The Chatterers of Australia

The now-silent voice of Auberon Waugh was once a trumpet whose clear note helped to justify even journalism. His delight was to puncture the poseurs, to skewer the sententious, to flay the phonies, and generally to be the hammer of all hypocrites.

Waugh never attained the crushing finality of Doctor Johnson in exposing those gaps which so often separate fine sentiments from actual behaviour. (Who ever did? This is Johnson on the rebellious American colonists: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”)

Nevertheless, among contemporary commentators, Auberon Waugh’s biting prose was a strong sea-wall against the tide of sludge from political correctness; many of his Spectator articles still make amusing and salutary reading. He was, I imagine, not an easy man, nor a happy one. He truly loved and admired his famous father Evelyn, who effortlessly combined the roles of literary genius and horrible human being; his particular sadistic pleasure was to put down and reject his affectionate son.

Auberon’s columns made many a swingeing attack upon those for whom he invented the descriptive term “the chattering classes”. It will be his literary memorial that this phrase has now achieved formal and certificated entry into the English language: The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (2005) defines it thus: “educated people considered as a social group prone to expressing liberal opinions”. The Dictionary warns that the general sense is “derogatory”. I dare to think that grumpy Auberon Waugh would be pleased.

“Chattering classes” fails in precision as a defining demographic. Alternative phrases are many: chardonnay set, champagne socialists, doctors’ wives, right-thinking people, bien pensants, inner-city greens, harpies from the hairdressers, the book group, the tennis club ladies. And so on. None of these is precisely helpful, nor are they notably fair. Some of the most admirable and straight-shooting citizens I know happen to be doctors’ wives. And, after all, what’s wrong with a glass of chardonnay if (like Neville Wran) you happen to fancy that sort of thing?

For the convenience and brevity especially of journalists, perhaps we do need a telling phrase which stresses the moral falsity of the “chatterers”: their high-toned opinions and their failure to behave accordingly. Next time I manage to catch him in an idle and unguarded moment, I might suggest to Quadrant’s editor that he conduct a competition among his readers for ideas for the snappy, shorthand name we think we need. Who knows? Some Australian wordsmith might eventually find himself embalmed in the Oxford Dictionary alongside Auberon Waugh.

And yet, and yet … perhaps such a quest is needless. The poet-scholar A.E. Housman, for example, managed pretty well without a specific when, in the 1930s, he wrote to his sister stating his pleasure that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had won the general election: “Not that I set the slightest store by politics, but it will annoy the sort of person whom I do not like.” Can we seriously doubt that Housman had in mind those who would have been today’s chatterers?

The gulf between what chatterers say and what they do confronts our eyes daily. The young mums down their cappuccinos as they deplore the growing size of our “carbon footprint”, fumble for their car keys, and hop into Toorak tractors as formidable as Abrams main battle tanks. These gargantuan consumers of steel, rubber and petroleum are needed to cope with the daily heavy haulage of ferrying Felicity and Jeremy (with, of course, their lunch boxes) to school. It is needless to provide further examples.

The two-facedness of the educated liberal Left began to trouble me back in the late 1950s. During my Arts course as a returned serviceman at Melbourne University (1946 to 1948) I had been actively involved in the affairs of its highly thriving Labour Club. Indeed I served as secretary and later as president. From the dizzy height of this office I was adroitly “rolled” by the Communist (Stalinist) fraction. They had detected in me “right-wing deviationism”. A document which I saw years later called me a “potentially dangerous wrecker”.

One of the fundamental tenets of the socialism which we said we sought was a society of classless equality. (You could tell this from the numberless times each day we addressed each other as “Comrade”—even more frequently than Gough Whitlam today.) Such an egalitarian objective was not likely to be assisted by a system of secondary school education under which well-to-do adolescents attended private colleges, and the battlers went to state high schools. But that was what we had, and what we still have sixty years later. I don’t recall that such an outstanding anomaly ever rose very high for policy discussion on the Melbourne University Labour Club’s agenda.

In the two postwar decades, numberless former Labour Club members married, choosing in many cases partners who were also ex-Labour Club. The 1960s saw their burgeoning broods reaching school age. I had taken it for granted that their normal choices of schools would be from within the state system. Far, far from it. I doubt whether there are any independent statistics to guide us here, but from my clear recollection of my own close contemporaries, only two couples adhered to the state system. One were the Ovendens—scions of those salt-of-the-earth “old-timers” of the remarkable Victorian Socialist Party. The other couple were the Ryans. I expect there were other exceptions I have forgotten, but the general picture I have described is undoubtedly true.

The most spectacular example (as in so many other things) of this equivocal educational philosophy was Manning Clark. Both in his published work and his conversation he spoke contemptuously of his own education at Melbourne Grammar. Doubtless, as an Anglican clergyman’s son, he was receiving this more or less for nothing. The experience for him, he says, was a time of disappointment and disgust. But he sent his sons to Melbourne Grammar when the time came.

This personal abandonment of public education by the intellectual Left was a much more serious matter than a mere quirk of the times. Many of my old Labour Club mates now so busily enrolling their offspring in expensive private schools were extremely bright and able people, achievers, and most decent citizens. Their future careers confirmed the promise of their university days: political leaders; heads of government departments both federal and state; high flyers in the law and in other professions; distinguished academics; editors of great daily newspapers. I could cite specific names to fit every category. They were a true elite, however much the pale ghosts of egalitarian radicalism might have shuddered at the word.

This loss of the personal participation of the brightest and best was one of the early blows which turned public education into a decadent ideological cripple, nowadays chained in bondage to the disgusting teachers’ unions which ought to be its servants. If the children of the intellectual Left had remained in the system, even simple parental inspection of their homework would have checked the growth of the outrageous pedagogical sloppiness we suffer today.

Not that the intellectual wing of the Left held any monopoly of hypocrisy. Once, while an office-bearer in the Labour Club, I was invited to a “do” of union officials held at the Melbourne Trades Hall in Carlton. The air was thick with “Comrade”, and “Up the Revolution”, and “F*** the Arbitration Court”. Exuberance took over. The rousing finale to the night was the beery singing of “The Red Flag”, with a fortissimo rendition of the two spoof last lines:

The working class can kiss my arse;

I’ve got the foreman’s job at last!

That slight pattering noise I heard was of scales falling from my eyes.