>[!INFO]+ Meta >Area:: [[Neverland - The Lost Continent of Australia]] >Date:: 2013 >Tags:: #text #Sweden #Denmark #Iceland #Australia #Norway *Like the hare from New Holland, I have very short forelegs but extremely long hind legs. Ordinarily, I sit very still; if I make a move, it is a tremendous leap, to the horror of all those to whom I am bound by the tender ties of kinship and friendship.* Søren Kierkegaard[^13] The sombre crowd gathers at dusk on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. They watch in awe as a Viking ship, its noble contents ablaze, drifts slowly towards the Heads. One of Australia's most revered statesmen is farewelled as his body is consumed by the hungry flames and the tireless ocean. This, at least, is how Gough Whitlam fancies being sent off.[^14] That the summit of his achievement should be represented in this way is indicative of the pull that the Nordic ideal has on Australian identity. If we examine the various Nordic stars that have crossed southern skies, we find the principal coordinates for Australia's course as an independent nation. Scandinavian culture provides Australia with its ideal of what good government, wholesome design, inspiring music and vigorous writing should be. The Nordic star sets a course towards social justice, individualism and appetite for life---ideals that Australia is never destined to reach. #### **The divine order of Linnaeus** They say of Chicago that it was built by Swedes, governed by Irish and populated by Poles. The American Swedes were part of a colony established in Bishop Hill by Janssonites fleeing the rigid Lutheran system in the 1840s. By contrast, the most substantial enduring Scandinavian settlement in Australia is the tiny Gippsland town of East Poowong, where twelve Danish families set up dairy farms in the 1870s. The Scandinavian contribution to Australia comes instead through individuals. Retired Professor of Swedish John Stanley Martin uses an astronomical metaphor: 'They are like comets that flash past, create a bit of life while they're there and then they're gone.'[^15] Despite their brief life, these comets provide bearings, to help map the Australian course by how far it falls short of their trajectories. The first Scandinavian visitors stepped ashore with James Cook. *Endeavour*'s discovery of Australia was a British--Swedish co-venture. Joseph Banks was informed by the ideas of Carolus Linnaeus, Professor of Botany, Dietetics and Materia Medica in Uppsala, whose Linnaean system of classification had uncovered a divine order in nature which provided a providential filing system for the classification of new worlds. English scientists called on Linnaeus to send them his foremost pupil to spread the gospel of *Systema naturae*, and Daniel Solander, Linnaeus' anointed successor and adopted son, was soon given a position at the British Museum. Through his friendship with Joseph Banks and his reputation as England's best botanist, Solander joined the 1769 Royal Society expedition to the South Seas, along with the Finnish draughtsman Herrman Spöring, a close family friend of Linnaeus. Together, they gathered samples of flora and fauna from Botany Bay. Solander's name adheres to the stretch of land on which Cook disembarked, Cape Solander, and to the device he fabricated for packing botanical specimens, the Solander Box. *Endeavour* returned with roughly thirty thousand plant specimens, which provided the scientific foundation for subsequent colonisation. The explorers were welcomed back to England as 'Dr Solander and his company', and King George III received Banks and Solander a week before receiving Cook. Cook's reputation grew only after his following journeys. Meanwhile, Solander remained with Banks to catalogue their botanical horde and then to expand it with an expedition to Iceland.[^16] #### **Jorgen Jorgenson, King of the Dog Days** Solander was invited to travel with Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific in 1772, but he refused, preferring to accompany Banks on an expedition to Iceland the same year. His decision seems wise, in retrospect, as the Scandinavians who subsequently travelled to the antipodes found their ideals of harmony in nature cruelly beached on its pragmatic shores. The next notable Scandinavian to reach Australia appeared twice. Jorgen Jorgenson was the second son of the Danish King's official watchmaker. At 28 years of age Jorgenson was first mate on a survey ship, Lady Nelson, from which he helped map Bass Strait and participate in the founding of many colonies. Jorgenson assisted in the birth of Hobart in 1803, which included initiating its whaling industry. On returning to England, Jorgenson offered his services to Banks, then addressing the plight of impoverished Icelanders by trying to establish a mutually beneficial trade---tallow for wheat. Iceland, however, was forbidden from engaging in trade except through its Danish masters. Banks gave Jorgenson the role of icebreaker in this economic Cold War. Jorgenson was set on a course that would take him from king of a proud new Nordic nation to a pathetic dreamer lying drunk in the gutters of Hobart. During Jorgenson's first visit in 1808, the Danish governor of Iceland had pledged to open trade. On their follow up mission in 1809, the English found that the governor had reneged on his promise, instead ensuring a ready market and high prices for his own goods. Jorgenson joined a small armed group which then apprehended the governor and confined him aboard their ship. With no Englishman daring to assert control of the island, Jorgenson proclaimed himself Protector of Iceland and set about liberating its inhabitants. With great pace he laid the ground for a new independent Icelandic nation. He released British goods for sale in the annual summer market, designed a new flag, granted freedom of trade, cancelled Icelandic debts to Denmark, instituted trial by jury, restored the Icelandic parliament, and promised that 'the poor and common people shall have an equal share in the government with the rich and powerful.' During a tour of the island to muster support, Jorgenson was given the Icelandic name of Jörundur. After nine weeks, another English vessel arrived under the charge of Lord Jones, who disapproved of a commoner and former prisoner-of-war taking high office. He forced Jorgenson to abdicate and sent him to an English prison. That was the end of his reign and the beginning of Jorgenson's personal decline. Jorgenson was thereafter known in Iceland as '*hunda daga konungur*', the 'king of the dog days'. His title refers to the constellation that marks the midsummer period in Iceland, a time of gatherings. It was during the white nights that the world's oldest parliament, the Althing, used to meet. Despite his short reign, Jorgenson continues to be a symbol of Icelandic nationhood. His role in Icelandic history has recently been the subject of two plays (*Dog Day King* and *His Majesty*) by Ragnar Arnalds, a former Minister of Education and Finance, who has argued the necessity of preserving Icelandic independence and campaigned against membership of the European Union: Jörgensen was no fool. He was far ahead of his contemporaries and intended to establish a form of government in Iceland which would have been much more modern at this moment in history than in any other state in Europe. He showed unusual mercy to his enemies and carried out his revolution without harming anybody.