Australian Notes

Wednesday, 18th March 2009

When Wayne Swan addressed the students of the London School of Economics the other day, he took a page from Julia Gillard’s speech at Davos earlier this year.

When Wayne Swan addressed the students of the London School of Economics the other day, he took a page from Julia Gillard’s speech at Davos earlier this year. At the Economic Forum she described Australia’s financial prudential regulatory system as ‘the best in the world’. Swan told the London students that our financial system is ‘sound’, the regulatory framework ‘works well’, and the economy is ‘flexible and adaptable’. What neither of them will say, at home or abroad, is that all this was put in place by the Howard government. At the G20 Leaders’ summit on the world economy in April, Prime Minister Rudd will no doubt follow precedent. He will not let slip the fact that he owes his seat as a G20 leader to Peter Costello, who won it for Australia for his role in containing the Asian financial meltdown of 1997.

The contemporary veto on ethnic stereotyping by cartoonists is easy to understand. In the past, some of the cruder jokesmiths produced hurtful caricatures with few redeeming features. But there has been a price to pay, and not only in some loss of freedom of speech. In the years before the second world war, ethnic stereotypes littered the cartoon pages of our newspapers and magazines. Stingy Scots, dopey Pommies, thick Aussies, canny Jewish bookies, cheating Arabs, excitable Italian greengrocers were as standard as bowelless wowsers, ever-fertile Catholics, philandering husbands and punch-drunk boxers. The jokes were for the most part artless and were usually humorous. In a migrant society their humour helped dissolve tensions and advance mutual assimilation. This touchy art is not altogether lost. It survives in the literature of an older generation, for example, in Alan Collins’s posthumous Alva’s Boy, an ‘unsentimental memoir’ launched in Sydney last week by Barry O’Farrell, the leader of the opposition in New South Wales. It tells the story of a Sydney Jewish street urchin, bloodied but unbowed, from that neglected ethnic group, the long established, thoroughly Australianised Jews whose forebears settled here some 200 or more years ago. They produced their share of Great Men (the soldier John Monash, the governor-general Isaac Isaacs, the philosopher Samuel Alexander) but most of them got by in more humble stations including a quota of shysters, dummkopfs and Roy Renes. They were often patronised by the more sophisticated refugees from Hitler, the ‘reffos’. But their way of life is the background of Alva’s Boy. In the tradition of the old cartoonists, Collins draws his caricatures of Bondi’s Jews, Italians and Aussies with zest and stoic humour. Alva’s Boy is a tonic for these refined times.

1 | 2 Next page

More articles from: Peter Coleman | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

ros collins

April 7th, 2009 5:32am Report this comment

It was very interesting to read Peter Coleman’s comments about ‘Alva’s boy’, written by my late husband, Alan Collins. However, I’m not altogether sure that Spectator readers in the UK will fully appreciate what Alan was really saying about the ethnic mix that was Bondi in the 1930s and 1940s.

As in all his writing, Alan used humour to make confronting and often unpalatable issues easier for the reader to grasp. In ‘Alva’s boy” there is bigotry, discrimination, child abuse, family dysfunction – the whole gamut – but he has laced it all with the colourful Australian vernacular of those times. He never, ever, endorses the stereotypes – he just tells us ‘how it was’.

The ‘reffos’ (European refugees) made an indelible impression on this lonely street kid, and most particularly when he lived among them in a Jewish orphanage where he was the lone Australian-born youngster. Barry O’Farrell’s wonderfully compassionate speech at the Sydney launch had many in the audience misty-eyed. He spoke of the ‘great awakening’ of Australia and how ‘this country’s gaze expanded from a narrow focus on Britain, to a wider, more worldly view’. He referred to the newcomers described in ‘Alva’s boy’ and how ‘their first tentative, difficult steps are detailed and their reception captured’.

I would like to see a comprehensive review of ‘Alva’s boy’ in your pages and I also hope an English publisher will make an edition available for UK readers. For those interested in reading Barry O’Farrell’s speech in full, or knowing more about Alan Collins and his work, please go to the website at http://www.alancollins.com.au

Post comment