Australia, Mark Twain observed after a short visit to these faraway shores, is a country where lies come true. No doubt this was meant as a compliment. Little did he know just how true his clever paradox was.
As everyone in the world must know, 1988 is Australia's bicentennial year, "marking two hundred years of white settlement." The qualification is now obligatory in any mention of the bicentennial, for it underlines the painful obsession of our scribes with the Australian aborigine, reflecting as it does the curious antipodean cult of the Noble Savage, by which the otherwise incomprehensible is rendered scared and the truly sacred absurd.
If nothing else, Australia's two-hundredth birthday has at least fostered the thing Australia seems to do best--rewriting history to suit current left-wing fashions.
The place that above all epitomizes this colorful, if mendacious, streak in the national psyche is Adelaide, capital of South Australia and the natural home of a form of class consciousness that somehow manages to foster a suffocating snobbery combined with an endemic variant of parlor socialism.
Progressive Causes
This curious marriage is nicely reflected in the person of John Bannon, the premier of South Australia and roughly equivalent in the federal pecking order to an American state governor. A remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old, Bannon is the very model of a common South Australian species, a well-bred yuppie puritan who sincerely believes that government is a philanthropic trust whose true purpose is the propagation of "progressive causes" and, of course, permanent security of office for socialist guardians like himself. As he once reflected, "My philosophic underpinnings are British socialism, Fabianism, the Chartists and the English radicalism of Cromwell--that is, to people trying to propose reforms fitted to the times."
Given the wacky logic of Australian political culture, it is fitting that Adelaide, this strange antipodean hybrid of Edinburgh and Berkeley, should hold a veritable orgy of high culture known as the Adelaide Festival, reputedly one of the world's top arts festivals.
This year's festival was the biggest and most cosmopolitan yet, for the simple reason that the national bicentennial has prompted the federal Labor Party government of Bob Hawke to dish out millions of dollars of public money on a huge range of allegedly festive events. Such wild generosity with the taxpayers' money not surprisingly quickly blossomed into an elaborate exercise in pork-barreling, on the assumption that circuses win votes and the most important votes are Labor votes. The state of South Australia, like most Australian states, has a Labor government and so received a disproportionate share of the birthday cake.
What the funding meant for the Adelaide Festival was that more overseas troupes, orchestras, and writers were subsidized by various government bodies to travel to "the Great Southland," all the better to flatter the local culture vultures. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti and Michael Tilson Thomas, master cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Peter Brook's epic nine-hour-long staging of Mahabharata,
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