[^17] Jorgenson's intense life of adventure continued during his commission as a secret agent for the English on the Continent, where he met with Goethe and observed the Battle of Waterloo. He even claimed to have foiled a French--American plot to seize the Australian colonies. But a tragic flaw in his character emerged at this time. Jorgenson had developed a gambling habit while in gaol, following his return from Iceland. This led to a string of financial misadventures and unrepaid loans. He was eventually sentenced to death, but this was commuted to transportation to Van Diemen's Land, which he reached in 1826. Back in the colonies, this time as a convict rather than a sailor, Jorgenson continued his active life, leading survey parties to map the remaining wilderness and publishing many books. He eventually received a full pardon in 1836, though he ended his days destitute in Hobart, where he was mockingly known as the 'King of Iceland'. Jorgenson's books were radical for their time. *The Religion of Christ is the Religion of Nature* (1827) was a plea for natural religion. In *Observations on the Funded System* (1831), he argued that national debt was a form of colonial oppression and should be cancelled. Given the war with the indigenous tribes during this period, Jorgenson's writings about the Aboriginal question are of particular interest. In *The Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land,* Jorgenson approaches the Tasmanian Aborigines in a similar fashion to the Icelanders. He expresses a qualified sympathy for the oppressed natives, carefully lists the vocabularies of different tribes so their culture might not be lost forever, and finds similarities in Aboriginal and Scandinavian language systems and burial customs. Though Jorgenson writes of the treachery and violence of the native population, he attributes this partly to white colonisation. There is a peculiar dreaminess to his arguments. One practical proposal, based on the Danish conversion of Greenlanders, was never realised. In 1828, Jorgenson wrote to the Lieutenant-Governor of Tasmania proposing a Zen-like solution to racial conflict. He suggested that a hut be constructed west of the river Ouse, a thoroughfare for local tribes. This hut would house a small group of whites who would act in a way that might break the cycle of suspicion: > The apparel of the inmates of this remote habitation should be > different from that of other whites ever seen by the natives, in order > to excite veneration, and induce to a belief of peaceable and friendly > intentions toward them. The white men should be taught to traverse the > country without endeavouring too early to promote any intercourse with > the blacks: go to and fro seemingly inattentive to what was passing > around them.[^18] By this means, Jorgenson predicted that 'we should see our black brethren hold out the olive branch to our view.' Such a proposal would absolve the colonists from guilt for 'the fatal policy which had delivered over to extermination a people who were guilty of no other crime than accidentally coming into contact with strangers from a far country'. Despite these noble sentiments, Jorgenson did in fact participate actively in the *levy en mass*, or 'black line', designed to sweep the entire indigenous population of Tasmania onto Flinders Island, where they would be safely removed from the white settlements. Despite his eager participation in this ethnic cleansing, Jorgenson was critical of the eventual treatment of the captured Aborigines. For a period after his death in 1841, Jorgenson's 'convict stain' worked against his reputation. His story was later discovered by Marcus Clarke, who in 1870 retold it as the *The Adventures of Captain Jorgenson,* which was serialised in the *Australasian*. Clarke described him as 'a singularly accomplished fortune-wooer---one of the most interesting human comets recorded in history'.[^19] In the opinion of popular historians Frank Clune and P. R. Stephenson, 'he was a Viking, born ten centuries too late.'[^20] As will be discussed later, Jorgenson may have faired better in the 1980s, during Australia's own brief 'dog days'. In his own time, such dreams of a free and harmonious Nordic world were destined to be broken on the rigid apparatus of the colonial system. The next Scandinavian visitor sought moral revival in the island of Jorgenson's doom, ushering in an eventual era of cultural destruction and political corruption that is unique in Australia's history. #### **The Bjelke Petersens find a Promised Land** By the late nineteenth century, many publications in Scandinavian countries extolled the beauties and opportunities of Australia. These inspired utopian schemes of moral revival on the other side of the world---ideals that inevitably ran adrift. In 1845, Christian Moller left Denmark to live in the small Tasmanian town of Bismarck. The book of his impressions, *Tasmaniens Egne* (*Tasmanian Regions*, 1881), extolled the paradise that awaited fellow Danes on the other side of the world. Moller's book caught the attention of an upwardly mobile Dane, George Petersen of Bjelke Avenue Copenhagen. Encouraged by correspondence with Moller, who heralded a 'promised land' in Tasmania, Bjelke Petersen (who acquired the name of his street) took his family away from dank urban life in Europe to endure the invigorating challenges of building a new country. Moller turned out to be a drunkard and his publication was a cruel hoax. Determined to meet their challenge, the Bjelke Petersens settled in the Hobart suburb of New Town in 1891. Though George was too ill to work, his children seized what opportunity they could find. The eldest son, Hans Christian, began teaching physical culture classes and introduced new sports such as basketball and squash, earning him the nickname 'By Jerks Petersen'. In 1892, he established a medical gymnasium, whose prize student was a future Prime Minister, Joe Lyons. Hans Christian's brother Harald pursued the family's mission with publications such as *How to Become Hardy* (1918). The brothers began to expand their moral empire and in 1907 established the Bjelke Petersen Bros' School of Physical Culture, in Sydney. It was initially a sanctuary for the ruling class: the Prince of Wales used their facility as a refuge during his royal tour of the colony in 1920. Today, the school claims to have 260 branches in eastern Australia.[^21] While the brothers developed regimens for the healthy body, their sister Marie aimed to encourage healthy minds. Her first novel, *The Captive Singer*, contrasted the vigorous and devout life of Tasmania with the decadent world of Europe. Her description of a woodchop demonstration honours a distinctive Tasmanian pastime: > Ten shiny axe-heads blinked high in the sunlight and the next second > pierced into the barked eucalyptus wood. Other strokes followed with > lightning rapidity; strokes well aimed, cutting clean---great chips > were separated from the blocks and flew about in all directions.[^22] *The Captive Singer* was popular with readers both at home and abroad---it sold a hundred thousand copies in Australia and forty thousand in Denmark. It was her first in a string of popular Tasmanian romances. Bjelke Petersen's fourth novel, *Jewelled Nights*, featured life among the osmiridium miners in the remote southwest of the island. This provided many opportunities to laud the ennobling Tasmanian landscape. The author describes the train journey to Hobart, the 'Naples of the southern hemisphere': > Every inch of its triumphant journey is lined with rows of adoring > hills and worshipful mountains which robe themselves in garments of > gorgeous blues, lilac, and rose ... > > So this was Hobart! This city, cradled in loveliness, watched over by > mountains, saluted by the river, kissed by sunbeams, blest by Heaven, > and purged to crystal clarity by the snow and ice of the > Antarctic![^23] The novel became Tasmania's major contribution to early Australian film culture. Yet despite breaking box office records in its premier Melbourne season in 1925, *Jewelled Nights* made a mere five thousand pounds; this covered only half the cost of production. Hopes that Hobart would be the new Hollywood were dashed. Marie Bjelke Petersen continued as a renowned writer of light fiction, presenting radio programs on subjects such as 'book-building'. While obscure today, her writing did contribute a poetic legacy to Australian politics. Her Depression novel, *The Rainbow Lute*, features a Hollywood film star named Len Dare who returns to the small Tasmanian village of Sheffield after his life becomes dissipated. He is traced by his fiancée, who will only release him from his commitment after he gives her his entire fortune. As the novel concludes, the loss of his personal capital releases a burden on his soul and he offers himself to the Christian faith. Unfortunately, public taste for her improbable romances waned, and Marie Bjelke Petersen was not able to publish any of the novels she wrote after WW2. Meanwhile, Marie's brother Carl took up a ministry with the Lutheran Church. His first mission was the Danish settlement Dannevirke in New Zealand, but for reasons of health he was forced to move to Queensland, where he settled in Kingaroy. Farm pressures forced Carl's son Johannes to cut short his primary school education. Despite this, Johannes went on to become Premier of Queensland, which he led from 1968 to 1987. Before taking power, Johannes went to visit his novelist aunt in Tasmania, a trip he described as his 'first real contact with the outside world'. What transpired during his reign as Queensland's premier bears little re-telling. It stands in stark contrast to the Lutheran style of government that developed back in Denmark, under the guidance of the theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig. Grundtvig's catchcry was '*Menneske Først*' ('Person first and then Christian').