Mungo MacCallum (1941–2020)

The Australia I grew up in levitated on a mythology of fairness and opportunity. Any close examination of myths always finds holes and they crash to earth quickly. In this case, fairness was mostly for whites at the expense of indigenous peoples, dark skinned islanders and Asians. The rich swanned around on vast gentrified estates recreating pastoral idylls and impenetrable mansions in coastal cities.

At its best though, that myth of fairness led to a labor movement, enfranchisement of women show more ahead of the world standard, good institutions from courts, to universities, parliament an electoral system. You could fairly persuade any parliamentarian that the inherited Westminster system of government was a pretty good one on a global scale. Eventually, by the time I was ten, I could look forward to going to university (free), and by the time I did go to university, healthcare was free. The wage system meant that people like my parents who immigrated for a better life could work hard and live well, buy a house, afford things, dream a little of that better life in retirement on a state pension and free healthcare. Knowing that I too could get a good education. That’s what fairness meant in Australia for a few decades at least.

The national anthem - which deposed the God Save the Queen jingle I grew up singing at school assemblies every Monday, has a line that goes like this “our land is girt by sea”. It’s an old fashioned word “girt” - anthems need words with age and the gravitas they confer - and it simply refers to the way that the nation continent is surrounded by sea. A blessing for many. An intellectual curse in other ways.

Australians don’t have a direct emnity with people on its borders. It means we lack a certain vigilance about such things and a lack of a mythology about enemies. We are like those giant mammals that roamed the world without natural predators until they grew to an inexplicably grotesque size.

But at the same time, Australians carry around a natural sense of superiority of being white, European, British and hold some deeply affected memory of how britons enforce colonies by exclusion, conquest and all those horrible methods.

Ideologues when they harness the power of that sense of being important and exclusive employ ruthless methods. The tragic diversion that occurred around the years 1996-2020 of our myth of fairness towards the myth of personal interest and exclusion reached a touchstone moment - the day the conservative government decided that its polling was looking poor in mid 2001 ahead of an election that it needed anything to galvanise voters. It all happened at once when a ship of refugees mostly from islamic countries was sinking (off those very game girdled shored) and good Norwegian captain of a ship used the law of the sea to rescue them. Maritime laws interact with our sense of fairness - anyone in distress on the seas must be assisted by a nearby ship and taken to the closest port. A grand law indeed, one that leads to bravery, noble action and affirms our very human belief in our benevolence.

Now, I like conservatives who care a little. I’m not one of them, but there are plenty of them who love opera, literature, art and opportunity for all to work hard a do well. They are my favourite conservative thinkers. At least by reading and engaging in the world they realise there is more beyond their immediate surroundings. The ones I don’t like are a snivelling band of miscreants and bottom feeders who think only of themselves and their miserable petty needs. A nasty bunch who you know would sell anyone out for their personal gain. That is the sort of government we ended up with here in Australia since the mid 90s. The ones that seem to have taken over politics just about everywhere in the Anglosphere over these last decades. NZ the exception.

That horrible miserable little government (HMLG for short) decided on that fateful day that the law of the sea did not apply to those stranded people, the captain of the ship was as good as an enemy invader and from there on the word refugee meant the same as terrorist, rapist, child abuser and such newly interpreted words in the English language. They sent the ship away, then they made politics out of it, carefully rebranded the national thinking on immigrants as freeloaders, refugees as freeloaders and grifters, sharks and invaders. the nation went into siege mode. Governing became irrelevant as long as the national consciousness was constantly focused on imaginary invasion forces. We became as miserable a nation as our government. Our media spun stories about invasion, left wing conspiracies against the masses etc.

By the time this insufferable narrow minded, phobic, insular thinking took hold, the word girt had come to resemble the word 'gird' another old-fashioned word meaning to tighten and prepare oneself. In this case against an imaginary enemy.

The author of this essay, Mungo MacCallum was one of those old school journalists, educated, intelligent, perceptive and filled with the old myth of national fairness, rather than national self importance. The essay is beautifully clear, fearless in its attitude to this changed national character and lamenting of the values that disappear along with it. He sadly died in 2020. There aren’t many like him. Today our journalists are more often like gestapo interrogators, ruthless apparatchiks of a parallel power running the country. I’m grateful that this essay survives. I picked it up in an opportunity shop the other day and read it again. show less

Mungo MacCallum has been writing on Australian politics with his sharp wit for generations now so I am thankful that he has taken the time to write precises on each of what was then the twenty-seven Prime Ministers of Australia (the 2012 publication means we only get 1/2 of the stories of Rudd and Gillard and, thankfully for some readers no doubt, none of Abbott).

MacCullum doesn't dish too much dirt on the PMs and in the end there's not much I didn't already know, but he writes in such an show more entertaining way that I breezed through "The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely" in a couple of sittings. And while MacCullum has his personal favorites amongst the 27, it's only with John Howard that his personal dislike of the subject comes through.

If, for whatever reason, you want to become more au fait with the characters that at one stage or another held Australia's top job, this is as good a start as any. show less

Could only put this down when food, work or other essential activity called. Wonderful to relive 2007 again, only this time through my memory and Mungo's words. Where were the so-called journalists during the Howard years? Their names appeared but someone else was writing the stories. What use is democracy when part of it is dead? Well, two parts, the Federal Opposition up until 4 December 2007 and the journos. I thought my morning coffee colleague was the only one in real-time who could see show more what was happening. Good on you Mungo, thanks for recalling those events that resonated with the two (three) of us at the time. show less

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/mungo-on-kevin/

This essay is mainly interested in the nature of Kevin Rudd's appeal to voters. It discusses policy, of course. It also quotes poetry, mainly bush verse, including a savage parody of 'Clancy of the Overflow':

He was poisoning the water when he chanced upon a slaughter
So he joined in patriotically to massacre and rape
And he sees the vision splendid of the native problem ended
and a land made safe for cattle from Tasmania to the show more Cape.

It takes the odd potshot at contrarian rightwing columnists. It produces some fabulous quotes, including for example a definition of a modern progressive as 'a fella that stumbles forward every time somebody shoves him'. (Sadly there are no footnotes, so we often don't know what wits are being quoted – I'm guessing Mungo himself did the Paterson parody.)

That is to say, there's a lot to enjoy. There's also substance – of an airy sort. It discusses Rudd's policies, and his largely successful response of the Great Recession (as Robert Manne calls it later in the book), but mainly it argues that he taps into some deeply held myths about what it means to be Australian – egalitarianism, fairness, the larrikin–dutiful citizen dichotomy, that reluctant progressiveness, 'fervent, if understated, nationalism'. 'For all his nerdiness and prolixity,' MacCallum concludes,

there is something very Australian about him, and the voters recognise it. In a totally unexpected way, Rudd has given them back their Lucky Country – and this time not in a spirit of irony, but one of self-belief.

Hmmm ... But I enjoyed the ride.

This issue also includes the 2009 Quarterly Essay Lecture, 'Is Neo-Liberalism finished?' a search for the meaning of the Great Recession by Robert Manne. The lecture isn't as much fun as the title essay, covers some of the same ground, occasionally manages to be incomprehensible when explaining how the Great Recession came about. Where MacCallum takes cheerfully bitter potshots, Manne eviscerates in earnest.

And then there's correspondence about Noel Pearson's Radical Hope which over all confirms that Pearson's conversation is mainly with conservative white leaders, but also shows him as eager to do more than simply pontificate as a lone voice. show less