Psychomanagement. Robert Spillane
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those concerned with sport.
The national obsession with sport carries with it an affirmation of human courage and endurance where physical achievement is the standard by which individuals are assessed. The obsession with sport, however, seems to contradict Australia’s notorious ‘levelling tendency’: a mistrust of excellence and suspicion of celebrities. As everybody knows, Australians have a decidedly ambivalent, if not negative, attitude toward individual eminence and distinction, with the exception of sport. Australians often qualify their comments about leadership with, ‘except in sport’, although that expression is generally further qualified with ‘so long as they are good blokes’: unpretentious, modest, laconic in victory. They should not appear ‘uppity’, arrogant or self-assertive and they should not indulge in American-style self-glorification.
A major weakness of folk history is that commentators abstract popular values from the local literature and apply them to the general population. Are our profound and lovable values – egalitarianism, mateship, tolerance, friendliness, stoicism and sardonic humour – characteristic of suburban Australians?
In Intruders in the Bush, John Carroll argues that there have been three main influences on Australian culture: upper-middle class Victorian values and institutions; working class (especially Irish) egalitarianism; and twentieth-century consumerism. Middle-class Australians settled themselves into British-style suburbs dominated by British-style houses and sent their children to British-style schools where they played cricket and rugby. However, in the late nineteenth century, working-class Irish-Australians staged a cultural take-over of English values. At its heart was an egalitarian ethos with an accompanying intolerance of respectability and manners, hostility to formal authority, a talent for improvisation but also for bureaucracy, and a romantic attitude toward male comradeship.
Carroll argued that the only thing that is typically Australian about the egalitarian-mateship phenomenon is that it is more widespread than in other Western countries. This ethic has been prominent in Australia because of the peculiar nature and strength of the working-class experience, and the fact that the upper-middle class, including senior managers as a class, has not been able to enshrine its values. This failure was due not to lack of strength but to lack of confidence. The values and manners of this class have remained the preserve of a small minority.
Why did the middle class fail to consolidate its culture? Carroll’s thesis is that the formation of Australian society coincided with a general development in the West whereby the middle class came progressively under the influence of an egalitarian bad conscience. He argued that democracies suppress excellence and individuality and encourage disdain for hierarchy, which makes it inevitable that central governments increase their power. But above all, the egalitarian spirit of democracies legitimates the envy of difference and of superiority. So the targets of envy establish disarming strategies by disguising whatever is likely to be coveted. This fear of envy is a contributing factor to the bad conscience of the modern middle class. The pressure to maintain disarming strategies may result in a questioning of the very values once so vigorously defended. The Puritan virtues of hard work, frugal living and responsibility for community require committed belief and action. Living in a country lacking in tradition and born of cultural conflict, Australians do not believe deeply enough, or in sufficient numbers, in these values. Where the authority of an old culture collapses there is a strong tendency for people to identify with the victims. This is what happened in Australia and accounts for its citizens’ empathy with underdogs, the lower classes, the stressed, the deviant and criminal. Carroll noted that this middle-class bad conscience is not new to post-1950 Australia since it was well established in the myth-makers of the 1890s who were significantly urban middle class.
Over the past thirty-five years, Australian characteristics have been changed by feminism, multiculturalism and postmodernism. The traditional ‘true blue’ stereotype is acknowledged by a small minority and less than fifteen percent of Australians identify with the man on the land. The majority do not identify with this easy-going, down-toearth, masculine, anti-intellectual Australian. By contrast, many see themselves as sophisticated, ambitious, hardworking, generous, creative, egalitarian, loyal and tolerant. As a consequence of the increasing feminisation of life in Australia, males have become more willing to express their feelings. One has only to watch popular television programs to see men crying when confronted with a newly improved backyard. However, Australians have also become passive, soft, simplistic, materialistic and obese. They demand that their politicians and bureaucrats work for them, but are cynical about their ability to do so.
If Australians rely so heavily on bureaucracy one might expect them to value leadership. However, their cynical attitude to politicians, bureaucrats and managers militates against leadership, at least from them. So Australians live an exasperating paradox: paradoxical because they depend on politicians, bureaucrats and managers but don’t trust them; exasperating because they pursue a goal that is doomed to failure. Believing that Australian democracy could, as Henry Lawson said, ‘democratise the world’, they are exasperated by the failure of government and business to eliminate hierarchies of power, corruption and inefficiencies. Their exasperation is expressed through strident demands for politicians and managers to work more effectively for the people, even though they know they will not. The result is a constant discrediting of politicians, public servants and managers.
There have been no leaders in the country’s history who have been able to seduce the Australian people for long, or at all. Australians have managed to combine a conditional egalitarianism with a strong sense of their independence and this has been achieved by a strong belief in universalism in law and an associated sense of fair play and support for the underdog. These assertions need to be qualified somewhat, but for now the point can be made that Australians are wary of those in positions of power. This is the most positive aspect of the Australian Tall-Poppy Syndrome, since it has prevented the emergence of leaders, or at least ensured that their status is temporary.
The Tall-Poppy phenomenon is alive and well in Australia in the twenty-first century. For her book Local Heroes, Ann-Maree Moodie interviewed thirty-seven influential men and women – entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, artists, architects, writers, business executives, journalists and athletes. All but three agreed that the Tall-Poppy Syndrome exists in Australia.
No one has captured the Australian character better than Les Murray.9 Combining a reference to the vast open spaces and the local laconic style, Murray sees sprawl as the quality of the farmer who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it tried to retrieve the car to repair its image. Sprawl cannot be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn with mink and a nose ring. That’s Society or Style. Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen. Sprawl is an image of Australia and would that it were more so. Reprimanded and dismissed, it listens with a grin and a boot up on the rail of possibility. It may have to leave the earth. But it scratches the other cheek and thinks it unlikely.
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Laconic: Management style that makes inarticulateness a virtue.
Readers may well object that this romantic indulgence in literature is anachronistic and irrelevant to the current concerns of Australians, especially those in the business of management. After all, these philosophical speculations were products of the romantic fantasies of urban intellectuals, not a few of whom were overly addicted to alcohol. Most Australians know little of the bush and care not a wink about its existential implications. They are suburbanites who rarely venture more than a hundred kilometres from the security of home base, except for tropical holidays. Is it not therefore fanciful and misleading to burden Australians with tensions and agonies that simply do not apply to most of them? A suburban existence dominated by the cretinising effects of the mass and social media protects individuals from existential angst to such an extent that Australians can happily claim that ‘we are all individuals’. Of course, it is possible, and some think likely, that the characteristic behaviour of Australians is a smokescreen for their inability to make the dynamic adjustments of which Americans are proud. The laconic Australian way is, on this view, little more than a pathetic