[^24] Supporting this benevolent evangelicalism were policies for folk high schools and liberal arts programs. Grundtvig's vision was to use Danish as the living word of God and for Denmark to inherit the mantle of '*history's Palestine*'*.* From this idealism developed an extensive social welfare system and one of the world's highest-taxing governments. By contrast, Joh Bjelke-Petersen claimed his main achievement in policy was to reduce taxes as much as possible. In Queensland, he gave open license for individual entrepeneurs, the 'white shoe brigade', to exploit bureaucracy for their own gain. The 'Joh for PM' campaign attempted to move his laissez-faire system onto the national stage. His subsequent loss of power was followed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry in 1989, which exposed corruption in the Queensland police force and government. In disgust with the new socialist order in Queensland, Bjelke-Petersen returned to his family's promised land. Like the hero of his aunt's novel *The Rainbow Lute*, Joh Bjelke-Petersen sought refuge in the town of Sheffield nestled below Mt Roland in northern Tasmania, a region originally christened Tasmania Felix. He set to work developing mining interests and even launching a chain of food outlets, Flo's Country Kitchen. He also advocated that Tasmania secede from the mainland: 'I could run your island ten times better at half the cost from Kingaroy, better than they can from Canberra. All they're interested in, in Canberra, is stripping your money.'[^25] Like the King of Iceland before him, Joh used Tasmania as a stage from which to announce schemes for alleviating the burden of government. In their twilight years, Joh and Flo were reduced to soliciting tourist buses to their property in Kingaroy. The Bjelke-Petersen story has a telling epitaph. Joh sums up the regret of his later years by quoting his faithful pilot, Beryl Young: 'You have to make time to stop and smell the flowers.' From the champion of the bulldozers comes a call for an Australian Shinto---the need to suspend business for the appreciation of nature. Flo's Sheffield outlet has since become Murray's Scottish Scone Shoppe, owned by an old Queensland colleague, Lord Peter Murray. Lord Murray inherited the feudal baronetcy of Kilcullen, which his Scottish ancestors had won assisting the Irish in their war against the Normans. While he still serves iconic pumpkin scones according to Flo's recipe, Lord Murray traces the cake back to its Nordic roots, as a staple made from boiled flour. The Joh and Flo memorabilia in the scone café constitutes a legacy that is more touristic than political. Bjelke Petersen's ultimate political successor emerged, instead, out of a tough apprenticeship in a fish and chip shop. Into Joh's footsteps comes his succubus---the blue-eyed ice maiden Pauline Hanson. Like Joh, her life story of personal hardship has drawn support from those who channel their hatred towards Canberra. What might create positive moves to establish community initiatives is instead channelled to negative forms of resentment.[^26] While such politics seem antithetical to the Scandinavian model, they can be seen as an Australian response to Nordic idealism. It was Queensland, rather than Tasmania, that inspired the next Scandinavian visitor to seek a better world in Australia. Finnish ideals of a socialist utopia found their antipodean expression in the ultimate home of predatory capitalism. #### **Finland founders in Queensland** While the Bjelke-Petersens were settling in Tasmania, a group of Finns were attempting to establish a utopian colony in Queensland. Finland at that time was under Russian control. Encouraged by reports of a 'land of the free', the socialist leader Matti Kurikka had decided to establish a colony in Australia. In 1899 he founded a group known as the Kalevan Kansa, which translates as 'the people of the Kaleva'. Kaleva, or 'land of heroes', is the poetic name for Finland. It is also the name of an anonymous epic poem containing exploits of national heroes, including attempts to win possession of the Sampo, a magic mill that endlessly grinds out salt, meal and gold for its possessor. Though Kurikka's venture won popular support in Finland, only 180 colonists made the commitment to leave with him. Short of labour, Queensland was offering free passage from London to Australia. However, conflict between Britain and Russia reduced the number of places available for Finns. Once they arrived in Queensland, the Finnish colonists needed to find work as a group that would earn them the capital to buy land. They finally made camp in Chillagoe, on the western side of the Atherton Tableland, where they tendered for a contract making railway sleepers. Their prospects were grim. Having finally reached the planned location of their utopian colony, the Finns 'El Dorado' amounted to a mere ten tents. Being poor in English and rich in naïvité, they were callously exploited. After a fruitless trek into the wilderness beyond Chillagoe, the Kalevan Kansa dissipated, much to Matti Kurikka's dismay. The Finnish utopia had struck barren soil. Kurikka's parting shot was an article published in the *Bulletin*[^27] in which he criticised their treatment by officials. > I learnt to know that the labourers in Queensland---there are, of > course, exceptions---are too drunk, too vulgar, and too hateful > against all foreigners that are sober, friendly, and honest as the > Finns, to think that they could become equals with them striving for > the same holy ideals ...[^28] In reply, the Queensland Immigration Agent, Mr J. Brennan, accused Kurikka of an 'Unaustralian' utopianism and compared him to William Lane, the writer who in 1893 established the failed socialist colony, New Australia, in Paraguay. According to Brennan, Kurikka had acted 'as an honest well-meaning theorist and enthusiast; in short, as far as the matter in hand goes, a hopelessly impractical faddist'.[^29] The noble plan that tempted these Finns to establish a socialist colony is here dismissed as a mere 'fad'. Kurikka left Australia in 1900 and succeeded in founding a Finnish community called Sointula (Harmony) on Malcolm Island, Canada. The Kalevan Kansa is a classic in the Australian treasury of 'fatal shore' stories. A recent novel by Canberra writer Craig Cormick casts Kurikka's journey as a descent into the inferno of Australian society. His *Kurikka's Dreaming* contrasts Kurikka's naïve idealism with the brutal state of affairs in Queensland. In one particularly gruesome scene, he describes Kurikka's experience in an abattoir. After vomiting into the steaming innards around him, he is assuaged by an experienced worker, 'you get used to it quick enough. It's the smell of money, eh?'