US Elections

The American mirror

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

20 February 2012

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Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard meets members of the Australian Defence Force in Darwin

It's curious the way those of us outside the United States are wont to use America as a mirror to understand our own lives. Here's how Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard commemorated the Japanese Bombing of Darwin on February 19, 1942, during World War II:

“For too many Australians the history remains unknown,” Ms Gillard told the Seven Network in an interview.

“I was determined to change that by ensuring that we did mark this (the anniversary) as a national day, that we told the story of what happened all of those years ago, 70 years ago, when Darwin was bombed.

“This is really Australia's Pearl Harbour and we should understand it.”

It's not that the bombing of Darwin shared no similarities with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, though there were significant differences. When Japan attacked the United States, the US was not yet involved in the war. When Japan attacked Darwin, it had been at war with Australia for more than two years. Both Japanese attacks represented historic assaults on each country's home territory, but Australia had long been nervous about threats from the north, while Pearl Harbor ruptured American faith in isolationism. Gillard's comparison isn't spurious, but it isn't intuitive either.

But those of us in Australia like to see echoes of American history in our own. Just as the United States had its founding fathers, we speak — a little absurdly — of our own equivalents, and lament that they are not as well known. (It is with good reason; the founders of the US fought a war and wrought a whole new system of government from nothing, while Australia's founders managed the not unimpressive but predominantly bureaucratic task of convincing six colonies to join in federation.) 

When Labor MP Joel Fitgibbon gave the inaugural Edmund Barton Lecture at the University of Newcastle in 2008, he voiced a not uncommon Australian complaint [PDF]:

It’s probable that the names George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are better known to Australians than the name Edmund Barton. Yet Barton was as leading a figure in the creation of our own federation, as were the three famous Americans in the drafting of the US Constitution.

A 2000 New York Times article details this national anxiety:

''It seems that Australians know more about the first president of the United States, George Washington, than they do about Edmund Barton, our own first prime minister,'' the booklet concedes, adding: ''But perhaps that's because our nation was created with a vote, not a war.''

[...]

Tony Eggleton, director of the centenary program, said focus groups that had been questioned about Australia's founding fathers were ''often embarrassed'' that they knew much more about American history than that of Australia and Prime Minister Barton, who headed the first federal government for three years. Mr. Barton's words, ''We have for the first time in history a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation,'' are much better known here than his name.

Similarly, here's Waleed Aly comparing America's political culture to that of Australia's:

Australia's political culture would never allow this. Edmund Barton is no George Washington, and no prime minister elicits anything near the reverence that Lincoln does in the US. Menzies may be the Liberal Party's touchstone, but no Labor prime minister would dream of embracing him as his ideal leader. Lincoln was a Republican, yet that has not detained Obama from invoking him over and over again. Lincoln's prophetic aura allows him to transcend party politics. Australia has no political prophets because no civil religion exists here strong enough to accommodate one.

Australians feel their history should look like the United States', or, at least, that the United States' history is an apt lens through which Australians can understand their own. Gillard's invocation of Pearl Harbor yesterday is an appeal to Australians to elevate an event in their own history by framing it as a natural equivalent of an important event in US history. We want America to act as a mirror: if we can see ourselves reflected in America, we might be able to use its understanding of its own history to enhance our understanding of ourselves.

Why do Australians do this? Part of it is due merely to US cultural hegemony: America's voice is so loud on the global stage that its history can't help but seem important even to those who don't share it. There's also the cultural and historical similarities between Australian and the United States that spur us to look for ourselves in America: Our common British origins, our mutual geographical isolation representing a cultural break from Europe, our shared subjugation of our native populations, our development of democratic institutions and open, pluralistic societes.

But I suspect that it is also a function of America's talent for narrative — its gift for telling stories about itself. The United States was born as a modernist nation, one that saw itself as set on a path of determined and inevitable progress. The American project was to achieve its manifest destiny (a westward expansion to achieve American domination of the entire continent), foster democracy and liberty, and to act as a model for the rest of the world (the "city on the hill"). America reads its history as a series of connected events: signposts marking its national progress. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor becomes not just an event, it is part of the ongoing American story, and has attained mythic significance as a result. It speaks to American innocence, and explains the US's rise from New World isolation to global superpower as being a byproduct of its defence of liberty, not any imperial ambition.

When Australians want to elevate the importance of events in our own history, then, we look for ways they echo American history. US history comes with an emotionally compelling and morally fulfilling narrative already constructed. Pearl Harbor is important to Americans, and if Darwin is Australia's Pearl Harbor, then Darwin must, by corrollary, be important to us. The outcome of this borrowing, however, is that we end up seeing our history as a jumbled version of someone else's: the same events imbued with the same meanings, but reconstituted out of context and haunted by the ghosts of another nation's story.

Tags: Australia, Culture, Darwin, Edmund Barton, Founding Fathers, History, Japanese Bombing Of Darwin, Japanese Bombing Of Pearl Harbor, Julia Gillard, Modernism, Narrative, Pearl Harbor, World War Ii

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