On Gough Whitlam and social and cultural change

A lot of obvious things will be said about Gough Whitlam:  tried to do too much too quickly; big on ideas, not so good on their implementation;  let down by his cabinet colleagues who badly needed some prior experience in being part of an actual government; but he was still the Prime Minister we had to have both culturally and (to the extent that a general shake up was overdue) economically.

From the cultural point of view, his government came at a very distinctive period of change, and his personal life of a long (and as far as I know, happy and scandal free) marriage, and military service, stood somewhat at odds with the social ideas of free love, marriage as a redundant institution, and great cynicism over the value of the military per se which were swirling around the Left at the time.  That Jim Cairns appeared to be living up to the "anything goes in love" standard was a scandal to social conservatives, and I still think that a PM appearing in a Barry McKenzie movie was sort of undignified.   (As was going to that sex education movie - the name of which escapes me for the moment - with Margaret.)  He was a man who presented as both very serious, but sometimes self-deprecating, even if still in a self-congratulatory sort of way. Rather like Keating, now that I think about it.

I was just listening to someone on Radio National saying that he was a champion of the arts, but also shouldn't be seen as valuing Australian art merely because of parochial bias:  his encouragement of the National Art Gallery to acquire good international works went beyond Blue Poles, apparently.   I personally don't see much value, culturally, in the Australian movie industry he is said to have revived - the claustrophobically Left leaning, secular naval gazing nature of most of the output has always left me cold; and after 40 years, perhaps I can feel justified that most of the population now seems to agree, given the tiny following Australian movies tend to have.  Still, economically it has been of some value, as it allows decent enough foreign films to be made here.  

I'm not sure that there was ever really a "right" way for politicians to respond to the social changes underway at the time, but the Whitlam Labor government represented (I think) a particular challenge to Catholics.  The social programs which they (Catholics) could have approved of were always at risk of being overwhelmed in their minds by the apparent embrace of too rapid a change to views about sex and family.  I don't think the Church was particularly enamoured of the idea of no fault divorce, either, although no doubt many Catholic women in difficult marriages welcomed it.

It perhaps only took to the 1980's until a bit of equilibrium had returned, and some of the extreme ideas of the theorists of the swinging 60's were recognized as not really being realistic.   (If one took some ideas of the 60's seriously, we'd all be living in open or group marriages now with communal child raising, and be able to walk nude to the shops if we felt like it.  Or perhaps I've just read too much bad, later Heinlein!)  Sure, there is the matter of gay marriage which has seen another remarkable turn around in cultural attitudes, but there is the view that it is in a sense a vindication of the conservative value of marriage - even though I am not convinced.

The wild, very parochial, enthusiasm for "Australian stories" to be told in schools and cinema had also died a bit by then, I think.   This cultural aspect of the 70's was always going to be somewhat stymied by the fact that our national history actually had little in the way of great drama, compared to most other countries, anyway.  But as with the later Keating, it seems a tad ironic that a PM who is seen as the champion of all things culturally Australian was very keen on knowledge of European history and arts (or so I take it, given his later work as European tour guide that I have heard about.)  

In a way then, I think it a bit unfortunate that Gough's turn as PM came when it did.   Even if he was in power in the second half of the 70's, instead of the first half, it might have felt somewhat different.  But who knows - we don't get a choice in these things.

PS:  Can someone tell Sinclair Davidson that it is rather ridiculous of him to be incorporating an attack on the ABC for letting a guest on a TV show make a disrespectful comment on the death of Margaret Thatcher (how Tony Jones was meant to prevent it remains a mystery), when we all knew that the very same thread at his own blog would contain some of the greatest bile that we will see with respect to the death of Gough.   As indeed it already does...

Update:   this is one of my posts where I keep doing minor re-writes for a while to try to improve it, so perhaps it's a bit better by now than the last time you read it!