[^30] Though Cormick shows Kurikka to be unrealistic in his expectations, he presents the conditions for fresh migrants as unrelentingly harsh. Kurikka was not the kind of Fin for Australian. There were others who would fit in perfectly. A far more successful Queensland colony was established under the guidance of a Finn known by his nickname, Russian Jack. Johan Frederik Sjöroos' working capacity was legendary. He demanded double wages for any work, and when questioned about this he would work free for a day to demonstrate his speed. Sjöroos started a sugar plantation in Long Pocket, a plateau fifteen miles from Ingham initially worked by Kanaka labourers. When the Queensland government banned their use, Sjöroos imported workers from Finland. Matti Hovi arrived in 1899 and became foreman. He eventually found the climate too hot and returned to Oulu in 1907, but his children subsequently re-emigrated to Australia. One of these, Seth, settled in Mt Isa and married another Finn, Tyyne. Their daughter Toini married Mervyn Norman, a man of mixed Scandinavian ancestry. Toini and Mervyn's son Greg became an Australian sporting icon, paraded to the world during the Olympic closing ceremony as The Shark. Greg Norman has crowned his golfing life in the USA, amassing a fortune and epitomising the ruthless individualism that is celebrated in the American pantheon.[^31] While Finnish socialists have foundered in Queensland, Norman has managed to rise to the top, exuding 'the smell of money'. Whereas in Scandinavia Vikings were purged of their pagan violence and evolved to become some of the world's most caring Christians, in Queensland it seems the reverse occurs. The next Scandinavian visitation occurs to the south, in the middle-class establishment of Melbourne. Here the Nordic spirit inspires Australia's most notable composer---inspires him to invent an Australian culture that he could never find in real life. #### **Percy Grainger, a true blue Scandinavian** Nordic influences have quite a different history in Melbourne. As a more institutionalised culture, Melbourne tends to preserve its failures. The city is dotted with Elsinores, where the ghosts of Nordic patriarchs are protected against the mercenaries attacking their gates. Percy Grainger is the brightest of the many Nordic comets that have flashed across Australian skies, and his rich conjectures on the dialogue between Australia and Scandinavia are preserved in the Percy Grainger Museum. Born in Melbourne, Grainger traced his inspiration back to childhood, when he read the Icelandic saga 'Grettir the Strong'. He described the saga as shapely yet 'formless, many-sided yet monotonous, rambling, multitudinous, drastic, tragic, stoical, ruthlessly truth-proclaiming'. He continued to profess this saga as the 'strongest artistic influence in my life' and vowed to fight the injustice of the Norman invasion: > the Battle of Hastings had become (& still is) an acute personal > tragedy. My duty as a composer seemed clear: to turn back, in my > music, the tide of the Hastings battle, by celebrating all seemingly > Old English (Anglo-Saxon) & Norse characteristics, by ignoring, as far > as possible, all seemingly Norman traits & influences & those derived > from the civilisation of the Roman Empire.[^32] For Grainger, Norman culture was responsible for all the evils of hierarchy---class war, militarism, imperialism, priestliness and controlled mass movements. By contrast, Nordic culture celebrated egalitarianism, individualism, sensuality and musical expression. Accordingly, Grainger's love of all things Nordic shaped his various life projects, including linguistic cleansing of 'blue-eyed English', travel to the Faeroe Islands to collect Danish folk songs, and his choice of wife. His quest was part of a broader cultural movement. Grainger's Nordic dreaming continued an English quest to identify with its pre-Norman inhabitants who emanated from the Jutland peninsular.[^33] The classic English cultural dialectic opposes the Anglo-Saxon egalitarian culture of honest labour to a Norman hierarchical system of privilege. This historical conflict follows a deeper fault line in English culture. In the Reformation, the virtues of popular devotion were extolled against submission to Catholic hierarchies. In reaction to industrialisation, the Arts & Crafts movement upheld creative expression against continental artificiality; in particular, John Ruskin distinguished the honest enjoyment of labour in the Gothic traditions from the ornate excesses of the Mediterranean, and William Morris extolled English peasant art, in contrast with France, where 'stupid pomp had extinguished all nature and freedom'.[^34] And during the growth of empire in Victorian England, figures such as Benjamin Disraeli and Rudyard Kipling used the Anglo-Saxon struggle as an emblem of freedom under British rule. The south--north dichotomy provided a language for representing the cycles of sedimentation and rebellion in English history. Despite its Danish ancestry, modern English culture has little cultural interaction with Scandinavian peoples. Today's peace-loving Lutherans are quite distant from the pagan raiders who first arrived in Britain. The exception is Iceland, which managed to preserve its Nordic spirit better than other Scandinavian countries. William Morris made several pilgrimages to Iceland---his 'Holy Land'---where the lives of the inhabitants still reflect the Norse sagas. The academic preservation of these sagas was most popularly celebrated in J. R. R. Tolkein's *The* *Lord of the Rings*. For Grainger, Iceland provided the central pillar of his identity as a genius composer. He described his passion for Iceland as: > the most inspiring, life-giving and satisfying artistic adventure of > my life, the one wielding the most determining sway upon my work and > standards as a creative artist, as well as upon my actions and > character as a man, has been the gradual unfolding before me of the > Icelandic racial spirit, as revealed to me through my growing > familiarity with the Icelandic language ... The metallic vividness of > life ... > > Am I prosecuting my goal with the tireless tenacity of an > Icelander?[^35] What makes Grainger's self-mythology particularly interesting is the way he tried to reconcile Iceland with the other twin pillar of his identity as an Australian. In a letter written in 1930, he attributed his wildness of character to a magical contact with the land: > I live for my lusts & I don't care if they kill me or others. Now (as > when I was sixteen) I live only for fury & wildness. I feel that a hot > parched wind from the Australian desert has entered into my soul & > with a fury of heat I must go thru', burning up myself & others.[^36] Grainger was an Australian who judged himself by Nordic ideals. Grainger's preferred arbiter was the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who welcomed Grainger as an Australian able to understand his music as well as any Scandinavian. Grainger notes in 1938: > Grieg's behaviour to me was flawlessly fatherly, tender and sweet from > the first to the last. It just shows what close ties bind one Nordic > composer to another, and it also shows the strange affinity that links > Australia to Scandinavia. Their people like ours are a Colonial > people. They are still colonizing their own great waste lands---in > parts as sparsely populated as Australia---and the percentage of > Scandinavians that colonize abroad, in the USA. for instance, is a > higher percentage of the home population than that ever sent out by > Britain. It seems as if the Australian type in so far as it differs > from its British forefathers is largely reverting to Scandinavianism > ...[^37] Yet, during his middle years, Grainger displayed quite negative views about Australia, whose pale imitation of Nordic ways became evident once he was more familiar with Scandinavia itself: > What it would seem cut me adrift from that Australianness for ever was > the going to Scandinavia & the finding there of the things I had liked > best in Australian pioneeringness, in Icelandic pride & > truth-zeal.