Matehoods: when you're in strife, reach for Australia's founding creed
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Version 0 of 1. One would have thought it was near impossible to trump the sheer silliness of Tony Abbott knighting Prince Philip, but not to be outdone, tennis great-turned-Liberal backbencher John Alexander joined in the inanity on Tuesday, spruiking the idea of replacing knights and dames with “matehoods”. Australians lucky enough to receive a gong would be officially referred to as “mate” and saluted with “g’day mate”. Prince Philip, he claimed, “would be tickled pink”. Related: Australia should offer 'matehoods' in place of knighthoods, Liberal MP suggests Is this a cunning strategy to make Abbott and other members of his embattled government appear remotely in control of their faculties? More likely, Alexander’s intervention is further evidence that Australian politics has fully disappeared down the rabbit hole. Of course, this latest foray into mateland by a serving politician, bizarre or otherwise, is not the first, and nor will it be the last, invocation of our nation’s secular creed. From the beginnings of colonisation, European Australians have enjoyed a love affair with mateship. The convicts brought the lingo with them from Britain. They took a fancy to using the term “mate” in reference to each other, male and female, and in addressing the officers who guarded them in what amounted to a vast open-air prison. It is difficult to imagine them being tickled pink by such insubordination. Yet the convicts observed the creed of mateship more in the breach, as they cheated, robbed and betrayed each other. Ever since then, Australian mateship has led a life of contradiction. Nineteenth century radicals and unionists thought of mateship as inherently left-wing – one prominent writer called socialism the “desire to be mates” – but Australian toilers of the colonial era more likely saw it as a means of making money. “Going mates” was shorthand for having a business partner in the rugged bush and on the goldfields. And the land of mates only partially lived up to the legend. An ideal signifying equality and solidarity brutally excluded women and non-whites. Some observers of colonial life thought that mateship on the testosterone-oozing frontier, where men outnumbered women by six to one in the 1820s, sexually suspect. An ideal signifying equality and solidarity brutally excluded women and non-whites Yet it wasn’t long before politicians took a liking to mateship. Working-class politicians had something of a natural affinity with mateship. But long before John Howard sought to include a reference to “mateship” in a new constitutional preamble at the republic referendum of 1999, non-Labor politicians have expressed their admiration for all things matey. Many Australians have been pillorying them for it ever since. During the first world war, conservatives sought to invoke mateship as a means of campaigning for military conscription, alleging that unionists had betrayed their working-class mates in the European trenches by opposing the proposals put to a plebiscite in 1916 and 1917. The Australian Worker newspaper had this to say of the Yes-casers: [W]hat a god-forsaken and incongruous … collection of market-riggers, fat-bellied capitalists, anti-Labor, wage-depressors, scab-promoters … [T]he heartbreaking picture of hungry and unfortunate workers ‘scabbing’ on their mates has been to them the very elixir of life. Undaunted, some Australian conservatives thought that Edward VIII, who briefly served in the British Army during the Great War, could be hailed as a quintessential mate. When the Prince of Wales toured Australia during May 1920, the Brisbane Courier gushingly described him as carrying “the everlasting, association of mateship on the battlefield” which “undoubtedly secured for him the spontaneous enthusiasm of the ‘Diggers’”. A later abdication and dalliance with Nazism ended any such illusions. Seventy-five years later, many Australians took offence at John Howard’s repetitive invocation of mateship during his prime ministership. Indeed, Howard’s devotion to the creed was mocked by Casey Bennetto’s Keating! The Musical, which featured Max Gillies as a gaudy tracksuit-clad prime minister performing The Mateship. Then again was there anything surprising about this turn of events? Over the course of more than 200 years of white settler history, shearers and soldiers, poets and politicians, working-class brickies and ruling-class bankers, and even the odd feminist (think, most recently, of Julia Gillard) have been drawn to the altar of mateship. Mateship is a seriously serious topic for many Australians, while others delight in taking the mickey out of a concept which has often been reduced to a cliche. And indeed, it would be churlish of a bloke who has just written a book on mateship to dismiss out of hand Alexander’s addition to the national corpus. Sales can be a tad sluggish between an Australia Day launch and the next festival of mateship, Anzac. So thanks, mate. |