Greg Melleuish, and the rise of the green wowser proves that eating people is wrong ...

(Above: coming at ya, dinkum drinking imperfect diggers, let's all get on the piss, Greg Melleuish is shouting).

It's seems an eternity since we've seen Greg Melleuish grace the opinion pages of The Australian, and after reading The rise of the Green wowser, here's hoping that that the rapture is delayed for a further eternity.

The upside? Well as associate professor in the school of history and politics at the University of Wolllongong, Melleuish demonstrates in a practical way to his students, the benefits of sweeping generalisations and unsubstantiated remarks; the way unseemly and untimely facts can be swept under the rug; and the way a thesis can be developed without any supporting documentation whatsoever.

First the grand over view:

When we survey some of the more controversial incidents of recent times, from the attempts to place restrictions on poker machine players to the suspension of live cattle exports to Indonesia, there is a connecting thread that almost everyone has missed. This is the return of the wowser.

Wowsers (We Only Want Social Evils Remedied) are traditionally as Australian as meat pies and Holden cars.

Now there's a tidy conflation of trends and incidents under one hackneyed, cliched label, as traditional an Australian activity as American owned General Motors, producers of Holden cars.

Of course if you flip Melleuish's thoughts, you might think he's arguing for completely unregulated live cattle and sheep and goat exports - heck let's just get them out of country - and for complete indulgence in poker machines without any thought to the social wreckage left behind. After all, that'd be the appropriate anti-wowser libertarian stance, wouldn't it?

But of course when engaged in a rant, a considered position is always to be avoided, in preference for those sweeping generalisations we love so well.

After co-joining the ugly side of the live cattle trade with poker machine addiction, where next might we go? How about linking them to the six o'cock swill and the shutting of shops on Sundays (bugger it, that shop shutting's still a lingering tradition in smaller rural communities. Damn those agrarian socialist small traders and their wowser ways, expecting to enjoy a Sunday free of work, how wowserish can you get).

They (wowsers) were responsible for Australian institutions such as the six o'clock closing and the shutting of shops on Sundays.

One would have thought that they had receded into the annals of history as Australians became more liberal on these sorts of issues. Shopping is now very much a Sunday experience and Australians are used to the idea of civilised drinking.

Never mind the inner city elite stuff about Sunday shopping, how about the line that Australians are used to the idea of civilised drinking?

It's at this point you realise Melleuish must live a very sheltered life, and never actually got out in the streets to enjoy a decent Australian night of uncivilised drinking, or he's simply being perverse for the sake of perversity. The binge drinking encouraged by the six o'clock swill is still very much a part of the Australian herd mentality, and if you try to stay apart from the crowd, the standard slur is that you're a wowser, a poofter, or a nerd (Binge Drinking Part of Australia's Culture).

Of course the people who deliver these slurs tend to end up as lushes, or alcoholics, or to lose more than a few brain cells, but hey, that's the way to become a folk hero doing your anti-wowser thing in Melleuish's eyes. Especially now, it seems that, wowsers have stopped being religious and started being secular.

And you know where we're heading now, don't you? Yep, it's another tirade about the Greens.

Wowsers want to improve people and make them better. To do so they have to prevent them from engaging in activities that they find immoral: be it gambling, eating meat, drinking alcohol, smoking or consuming junk food.

My father used to say that for such people if you were enjoying yourself there must be sin involved.

Uh huh. My father used to say that about smoking, but that's before he got emphysema, which made walking, talking and uttering flip generalisations a lot harder. Then he didn't talk so much about morality, he talked about the stupidity of youth, and the extreme difficulty of breaking his addiction to nicotine.

Not to worry. Let's take a contrarian view in support of Melleuish:

Anti-wowsers want people to ruin their lives and to fuck up everything around them. To do so they have to convince others to indulge in activities they find moral, and proper and useful: be it addictive gambling, pissing the week's salary away in an afternoon, eating meat to Colonel Blimp excess - give me another of those 32 ounce steaks - drinking alcohol until you're pissed as a parrot, blind drunk, spewing and incapable of recognising how you got there, as if life was just one long Hangover movie, smoking to the point where lung, throat or other cancers, or other medical conditions can be developed to a life-threatening point, or consuming junk food until you become a total fat Colonel Blimp burden on your family and the medical system.

Uh huh. You see, if you suggest that people might actually live in moderation, even be a little abstemious now and then, there's only one answer: what are ya? Some kind of wowser?

Now there's a fine vision, and a way forward for Orstralia and Orstralians. And sssh, remember to take a hearty dose of paranoia along with you:

I have no doubt that behind the ruckus about live meat exports there is a vegetarian agenda, based on the idea that vegetarians are better people than meat eaters.

