Things Do Change
How things change and other Sneaky Little Revolutions
Dear Substack Subscribers,
Sorry for the silence from me. Everything has been happening, all at once. I launched the FSU in Australia. I have been doing many media appearances and events. My interview with Fred Pawle for ADHTV has been published, you can watch here. There will be others published shortly.
And just when I want to be less busy in other parts of my life, I seem to have acquired a new job and a new man. All things that require more of my time and attention.
So, sorry for neglecting you, but things do change.
Sneaky Little Revolutions
I have recently started reading a collection of essays from Charmian Clift called Sneaky Little Revolutions.
Charmian Clift is a recent discovery for me. She was an essayist for the Sydney Morning Herald in the 60’s and before that published several bestselling books with her husband as well as solo memoirs. The most famous being Peel Me a Lotus about her time living on the Greek island of Hydra.
I learned about Clift from Gina Chick, who turns out to be her granddaughter. Gina Chick is known to most for being the winner of Alone Australia. I have to say, as someone that doesn’t own a TV, I only found out that through her Substack, that I signed up to not knowing that she was also the person that I was doing 5Rhythms with… and then I joined the dots.
Anyway, after learning her name for the first time, I did a short bit of research about Clift who would have recently celebrated her 100th birthday on the same day I was celebrating my 31st. This 100-year late discovery worked well as there were many pieces praising her work being published in celebration of the anniversary. From this I made an impulsive decision to purchase this volume of her essays.
The volume is compiled and edited by Nadia Wheatley (who amongst other things was a “writer for the Voice”). Nadia tries to claim her as someone that would be on the same side of the debates that rage today as she is. I am not so sure myself. To give a clear example, just because she was pro the “yes” vote in the 1967 referendum doesn’t mean she would be pro the “yes” vote in 2023. They were incredibly different propositions.
People are also a product of a particular time and place, even if they are “progressive” or hold views that are not typical of their era. It doesn’t matter whether we are “pro” or “anti” the zeitgeist, there is still a dominant culture that we are interacting with, even if that interaction is a rejection.
More than that, people are complex and hold many different positions in respect to many different things. Something that the very name of this Substack tries to demonstrate – I am a bit of a hippy that grew up near Byron and yet have found myself in my 30’s having conservative views.
Despite her progressive credentials, Clift’s lamentations on the ugliness of modern architecture are not too dissimilar to those penned by modern conservative thinkers like Roger Scruton and Peter Franklin. Likewise, her feminist writings are far more nuanced than a lot of the “pop-feminism” around today. Particularly in her instance that if women want rights, they must take more responsibility.
What I find more interesting about the collection of essays is how it provides a particular view of Australia through the eyes of someone who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider. Her writings start with a piece about her return trip to Australia on a ship from Greece carrying mostly new migrants. For her follow travellers, this was the first time they saw Australia, but for her the Australia she left in 1949 was a very different one she returned to in 1964. In the intervening years Australia became incredibly wealthy and the standard of living so much higher that what she left behind in Europe.
Australia was also in a population boom and was building lots of new (ugly) houses and the skyline of Sydney was changing dramatically. Not only was the built environment a completely different country, but comfort changes a culture, and although Australians still liked to think of themselves as tough, Clift feels that by the sixties they had softened greatly.
Clift’s essays that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald during the 1960’s were observational accounts of the Australia that came out of the prosperous 1950’s forever changed. It is a snapshot of Sydney life in a decade of rapid progress. Sometimes (in Clift’s view) this change was for the better, sometimes for the worse, but often it just made things different to the old Australia.
The charm of these essays is that they hold so much. They can be both personal, and big picture, opinionated but weave in the views of others (particularly her “conservative” neighbours), but mostly they speak of Australia as both an old home and an alien land.
That feeling of an Australia that simultaneously feels familiar and foreign as the pace of change accelerates is something very relatable for many of us.
Whether we are lamenting the tearing down of old buildings to be replaced with “spreadsheet architecture” or the demise of the Australian Way of Life (as Clift herself refers to it). The death of a Sydney where ordinary people could afford a small castle of their own, to just another city, indistinguishable from any other in terms of architecture, culture, and endless chatter about the insane house prices.
The changes are perpetual, and, for better or worse, to accommodate each of them a small part of the Australia we knew has to die. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there is no such thing as progress, only trade-offs.
Some of the specific concerns of Clift are a product of her time and place, but to take a deep interest in the changes that are occurring around you is a timeless experience.
Despite the claims of the editor and others who see her as the grandmother to the progressive causes of today, I wouldn’t be so quick to claim Clift and her Sneaky Little Revolutions for any ideology or cause. It would be more apt to think of her writing as a kind of postcard from an Australia that no longer exists.
But things do change. It is sometimes lamentable, but always inevitable.