[^38] Grainger's pilgrimage followed a familiar antipodean disillusion: our culture is revealed as a pale imitation of the real source. At the end of his life, Grainger returned to the story of his Australian genius. He selected Melbourne as the city to host his museum, and focussed his energies on Australian compositions and methodologies. He invented a machine called the 'Kangaroo Pouch' for playing his 'free music' that went beyond the boundaries of fixed notes. For Grainger, this freedom of movement was an Australian privilege, unavailable in Europe with its tight internal borders. For him, Australia offered a landscape of fluent monotony that reflected the structure of Gretirr's Saga. Today, Grainger still exerts a presence beyond the grave. His wild spirit is now maintained in a heritage-listed institution. Visitors can watch his ghost at the piano as it plays Pianola rolls of his physical performance. In his blue-eyed English, Grainger called his museum a 'Past-Horde House'. The substitution of 'horde' for 'museum' retains the sense of collection but removes any association with the operations of a state. The institution is designed to inspire future generations of composers by revealing all the dimensions of his genius, including his highly evolved practices of sado-masochism.[^39] Public interest in Grainger's sexual habits is now overtaking that in his music. During Grainger's later life, Melbourne's prurient fascination for the salacious life was directed to another Nordic castle, Montsalvat, whose atmosphere is described as 'an odd darkness, Ibsenesque perhaps in Hendrik's more gothic moments, with costumes and stage-set by Munch'.[^40] Montsalvat was the home of an artist colony in Eltham. The founder of this bohemian settlement was Justus Jorgenson, who grew up listening to real-life stories of Nordic adventure. The impossible quest for a free spirited Australia recurs again in Melbourne, though this time thanks to visitors from Norway. #### **From Norway to Montsalvat, with love** Norwegian sailors have played an unprecedented role in Australian life. They have a tendency to arrive at critical moments and, unintentionally, set in train a brave challenge to Australia's colonial conformity. In 1862, the son of a disgraced Norwegian clergyman, Niels (Peter) Herzberg Larsen, settled in a new land and married Louisa Albury, who five years later produced a son, Henry Lawson. Despite his Nordic ancestry, Scandinavian themes in Lawson's writing are confined to occasional autobiographical references. In a poem to his own son, 'To Jim', Lawson writes: 'A strong Norwegian sailor's blood / Runs red through every vein.' While Larsen is not credited with directly influencing his son's beliefs, his Norwegian background is sympathetic to Lawson's subsequent republican course.[^41] In recent times, a Norwegian sea captain made an indelible mark on Australian history by his non-arrival on its shores. In August 2001, Arne Rinnan, the captain of the Tampa, decided to rescue asylum seekers and refused to return them to Indonesia. The hostile response of the Australian government received much criticism in the Norwegian press. Its daily paper, *Dagbladet*, called the crisis, 'A Week of Shame for Australia'. Through Rinnan's intervention, the Australian electorate was split between the liberal minority seeking a Scandinavian flexibility and the mainstream majority supporting the rule of law. It was another, lesser known Norwegian sea captain, an adventurer of epic proportions, who left Melbourne its great monument to bohemianism. Captain Simon Jacob Englehardt Jorgenson sailed the *Ragna* on its annual voyages to and from Norway, exchanging Australian wheat for Norwegian wood. As a challenge to contemporary shipbuilding, he built an 'unsinkable' lifeboat called *Storm King*. To demonstrate its worth to Lloyds Insurance, Simon Jorgenson sailed from London to Adelaide via Brazil and the Cape. Despite the survival of this tiny vessel in the open ocean, Lloyds remained unconvinced. Bitter at this indifference, Simon Jorgenson pursued a life of adventure around Australia, pearling in the northwest and then exploring the Northern Territory with Sir John Forrest. He eventually settled down with his wife, Nora Shreiber, the daughter of a Melbourne architect. Despite a promising future in architecture, Simon Jorgenson's son Justus followed the less charted course of painter. Early in his career, Justus Jorgenson came under the influence of Max Meldrum and his tonal realist style of painting. After the inevitable Paris sojourn, Jorgenson returned to a conservative and straight-laced Melbourne. Known as 'Norway' to his circle, Jorgenson started building a house on an Eltham block. He was soon joined by friends, and an artists' colony was formed. They started with adobe-style mud brick houses and later added ornaments rescued from Melbourne's gothic buildings to create a faux medieval village. It was named Montsalvat after the Grail Castle in Wagner's *Parsifal*. Montsalvat became a refuge for those fleeing the repressed life of Melbourne suburbs. The evening banquet provided the main stage of activity, where visitors would gather to imbibe the frank and confronting theatre of artists. The main act was Jorgenson's dialogues, as described by his niece: > While the food was being eaten conversation remained general, but > after about an hour there would fall an expectant hush, and the > 'dialogue' would begin ... They began with some such phrases as 'Now > just support that some young man, AA for example, or NN, were to say > to me... then I would say to him ... and then he might perchance reply > ... and then ...'[^42] To wide-eyed university students from the suburbs, these 'dialogues' were terrifying events, as Jorgensen challenged their cosy world views with allusions to men of genius. In Montsalvat, the evening would often feature a woman singing the Brunhilde parts from Wagner's opera. By contrast with the Melbourne suburbs of the 1950s, the Eltham castle offered an arena for speaking frankly and acting out. To the public, the most scandalous aspect of life in Montsalvat was Jorgenson's transparent sexual life. While continuing to profess allegiance to his wife, Jorgenson openly acknowledged his mistress; equal respect was shown to offspring on both sides of the law. The patriarch of Montsalvat subscribed to a higher morality than public decency, just as Grainger saw flagellation as a creative inspiration that transcended existing mores. Today Jorgenson's descendents maintain Montsalvat both as a museum and as a site for festivals in music, jazz and poetry. Artisans still occupy the workshops, making chunky gold jewellery and soulful violins. Montsalvat is a stark contrast to the other remaining artists' colony, the one-time home of John and Sunday Reed in the outer suburb of Templestowe. The reverential 'Museum of Modern Art' now at Heide makes Montsalvat seem distinctly old world---a world superseded by Melbourne's international culture of Grand Prixs and Biennales. While often providing a refuge from the soulless world outside, Australia's Nordic sub-cultures can provoke developments in national culture that embrace the whole of the country. Thus Melbourne's Little Iceland gave birth to the *History of Australia*. #### **Augustin Lodewyckx and the Viking retort** The suburban village of Mont Albert is a stately haven of conservative Melbourne. Nestled in a verdant avenue is one of the city's most influential bastions of Nordic ideals. The castle on Beatty Avenue inspired a Hamlet who became Australia's most revered and reviled historian. The story begins as you open the front gate. In the middle of the garden is a large oak tree, with swings and ropes hanging from its sturdy arms. Unlike a normal oak tree, these arms are splayed out horizontally. It is still possible to see the marks where bricks were hung from branches to warp their growth. Up the steps to the verandah, you'll find the name of the household embossed on a brass plaque---*Huize Eikenbosch* (House of Oaks). The house and garden are legacies of a fanciful campaign to wilfully impose European standards on southern soils. *Huize Eikenbosch* was owned by Augustin Lodewyckx, a Belgian champion of old Europe. Lodewyckx was born in 1876 to a father who was already 62 years old. As a champion of the Flemish cause, Lodewyckx converted to Protestantism