[Editor: This book review, of Advance Australia — Where? (by Brian Penton, 1943), was published in The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, NSW), 26 February 1944. The book advocated that Australia engage more fully with Asia, and called for an end to the White Australia Policy.]
A vigorous pen
“Advance Australia—Where?,” by Brian Penton. — Cassell and Co.
Prompted by his publishers, who asked for a book about Australia at the moment, Mr. Penton re-dons the mantle of seer and philosopher we glimpsed in his pamphlet, “Think — or be Damned.”
Mr. Penton is not the first thinker to be appalled by Australia’s isolation from the main stream of civilisation and the quality of lazy-tolerance he calls “the policy of near-enough,” which marks or mars, as you wish, the Australian’s approach to life. He deplores our habit of “whittling down all unaverage talents and standards to a common denominator accessible to the understanding, enjoyment, and competition of the fair-average,” and points with shame to the fruits of that habit — an outmoded censorship of books, a parsimonious education system, a sterile intellectual life, insufficient respect for the work of the artist and scientist, slums, and ugly makeshift cities in a new land of plenty, and a standard of living based solely upon material concepts.
The root cause, he says, is that until comparatively recent times the bulk of Australians had no real love of country. They still looked upon England as “home” and Australia as a place in which to amass a fortune which they would spend at leisure in that fairer “homeland.” Fifty years ago there were stirrings, signs of the birth of a national consciousness, but it wilted because we were content with mere material gains and pleasures — we were not prepared to shoulder the responsibilities which the assumption of nationhood connotes.
But war came. For the moment the grim struggle to survive overshadows the flowering of Australia’s ego, but the forces war has unleashed and the myths it has exploded should revolutionise our thinking and lead to our emergence as a distinct individualistic Pacific nation, without, as some prophets gloomily forecast, taking us out of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
That is the burden of Mr. Penton’s case. “We have just got to build ourselves into the Asiatic economy,” he declares. That is our destiny — a buffer State at the storm centre of the post-war world, where the British Empire meets Asia and Russia meets America in the maelstrom of conflicting interests. It is a situation fraught with dangers but also with exciting opportunities. If we want peace — not just temporary peace but lasting peace — we must insist, he says, upon equal economic opportunities for Asia and banishment of the concept of white superiority which sharpens resentment and hostility of the coloured man. Any attempt by British and American — and, for that matter, sectional Australian — interests to exploit the vast potentialities of undeveloped Asia for their own selfish profits must be resisted.
He admits the difficulties of achieving this goal, which will require no less than a complete change of heart on the part of more countries than Australia. But he is not without hope. “Man,” he declares in a brave statement of his faith, “is a brilliantly revolutionary as well as a ponderously evolutionary creature. When his mind seems most encrusted by dogma, he produces a wicked little thought that smashes all dogmas overnight. In Alexandria of the Second Century, B.C., in Rome of the Twelfth, in Paris of the Eighteenth, and in Moscow of the Twentieth, he left behind a mind and a spirit he was tired of to try a new mind and a new spirit and a new direction of living. To predict that he will do so again is more justified by historic fact than to presume that he will sit down patiently waiting to die.”
— F.W.
Source:
The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, NSW), 26 February 1944, p. 6 (Late Edition)
Editor’s notes:
B.C. = (abbreviation) Before Christ
connote = to allude, imply, signify, or suggest a meaning other than, or in addition to, the denoted, explicit, or principal meaning
maelstrom = a chaotic, disordered, restless, tumultuous, or turbulent situation, state of affairs, or emotional state; a situation characterised by bedlam, chaos, dangerous agitation, disorder, pandemonia, turbulent confusion, tumult, and/or socio-political upheaval; can also refer to a large, powerful, and/or violent whirlpool (derived from the Moskstraumen: a system of powerful and hazardous tidal eddies and whirlpools occurring at the Lofoten archipelago, located off the north-west coast of Norway)
See: 1) “Moskstraumen”, Wikipedia
2) “Whirlpool”, Wikipedia
parsimonious = frugal, miserly, stingy, tight-fisted, unwilling to spend money; careful with money, financially prudent, not spending money unnecessarily, not wasting money, thrifty; being frugal or minimalist in using assumptions, conjectures, or steps
unaverage = not average, not ordinary
[Editor: Added two line breaks before “— F.W.”.]
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