learnt too from Mrs K that during the Depression the USA embarked on a radical and never to be repeated initiative. With unemployment over 20%, President Roosevelt passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act as a way to support the worst off through minimum-wage jobs. Harry Hopkins, Secretary of Commerce, persuaded Roosevelt that relief be extended to artists (and to writers and musicians), and a program was conceived that paid for the creation of thousands of artworks to be displayed in government buildings and public places. Some notable beneficiaries of the visual arts program – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Lee Krasner – were the staples of my high-school art curricula; and their works and influence still loom large in visual art courses today.  

I was and still am in awe of this initiative, which, as McIlroy records, saw more than 8.5 million people employed by the time it ended in 1943. I wondered too, then as now, why it took a national disaster like the Depression to spawn such an initiative – especially since, whenever we look back, the benefits across the visual and literary arts are so enduring. Never before, or since though, has such a commitment to a nation’s cultural arts policy been repeated. As historian Joshua Black pointed out, Australia missed a ‘golden opportunity’ to implement and commit to a similar program during the Covid pandemic. 

It would not be until 1982 – when the National Gallery of Australia was completed and opened in Canberra – that I saw Blue Poles close up. I was not disappointed, with all the time I had spent staring at pictures of the painting. It was much larger and the colours more vibrant; and the poles much more prominent and looming in the foreground than any photo could capture. While art critics have offered various interpretations, it’s the eight blue poles spanning the painting, against the layers of orange, red, yellow, silver and smatterings of white that were, and are, most poignant and most inform my interpretation of the work. 

To me, these poles represent the polar extremes of the nation, and its opposing attitudes to many things that the Whitlam reforms addressed, including the arts. The vertical blue strokes that define the work, with the swirling mix of colours in between, are stark reminders to me of the politics of envy that still tugs at the nation around reforms in welfare, housing, health and Indigenous affairs; and of the national cultural arts policies that have been weaponised as political fodder against successive governments by their oppositions ever since. The painting did change the nation as it plunged both the public and politicians into an argument that has never ended – not only around Australia’s commitment, or lack thereof, to the arts and cultural sector, but also around what they are – what actually constitutes art and culture in the nation 237 years post invasion.  

Whitlam, as McIlroy points out, believed that culture should be central to any civilised nation and that enjoyment of the arts was a right and an end in itself. His government was committed to widening access to the arts, including investing in a national collection to be housed in the National Gallery of Australia. In 1973, the Australian government paid New York art collector Ben Heller $1.4 million AUD for Blue Poles. Whitlam made the price public with full awareness of the controversy it would stir up. But as Joshua Black notes: 

The debate started by Blue Poles still embroils discussions of Australia’s commitment to the arts and culture under successive governments to this day. As arts advocate Esther Anatolitis points out, the Albanese government’s Revive arts and cultural policy is the first since the dismissal of Whitlam to survive more than one term of government due to Labor’s ‘thumping victory’ in the last election. And while there is plenty to be optimistic about with the creation of Writing Australia earlier this year, as with the case of racial discrimination, legislation alone is not enough to protect Australian arts and artists. What is required is a great deal of work to embed in the national psyche the importance and centrality of rigorous cultural expression in the face of recurrent culture wars alongside the censorship of artists expressing certain political views that we have seen play out over the Venice Biennale, the cancelation of fellowships and platforms for artists and writers, and the shutting down of journals under the guise of financial considerations. 

As the dissent and cacophony around the purchase of Blue Poles (and also within the painting itself, as I understand it) show, Australia still is a polarised nation around all the things the Whitlam government put on their reform agenda – education, healthcare, social welfare, Indigenous affairs, foreign policy, national symbols – all the things that are essential to robust, critical, rigorous, and original artistic expression. The question still hangs over the nation: How important are the arts across the visual, literary and performance fields, in their broadest and most inclusive interpretations, to cultural health and well-being in Australia today? 

Fifty Years On 

Though some of the reforms have since partly been unravelled, the Whitlam policies in health, education, anti-discrimination, and the arts made it possible for me, my siblings, my cousins and my Blak and working-class peers and other communities like us to finish school and attend tertiary institutions. The raft of reforms implemented allowed the most discriminated against, economically disadvantaged and socially marginalised in the nation choices that we would otherwise not have had; and that previously had only been the domain of the wealthy and privileged. It paved the pathway to and established the conditions for a Blak middle-class which would not have been possible under previous or even successive governments. 

From 1973 onwards, the lives of my family and community changed. As their access to better healthcare, education, anti-discrimination legislation and equal wages increased, their lives improved.  I witnessed a huge socio-cultural shift that might have otherwise taken generations – if it happened at all – occurring in Australia between 1972-1975. From brave, radical reforms to the bitter politics of envy, these legacies have shaped me. From a young age, I became conscious that the personal is always political. It still is.