DAVID MARR My Country: Stories, essays and speeches. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

In this collection, David Marr presents 50 years of his thinking and writing about Australia.

David Marr is one of Australia’s leading journalists, and he has been commenting on things Australian for over fifty years. In his preface he says, ‘Curiosity, mischief and exasperation made me a journalist’:

Wanting to understand my country came, right from the start, with wanting it to change … My country is the subject that interests me most, and I have spent my career trying to untangle its mysteries.

In this volume he reproduces 97 pieces ‘written over fifty years that I hope make sense of the place’. The pieces range in length from a couple of pages, mainly those written in the Sydney Morning Herald, to a 23-pager on Patrick White, whose biography he published in 1991.  He also provides a summary of his 2023 book Killing For Country and its chilling account of his great-great-grandfather and his brother hunting down and killing Indigenous Australians as officers of the Native Police during the nineteenth century.

Marr covers a wide range of topics, including personal stories of his education and family, his coming to terms with being gay and his advocacy for the gay community. He has a particularly moving chapter on the death of his parents. Material is provided on leading politicians, their respective policies and idiosyncrasies. He is particularly critical of the stance of the Howard and Abbott governments on Aboriginal recognition and rights, and their approach to the plight of refugees. He also includes a lengthy examination of Sir John Gorton (prime minister from 1968 to 1971), and briefer examinations of aspects of the prime ministerships of Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. A continuing theme within My Country is Australia’s appalling treatment of Indigenous Australians and refugees.

On the Labor side he includes a number of pieces he had written associated with the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. One of these includes an insightful piece on Whitlam’s relationship with Governor General John Kerr. He provides a moving description of events associated with the death of Prime Minister Ben Chifley on the same night a ball was held in Canberra to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Australia’s Parliament. There is also material on Bob Carr becoming the longest-serving premier of New South Wales, and brief sketches of Kim Beazley, Bill Shorten, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. There are occasional references to Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. What is surprising, is that Marr has not provided any commentary on the Hawke-Keating years and the quickening embrace by Labor of neo-liberalism.

Beside his excursions into politics, Marr’s major focus is on social and cultural issues. He discusses writing and the arts more broadly, censorship, the continuing power of religious leaders in stifling social reform, and many causes célèbres that have occurred over the years. The latter include hoohaas over arts exhibitions, the cartoonist Patrick Cook making fun of the architecture of Harry Seidler, and battles between architects and bureaucrats over the building of memorials to commemorate the deaths of Australian soldiers during wars.

Some of Marr’s best pieces are where he examines the role of a particular person or institution that has made a significant contribution to Australia. He pays homage to Stanley Hawes, who, as head of the Commonwealth Film Unit, enhanced filmmaking in Australia. Two of the best pieces in My Country are about two of Sydney’s major institutions. The first concerns the city itself, a piece Marr wrote to celebrate the 50,000th edition of the Sydney Morning Herald in December 1997. In it he captures the essential contradictory nature of Sydney:

By small acts of courage, NSW governments sometimes face the puritans and clip a few mad provisions out of the Crimes Act, but it’s slow going. The touted sophistication of the town in the last few decades was still mediated by the corruption needed to allow dance clubs, gambling, brothels, booze out of hours and sex in arrangements forbidden by the Bible. The price of keeping puritan Sydney happy has been high: turning – who knows how many? – police, magistrates, judges and politicians into crooks.

The second is a speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Mitchell Library, which has been so important in preserving the history of the nation and being a haven for writers and scholars.

Marr has a keen eye for the absurd, especially when he stumbles across pomposity,  lampooning the way politicians speak, and their ability to say nothing in such a boring way. And he notes the fawning of the royal press and local dignitaries during the visit of Charles and Diana to Australia in 1983:

Royalty is invited to this country by Canberra, but once here they are delivered up into the hands of local government, to premiers, mayors and MPs. These men have marginal seats to protect, wives to impress and debts to repay. Royalty does the lot. The process is, for the most part, disguised as inspections. A hospital is inspected royally to thank the nurses for being paid so little.

Marr maintains that the fundamental contest in Australian political life is between panic and calm. This is about the willingness of leaders to beat the drum to intensify fear.

Skilled panic merchants find ways of suggesting, however vaguely, that the survival of the nation is at stake – not always the integrity of its territories but its heart, its health, its spirit, its way of life. The argument always is that desperate times require tough laws and strong leadership. Panic is a rallying cry for power.

In another piece he writes:

… the key to power in this country is engaging the support of the most conservative, most anxious chunk of the electorate. Gathering these votes calls for great political skill because the big parties have no intention of ditching the economic policies that are actually producing the pain out there. Free-market economics are sacrosanct. So instead, the major parties are appealing to those unhappy electors’ prejudices on blacks, Asians, drugs, violence and their general fear that the world is drifting out of control.

Marr is a supreme wordsmith. He knows how to tease out an issue and provide an understanding of what lies behind the behaviour of individuals. Aside from his neglect of the Hawke and Keating years, My Country helps to remind us of a wide range of major figures who have strutted their stuff across the Australian landscape over the last fifty years, and of things we got right, and things we got wrong.

David Marr My Country: Stories, essays and speeches Black Inc. 2024 PB 592pp $39.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

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Tags: Australian culture, Australian history, Australian politics, Australian writers, David | Marr, essays, Patrick White