Lordy, or could it simply be that some people were appalled by the images and wanted better treatment of cattle before they get stunned, degutted, treated and eaten. Why it seems even devout meat eaters thought this way ... the lickspittle turncoats.

If we limit gambling we can make people better. And, as we all know, it is a fact universally acknowledged that there is not a bogan out there who could not do with some improvement.

Actually, it' a fact universally acknowledged that some academics are inclined to be drop kicks, and their rhetorical devices could do with some improvement, especially when borrowing form Jane Austen in support of boganism, but I'm sure when in the classroom Dr. Melleuish encourages boganism and bogan arguments as a way to improve the intellectual ferment and debate at the University of Wollongong (we all know that Eating People is Wrong).

Now let's get really far-fetched. Let's drag in eugenics:

In days gone by, the ideals of wowserdom were often linked with those of eugenics. People could be improved if only their habits and lifestyle were changed; if only they lived a more rational way of life.

Eugenics has often been misunderstood. For one thing it was embraced in countries such as Australia by people who considered themselves to be progressive, who we would describe as being on the left. For another it was as much about changing the environment as it was about selective breeding. It was about making better people.

Uh huh. Of course if you actually look at eugenics in Australia, you'll find it was embraced by all kinds of odd bods and eccentrics, but most particularly by conservatives in relation to Aboriginal folk, and their being bred out of history over the generations - a reality now generally denied by conservatives.

And of course it was conservatives who deemed it necessary that schoolchildren participate in mass fitness events (oh what aspirational Nazis we were), and enjoined parents to participate in mothercraft methods and courses and programs designed to lift the health of young ones.

It was not only Nazi Germany that engaged in activities such as sterilising the unfit. Many countries, including democracies, sought to improve their populations in this way.

Uh huh. Many democracies run by conservatives ... come on down, benign improver of the middle class, Robert Gordon Menzies, so we can salute the flag, and stand for the Queen in cinemahs ...

It takes a remarkably myopic view of eugenics and history to attempt to pin it on the left and 'progressives', but now Melleuish takes a turn towards the surreal:

It was not politics so much as religion that determined whether a government would seek to go down this road. Protestants generally did, Catholics did not. Fortunately, Australia had a significant Catholic minority.

Catholics weren't inclined to be wowsers? Oh I do wish that someone had told my grandmother, the parish priests, and the Dominican nuns who made our lives a hell for fear a sin or even stepping on a crack would see us doomed to sweat for all eternity ...

But then in the way of all generalisers, no doubt Melleuish is in love with what we might call the Italian Boccaccio/Irish Joycean Behan side of the church, as opposed to the current intolerant wowserish Pellists who rule the roost, and blather on about morality at the drop of a hat ...

Still the notion that the likes of Archbishop Mannix, at one time the dominant personality in the church, wasn't a wowser will keep me sustained with cheerful cackling in my old age:

Mannix introduced the Manual of Etiquette and Good Manners, and improved salaries and domestic welfare. Books on the Index were removed from the library, Maynooth was screened for tinges of 'modernism' and speculation in the Irish Theological Quarterly discouraged. Mannix contemptuously repelled student protests but was esteemed for his holiness and personal care of the sick; 90 per cent of students emerged teetotallers. (much more about Mannix in Ireland and Australia in the excellent ADB entry on him here, and for more on that Sydney variant, the deviant socialist feminist wowserish conservative Cardinal Moran, go to the ADB here).

But back to those despicable moralists, and about now it's surely time for a breach of Godwin's Law:

In a slightly different vein it is worth observing that Hitler and his fellow Nazis were very concerned about cruelty to animals and introduced legislation that made Germany a world leader in this area. They restricted their cruelty only to those people whom they regarded as inferior, all in the name of improving the human race.

Wowsers and eugenicists generally go together as they see the key to a better world lying in the creation of better human beings. Eradicate evils and that will be possible.

Uh huh. And there you have it. Suddenly wowsers are Nazis, with the same aspirations and aims as the Nazis. QED (quest for the eternally dumb analogy).

Still you have to hand it to Melleuish. He refrained from mentioning that Hitler was a teetotaler, and anti-smoking, and worst of all a dog lover, as this would have conclusively proven that being a dog lover is just one step short of being responsible for the Holocaust.

And now it's time for the coup de grace, when all these themes are brought together to demonise the poor old hapless Greens and their cardigan-wearing ways:

The idea that it is the task of the government to improve the people who are entrusted to their care is very dangerous. Are people who do not eat meat or play the poker machines really better than those who do? Do we want the state to attempt to create a utopia of good people who have had their bad bits excised?