and worked on a Dutch dictionary. He moved to Africa---first to Cape Town, where he was professor of French and German, then to Belgian Congo where he explored opportunities for migration at the behest of King Albert. The Belgian colonist was passing through Melbourne on his way to America when WW1 was declared, and he was forced to stay. Lodewyckx worked initially censoring letters but soon took up the position of language master at Melbourne Grammar, and then became head of the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Melbourne. In Melbourne, Lodewyckx focussed his energies on one of the lost worlds of old Europe. In and out of university, he promoted the teaching of Old Icelandic. He visited Iceland twice in the 1930s and broadcast on Reykjavik radio to celebrate the 150^th^ anniversary of the First Fleet. On return, he established an informal group, the 'Friends of Iceland', which met at his Mont Albert home. From his retirement in 1949 to his death in 1964, Lodewyckx continued to teach classes in Old Icelandic at *Huize Eikenbosch*. For his services to Iceland, he was made Knight of the Icelandic Falcon. Subsequent academic exchanges in Scandinavian studies have explored the relationship between Iceland and Australia. They are sometimes viewed as colonies arranged symmetrically on either end of the world. Vilberger Júlíusson is a school principal from Iceland who has written books on Australia: > Australia and Iceland are two countries which lie at opposite ends of > the earth. There are certain distinctive similarities between them. > They are both sparsely populated countries which trace their histories > back to a period of great colonisation, one for 200 years and the > other for 1,114 years. Although neither country plays a very important > part on the stage of world politics, each is important because they > are strategically situated.[^43] Lodewyckx's protégé John Stanley Martin, descendent of the Eureka rebels, went to Iceland to pursue a degree in Old Norse. He recalls a conversation with Icelandic novelist Sigurur Nordal, who saw both nations as sharing the challenge of new beginnings: > As an Australian you understand Iceland better than the Europeans do, > because we are Europe's first colony. We are the first time they came. > Every time there was a movement in Europe, there was always a group > before---the Celts moving in, the Germanics moving in---and there > would be an amalgam of the cultures\... In Norway, from where they > came, it was limited resources, someone gets more and someone gets > less. Come to Iceland and it's a free for all, grabbing land, so you > don't respect the environment in the same way any more.[^44] Lodewyckx's line on immigration followed the Icelandic model. He was a supporter of increased migration to Australia, taking the example of intense farming in Denmark and Israel. It would only be by increasing European stock that Australia would be able to fend off the threat of Asian invasion. He ascribes the power of the British Empire to 'the spirit of adventure and the genius for commerce' that was fostered by the immigrants from Jutland. Threaded through his book *People for Australia* are images of a Europeanised nation: > And if in time to come Swiss chalets or Norwegian herdmen's huts were > to enliven the wild slopes of Tasmanian mountains; if the yodling > \[sic\] of the Tyrolese or Bavarian mountaineers were to resound in > the Australian Alps; if Frisian farmhouses and Italian masserias were > to be the eye on the plains of the Riverine or on the Darling Downs of > southern Queensland; if here and there the spire of the Dutch church > were to greet us in the country which used to be known as New > Holland---then all this could only enhance the beauty of the > Australian landscape and enrich the culture of the Australian > people.[^45] Though Lodewyckx's vision countered the White Australia policy, it proposed a pasteurised European Australia in its place. Lodewyckx especially enjoyed Flemish dancing and would hold regular parties in his Mont Albert home. His son, Axel, who became chief librarian of the University of Melbourne, described the family home as 'a little European haven' and explained his father's duty as being 'to impart as much of that culture as he could do the local scene'.[^46] But not everyone enjoyed the party. While Lodewyckx's daughter, Dymphna, followed her father's specialisation in languages, her fiancée was less impressed by Augustin's Euro-centric values. Dymphna met Manning Clark when they were both undergraduates at the University of Melbourne. They married in 1939. Near the end of his long career as a historian, Manning Clark recalls the scene at Dymphna's family home: > In Beatty Street, Mont Albert, where her family took up residence in > 1921, her father and her mother built a 'little Europe'. A high > cypress hedge became the frontier between their family and Australia. > Her father planted European shrubs and trees: an oak, not a gum tree, > was the focal point in the garden. They spoke to each other in Dutch. > They celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve: they did not feature a > roast, or a fowl, or a turkey, or a goose ...[^47] Despite the attractions of this exotic European fare, Clark admits to twinges of patriotism: 'Something held me back. I did not want to be an honorary citizen of Europe in Australia. I could not be a European. I was an Australian.' Clark uses that event in his autobiography to account for his quest for an Australian story: > We were the wild cherries in the bush---parasites. But why accept a > life sentence of mediocrity; why be a second-rate European in > Australia? Why not be an Australian? ... I had to find out who we > Australians were ...'[^48] *Huize Eikenbosch* spoored a gum tree revolt. Clark's conversion to the Australian quest is dense with irony. The very Australianness that Clark opposed to Lodewyckx's Christmas was itself an unadulterated English import of roast dinner, pine trees and English carols. However, unlike Grainger, who perceived Australian divergence from the Nordic ideal as its failure, Clark sought to forge this failure into a new historical canon. Clark's approach was to fight rather than follow the Nordic ideal. But this revolt can itself be seen as part of Nordic culture. Scandinavian culture itself provides examples of how this ideal might be combatted. About the same time the devout Bjelke Petersens were leaving Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard emerged as a fierce opponent of the 'happy Christian' ethos of Grundtvig. He argued that Danes should have some 'paganism in reserve': > If I didn't know I was a genuine Dane I could almost be tempted to > attribute the contradictions astir in me to the hypothesis that I was > an Irishman. That nation hasn't the heart to immerse its children > totally when it has them baptised; they want to keep a little paganism > in reserve. And while usually one immerses the child completely, they > leave the right arm free, so that with it he can wield a sword, > embrace girls.[^49] The claustrophobia that Kierkegaard felt towards Lutheran Denmark reflects its lack of opportunities for individual expression. We could say that Danish culture, like Australian, lacked a Shinto-style folk religion to release wilder emotions. The obvious candidate for such an alternative would be Viking beliefs, if they hadn't been so quickly assimilated into the Christian church. Manning Clark's path is more like what we could expect from an antipodean translation of Nordic ideals than would be produced by an attempt to imitate Scandinavian ritual and lifestyle. In today's Scandinavia, the most productive current exponent of this Nordic revolt is the film director Lars von Trier. With fellow Danish directors, von Trier established a collective pact, 'Dogma 95', one of whose principles is the avoidance of good taste: > Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am > no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a 'work', as I > regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal > is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do > so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and > any aesthetic considerations. > > Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.