The English language is our native language and English literature is our heritage

David Flint, Convenor for Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, wrote a piece on the importance of Shakespeare's body of work for Australia's cultural health and development. He was reflecting on an article (William Shakespeare: A king of infinite-space) in the UK's Telegraph by Anthony Seldon who laments the downgrading of Shakespeare in the British school curriculum.

Practically all that Seldon says on the importance of Shakespeare for British culture applies to Australia. But there is nothing in Seldon's article that gives any hint of his understanding that English is the native language of Australians and that Shakespeare's works, representing the English language's highest achievement, are just as important for Australia's cultural development. The downgrading of Shakespeare in the educational curriculum is a reflection of the social and political movements that are inimical to our common British heritage and ancestry. Indeed, the enmity is not passive and Seldon is right to raise the alarm over the neglect of Shakespeare.

It is the issue of common heritage and ancestry that drew my attention to Seldon's article and Professor Flint's response to it. I have long considered myself an 'anglophile', though never for one moment being blind to the differences between being an Australian and being an Englishman. The differences are important and, as has only occurred to me in recent years, an ontological signification. Being Australian is not the same as being English. The ontological difference is of the same nature as that between being English and being Scottish, or being English and being Irish, or being English and being Welsh.

I realised late that it was inaccurate to call myself an 'anglophile'. After all, anybody can be an anglophile. Even a Frenchman can be an anglophile. It is something else entirely to be a member of a social and political group - a people or a nation - that has direct continuity with its British ancestry. An Australian, in an abstract sense, is an autonomous ontological modification of being British - though I might be guilty of a tautology in that statement. I use the word 'autonomous' for the sake of that feverish group of Australians who are agitating to turn Australia into a 'republic'.

My reflection on what it means to be an Australian deepened in recent years for two reasons. First, I took up from where my parents' left off in their researching of the family tree and, second, I began preparation for a childhood memoir which will be more about the Fifties than about me. The intellectual background, and an important motivation, was my study of Edmund Burke's thought, particularly on custom, tradition, and what it means to be a 'people'. Burke (ironically) was an Irishman, a member of the English Church, and suspected of being a (treacherous) closet Catholic. I remark here that there has been no other writer of English, except perhaps for Evelyn Waugh, with whom I have felt such an affinity.

Research for my memoir covered a number of sociological commentaries on Australia in the 1950s, some of which were shamelessly feminist/Marxist in their analysis, as if feminist/Marxist categories were the only legitimate intellectual tools for the task. Despite the political bias in some commentaries, my own memories of the 1950s were either reinforced or expanded. Crucially I had a clearer picture of the distinct movement in the early 1950s away from British ways of seeing and doing things to American ways. On balance this has not been culturally beneficial. Understanding the American influence is necessary for repairing Australian culture.

With regard to history, I am embarrassed to confess that my reading of early Australian history showed how deficient my understanding was of the forces and influences at work in the colony. Of course, I knew that in that small fleet under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, British law and political structures were transferred to a continent on the other of the world. We now call that continent and political incorporation Australia. Let me make the point again: properly understood the Australian nation did not exist before 1788. It came into existence when Captain Phillip was rowed ashore and the Union Jack planted in the soil of Port Jackson.

What I did not understand was the crucial role of the convict population. I have written about this in a previous comment. In brief, the convict system was not an unrelentingly brutal system. Most convicts, especially under the enlightened governorship of Lachlan Macquarie, were given the chance to remake their lives. They were given another go. In the previous comment I gave the example of my convict great-great-grandfather Michael Jones who came from Manchester, was convicted at the age of 16 years for 'street robbery' and transported to the colony in 1827 to serve 7 years.

It is interesting to read on his Certificate of Freedom that he was 5 feet four inches, pale complexion, light brown hair, and hazel eyes. Scar under the chin, small scar betwixt the eyebrows, several small scars top of the forehead, mark of a burn outside the left arm. It is safe to say that violence had not been absent from Michael Jones's life. His death certificate states that he died an innkeeper in Muswellbrook, one of the bigger colonial towns north-west of Sydney, a far cry from the bruising violence of Manchester's back streets.

Michael Jones did not join some radical political organisation that had as its task the overthrow of the wicked political systems that oppressed him. In remaking his life, he married a free woman, Elizabeth Harris from Donhead St Mary in Wiltshire, and took up the cultural and social background of the Lancashire environment he was born into. What measure of success he actually enjoyed I do not know at this stage, but he could be satisfied that his descendants in my line (his daughter married my great-grandfather James Wilson) are middle-class, well-educated and materially well-off. He surely could not have imagined that a great-grandson x 6 would now be working in London with a cutting edge IT company .

It was a similar story with all my ancestors from the British Isles. The sixteen ancestors at the level of great-great-grandparents (including five convicts) numbered 3 from Ireland, 1 from Scotland, and 12 from England. They came from Monaghan, Dublin and Donegal in Ireland, Aberdeenshire in Scotland, and Wiltshire, Middlesex, Essex, Lancashire and Huntingdonshire in England. Uncovering this somewhat unremarkable information amounted to a powerful awakening for me. It shed light and continues to shed light on every aspect of me and my family - and the meaning of our Australianness. An essential part of my Australianness is the British ancestry. It is why I speak of being Australian as an ontological modification of being British.

I cannot look now at news from Britain or watch a British television program without relating it to the ancestors who came from around the British Isles, particularly from England, and to my everyday life and the life of my parents and grandparents as I knew it. I feel sure that my story would be the same as that of a majority of Australians, some of whom are in a fascinating denial about it.

Take for example the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). We all know that its journalistic staff - the people who decide the broadcast content - are made up of the full spectrum of lefties. The Left in Australia will seize any opportunity to sling off at Britain's class society, urging us to come out from under the British overlordship and stand up as an independent autonomous people. This is all about the 'republic', the rhetoric of which has to be the most childish heard in Australian political discourse, and which is to be heard frequently on the ABC.

On the other hand, the ABC has a fantastic range of eagerly viewed BBC and Granada programs, far superior to most of the brain-pulping rubbish that comes from America, a state of affairs that must cause painful embarrassment to many Americans. A huge dose of reinforcing British culture is received by anyone tuned in to the ABC. Their political journalists are forever talking chummily via satellite with their British counterparts, seeking any excuse to hop on the plane to get over there quick smart. Indeed, the first thing a leftie does following the dawn of his political consciousness is to hightail it over to Britain to join all the other Australian lefties there. Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Geoffrey Robertson are a representative bunch. One has to smile at republican Robertson with his toffy class-ridden British accent. (See my comment about 'Pancho' Robertson and his grandiose undertaking to bring the Pope before the International Criminal Court).

I will no longer labour the point, which must be clear by now. A mature Australia will acknowledge its British ancestry and its modified Britishness. It will get over the childishness of the republican movement and not only acknowledge the cultural links but enhance them. In this politically fast changing world the recognition of the substantial familial bonds, including that of our shared language, will be of benefit to both nations.

See this comment for more about the 'republic' issue.

Fr Tyler's thoughts for today

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com