No, no, no. Of course we want criminality to flourish, we want crime on the streets, we want people ruining their lives, the last thing we want is some government inspired socialist utopia, we want the really bad bits, we want Olivia Newton John falling for scientologist John Travolta, we want teen pregnancies, we want fornicating from the rooftops, we want cats with piles, we want ...

Yes, bring it all on, we want liberal heaven. Sex and drugs and rock 'n roll. We'll get that pie in the sky by and by ...

It is not surprising that wowserism should come to prominence again in tandem with the growing strength of the Greens. The Greens are the latest manifestation of a sort of moralistic puritanism that has been part of Australia since the First Fleet. Australians must change their evil ways. The Greens see themselves as the enforcers who will achieve that change, thereby leading the country into the sustainable utopia.

In such a utopia the status of animals would rise and that of humans fall. It is no longer necessary to sterilise the unfit. With the advance of medicine they can be detected and disposed of while still in the womb.

Uh huh. We've now reached the far outer limits of paranoia, whereby it seems that the Greens will introduce an apocalyptic breeding program, wiping out all the weak-minded and weak bodied.

While sustainability is linked to utopianism, as opposed to say nine billion people trying to eke out a living in 2050 ...

But how have we reached here? This outermost limit? Well when you look back Melleuish started off with this notion:

The only problem is that maybe ordinary Australians do not want to be improved in this way. As in the past, they enjoy their gambling, their steaks and their booze. They simply want to enjoy life.

Uh huh. They want to go broke, get fat and get pissed as a parrot. That's called enjoying life ... as opposed to sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, or perhaps techno dance raves, which is called being young and irresponsible.

Wowsers are part of the Australian tradition but they have always been in the minority.

Their grand plans for the people of this country have always run up against the reality that most people are happy to be less than perfect. On that rock the Greens will ultimately founder.

Yep, indeed. It's a splendid vision, and on that rock, the religious and the conservative will ultimately founder as they blather on about how people need to lead moral uplifting lives and do good works for the benefit of Australia and their fellow citizens.

Oh sorry, I mis-read that, it's the Greens who will founder, and not Tony Abbott and George Pell and the Jensenist nepotics.

Thank god I'm happy to be a less than perfect student, but my sympathies do go out to the students of the University of Wollongong forced to confront this garbled mangling of history, simply so Melleuish can advise the world he doesn't like the Greens ...

And so back to Malcolm Bradbury and a quote:

The children's novelist now leaned over. "Do you read much children's literature, Professor?" he asked. "I don't," said Treece. "I think you're ignoring, if you don't mind my saying so, a very fruitful field for study," said the novelist. "I'm sure you're right," said Treece, "but the trouble with me is that I have a sophisticated mind. Was it Chesterton who said he didn't like the Greens because they smelled of bread and butter. I dislike them because they aren't grown up".

Sorry Malcolm. As an apology, here's a link to an unpublished afterword, which - since much of Melleuish has been about the joys of meat eating, and who are we to argue about that, since our usual argument is whether ham is better than bacon (The greatest challenge of our time? Deciding between ham and bacon, of course) - should at least establish a 'new rule' for Melleuish.

Eating people, or distorting history, for purposes of silly argumentation, remains definitively wrong:

I meant Stuart Treece to represent both the virtues and absurdities of liberalism in a changing age; but the age is still itself liberal enough to let him exist. The university is still an even-handed, fair-minded institution, believing in disinterested learning and critical knowledge, rather than line management and politically correct ideas. The Sixties turmoils of confrontation and commitment have not yet reached it, and certainly not the dulled materialism and anti-intellectualism of the Eighties. Treece doesn't yet know about the global village, or structuralism, or ethnic pluralism of the modern kind, or the postmodern, theme park Euro-world. The book is a sympathetic comedy (a tragi-comedy, perhaps), a liberal comedy allowing everyone their own sort of life and their own sort of fate, a comedy about the gap between realities and ideal expectations, half-heroic deeds and their dull and ordinary consequences. Indeed it is warm comedy, of a kind that in our harder, harsher and less moral world it is ever more difficult to write. The novels I have written since have in various ways follows the changes in a world that, for me as a writer, starts here. The Swinging Sixties, the Sagging Seventies, the Economic Eighties, and the Nervous Nineties have all had their turn. My style has changed, my liberalism altered. But most writers value their first novels, and find them central to what they did since. Yes, even in the streetwise Nineties, eating people is, still, wrong.

Complexity? Contradictory imperfect characters? Perhaps in a novel, but certainly not in Melleuish's simple minded analysis of the world ...

(Below: that wild eyed enthusiastic supporter of drinking, smoking and fornicating, Irish Catholic Archbishop Mannix, found here, and in statue form outside St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne).


(Below: sorry, the one on the left is actually Rod Quantock, here).