[^50] Von Trier's 1991 film *Zentropa* articulated a Danish independence from Europe---subsequently reflected in the national vote against the Euro. His television series *The* *Kingdom* concerned a pagan underworld at work in a modern, sophisticated Danish hospital. And in *Dancing in the Dark* he recruited Icelandic singer Björk to play a downtrodden mother whose spiral of tragedy is totally out of step with the cold world of America. Apart from Manning Clark, it is hard to find Australians who have traced the Nordic star beyond its wholesome ideals into the pagan world. Perhaps it will always be thus while the ideal continues to be so elusive. Proof of this impossible Nordic dream lies in Australia's architectural centrepiece. #### **The Danish gateway to Australia** After the 1950s, the Scandinavian constellation moved back to where it first arrived, to Sydney. Here it struck root most deeply, and for a short time Australia enjoyed its 'dog days' under the endless northern sun. On the brow of the 1960s, Australia seemed a bleak wasteland of conformist suburbs and gaudy architecture. In *The Australian Ugliness*, Robyn Boyd argued that Australian design was 'diametrically opposed to that of Sweden, where the average exhibited taste is cultivated and there are few who rise above or sink below'.[^51] Boyd's denunciation of Australian veneer heralded a broader cultural movement that attempted to reach beyond the superficial. Individuals began to experiment with more 'natural' forms of existence. Continental films screened at city cinemas, where Swedish films were synonymous with moral openness and nudity. Igmar Bergman on the screen, and Strindberg and Ibsen on the stage confronted audiences with hard realities of life. Out of this period emerged Australia's most enduring architectural icon. The seed was sown a generation earlier. The Finnish architect Eliel Gotlieb Saarinen had received his program for the 1912 competition to design Canberra late. With only six weeks to create and draw his designs, he was awarded second prize. Despite the new capital's design being entrusted to Walter Burley Griffin, a later Saarinen exerted a critical influence on Australian architecture---Elial's son Eero. A minimalist like his father, Eero Saarinen was an advocate of architecture that reflected the 'beauty of the space between buildings'. As demonstrated in his acclaimed Great Arch in Missouri, his work evinced sculptural qualities that reflected organic forms. In 1956, Eero was invited onto the panel of judges for the Sydney Opera House. A shortlist of entries was presented to the Finnish architect, but an exhibition of rejected drawings was also displayed for his interest. Dissatisfied with those shortlisted, Saarinen found a rejected drawing that showed promise. To the dismay of the organisers, he would not lend his name to the process unless his fancied reject was awarded the commission. Thanks to his intervention, the Danish architect Jørn Utzon was able to design an opera house that is now the most celebrated building in the country. The result is a unique building that reflects the idiomatic elements of the harbour---waves, sunlight, shells and sails. On the outside, it is a sublime feat of engineering. Utzon spent a year in Sweden working with the Hoganas factory to prefabricate more than a million chevron-shaped ceramic tiles that would make up the exterior shell. For Utzon, the effect of sunlight burning on its white surface is comparable to the *alpengluhen*, or radiance of snow-capped mountains at sunset. For critic Philip Drew, the exterior contains a reticent majesty: > The tiles are a parable with a fairytale message that exalts ordinary > things by showing us how they are really extraordinary if we can only > discover their true nature. The tiles have their own rhetoric, rustic > to be sure---countrified, rough on the surface, robust---yet inwardly, > they posses magic hidden fire. They are also possibly one of the most > perfect things Utzon realised in the Opera House.[^52] But the interior is a different story. Utzon famously refused to continue with the project because his vision of the interior was seriously compromised. What remained was in both literal and figurative senses, the shell of his original idea. While the Opera House features in a mountain of postcards, its impact in Australian architecture beyond Bennalong Point is hard to discern. Utzon's building operates as a singular relief to the cramped vertical blocks that proliferate elsewhere in Australia, as evidenced by its new neighbour, the toaster-style apartment building greeted by Sydney's population with impotent fury. While a grand success on the world stage as a brand for snow domes and tea towels, it is a grand failure as a catalyst for a new kind of architecture reflecting the natural elements of Australia. Utzon has refused to return to Australia and has never seen his Opera House, but there is one subterranean manifestation of his aesthetic. The long-time restaurateur of the Bennalong Point Restaurant is himself of Scandinavian origins. Anders Ousback is the son of a Swedish sailor. Apart from being a leading Sydney restaurateur, Ousback also makes ceramics from his pottery hear Goulbourn. Ousback's interests in ceramics and restaurants combine in his experiments with designs for eating. Of note is a breakfast setting which demonstrates a unique synthesis of Scandinavian and Australian. The bowl and cup are both simple organic shapes. The cup has a small wing for the thumb, which invites the hand to cup the vessel, to feel its warmth and breathe in the steaming beverage. By contrast, a normal cup or mug has a handle that is designed to be hooked through with the middle fingers, which offers more accurate control but at the same time puts the holder and vessel at a distance. Moreover, Ousback's pieces are made from local clay, which is rougher than northern mixes and contains iron elements that turn into brown spots in firing. His piece combines a Scandinavian holistic sensibility with the coarser elements native to Australia. Ousback has since had requests to re-make this setting but, like Lasseter who could never again find his once-sighted reef of gold, he has been unable to locate the original source of his clay. Like Utzon's Opera House, Ousback's breakfast setting is a singular expression of how Australia might be if designed by Scandinavians.[^53] The Scandinavian model has inspired the ideal of a separate Australian craft culture. #### **Craft as a Danish profession** As well as a leading restaurateur, Ousback now also has sell-out shows of his ceramics at Sydney's Rex Irwin Gallery. At the less commercial end, Scandinavian hands have also guided the institutionalisation of craft in Australia in the 1970s. The formal organisation of craft followed the 'back to nature' pursuits that drew city dwellers to outlying hills in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth. Potters dug their clay from their own land, and fired their pots with wood from their own trees. These were communal ventures encouraging participation from all regardless of skill. From this popular movement emerged a professional class of craft practitioners who sought to differentiate themselves from hobbyists. The leaders in this 'contemporary craft' movement were an Australian--Danish partnership---Darani Lewers and Helge Larsen. Throughout the 1950s, the sculptor Gerald Lewers and his painter wife Margo Lewers had explored new territories of abstract expressionism with a practical edge, providing an art that complemented the architectural modernism of the time. Gerald undertook many architectural commissions such as fountains and reliefs, while Margo's practice included pottery, textiles and mosaics. Together they established a homestead at Emu Plains, which has since been re-cast as the Lewers Bequest Gallery at Penrith, the gateway to the Blue Mountains. Gerald held contemporary Danish jewellery in high regard and encouraged his daughter, Darani, to travel to Denmark in 1959. There she met Helge Larsen, who had followed the standard path of apprenticeship and studied with prestigious jewellery firms and colleges. He worked under a Danish silversmith in the USA and returned to set up a shop, Sølvform, in Copenhagen. His shop and career had begun to flourish, with an invitation in 1960 to exhibit at the national craft museum. Instead, he decided to join Darani in Australia. As a couple, the contribution of Larsen and Lewers to the state infrastructure of craft was as great as any. They helped found the Craft Association of Australia in 1964, which in 1971 became the Crafts Board in the Australia Council, with Lewers as chair in 1976. She also oversaw the development of the Powerhouse Museum of Decorative Arts. Meanwhile, from 1968 to 1974, Larsen was senior instructor in the Department of Industrial Arts at the University of New South Wales. In 1977, Larsens was appointed founding head of the Department of Jewellery and Silversmithing at the Sydney College of the Arts. The work the two produced during this period was similarly 'world building'. Their brooches and pendants reflected environmental themes, including materials collected on bush walks and the perceived textures of the landscape. The forms were streamlined, fluid and kinetic, devoid of any fussy detail or excess. After travel through France in 1974, their work began to reflect more urban themes, including townscapes and their signature piece, the Opera House Pendant. After this, Lewers' work in particular was engaged with the social issues of the day, including comments on war and ecology. They have regularly fulfilled ecclesiastical commissions. Lewers and Larsen's horizon is a world based on an order flowing *from*, rather than imposed *on* nature: > Societies seek to order the forces of nature, while nature has its own > organic structures which in turn influence societies. Our way of > working involves a planned and structured approach---to create a sense > of order and determine the content. We respond to and explore the > imprint left by cultures on the environment as well as the order which > exists in nature.[^54] Larsen and Lewers were as responsible as anyone in Australia for institutionalising jewellery as a creative art on par with the 'fine arts' of painting and sculpture. They did this by tying their practice to sociological factors -- at the time of the merger of the Crafts and Visual Arts boards of the Australia Council, Australian craft tended to reflect more conceptual issues related to body and gender. While their own practice continues in various commissions, it is isolated from the overall trends of hard craft. Without the Scandinavian precedent, it is hard to imagine Australian craft today. South Australian Premier Don Dunstan opened the Jam Factory Craft & Design Centre in 1974, heralding a Scandinavian alliance between creative design and industrial production. In Launceston, there was a move to become the 'Finland of the South' with emphasis on value-added industry, but that has waned. While we enjoy the legacy of this influence today, it is currently more a source of imitation than inspiration.[^55] During the 1970s, Scandinavian influence went beyond specialist sub-cultures and cliques. It was wholesomely embraced by mainstream Australia, everywhere from the living room to the factory floor. #### **Australia as a Volvo factory** The Nordic star was not just a fantasy of art, craft and architecture. In the Fraser--Hawke years, almost every Australian home and workplace had its Scandinavian feature. In 1975, the first IKEA store opened in Australia, bringing Ingvar Kamprad's Swedish design ethic into the homes of average Australians. IKEA's flat packaging offered the pleasures of do-it-yourself with the confidence of Scandinavian craftsmanship. Two years later, Abba commenced a world tour in Australia, which was the global epicentre of their popularity. During their fortnight tour, Abba played to a hundred and forty thousand people, meeting then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser backstage in Melbourne. Blonde singer Agnetha recalls the heady confrontation of Sweden and Australia: > the Australian tour was the most incredible of all the things that I > experienced with Abba. There was fever, there was hysteria, there were > ovations, there were sweaty, obsessed crowds.[^56] While none of Abba's hits had Scandinavian references, their Swedish accents and appearance helped endear them to Australian audiences. Abba was not part of the entertainment empires of Britain or the USA. Australians were thus able to identify with Swedes as relative outsiders to the main players. This musical infection was complemented by Swedish influences in the workplace. The Scandinavian ideal was introduced into industrial relations by the social scientist Fred Emery.[^57] Emery was a convert to the Socio-Technical Systems theory that was first put into practice in Norway in 1963. One of his students, Neil Watson, gained a position as head of an industrial relations research unit in the Whitlam government under Clyde Cameron. During this time, there was an exchange of advisors with Sweden, and Swedish labour attaché Olle Hammarstrom brought with him ideas of industrial democracy and worker participation. This continued after the change of government under the progressive ministry of Ian McPhee, Productivity Minister in the Fraser Government. In 1973, the Dunstan government in South Australia institutionalised Fred Emery's approach in the Unit for Equality of Working Life. This inaugurated the Scandinavian model of tripartite industrial relations of worker, government and employer, to be realised once Federal Labor took government. When Labor was returned to power in 1983, Hawke's assistant at the ACTU, Ralph Willis, took control of the Industrial Relations portfolio. In 1984, the Labor government organised an international conference at which the keynote speaker was Thoralf Qvale, from Norway's Work Research Institution. This launched the Hawke government's approach to workplace reform. During the first term of government, the ACTU organised an overseas study for a group including Bill Kelty, Laurie Carmicheal and Simon Crean. The group went beyond the normal ports of call in Britain and spent most of its time in Sweden and Norway. Organised by Olle Hammarstrom, their Swedish tour included trips to the Uddevalla Volvo factory, legendary in its enlightened approach to the worker as craftsman responsible for the whole car. The result of their travels was the 1987 report *Australia Reconstructed*, which underpinned the prices and incomes accord with the ACTU. Wage rises were henceforth linked to productivity improvements: the argument was not how to get a bigger slice of the cake, but how to make the cake bigger as a whole. Having established the Scandinavian ideal on paper, the challenge was to graft the fruit of cooperative industrial relations on the stock of partisan unionism. In writing training manuals for the Swedish model in Australia, Neil Watson had to make concessions for the low level of trust between worker and employer in Australia. (One of the reasons for the high level of trust in countries like Norway was the shared experience of underground resistance during the WW2.) According to Watson, it was during this time that 'the Australian unionists began to get a glimpse of the difference between old-fashioned British style tactical unionism, sectarian and the Swedish style strategic.'[^58] The trend of increasing cooperation between worker and boss was reversed under the older-style confrontational method of the Howard Liberal government. In 1999, the ACTU organised another overseas study tour, but they explicitly distinguished it from the previous Scandinavian venture. Secretary of the ACTU Greg Combet advised, 'You won't see another *Australia Reconstructed*, don't expect glossy books or tomes of analysis, it will have a more practical focus.'[^59] The trip included England, Ireland, Belgium, Canada and the US---anywhere but Scandinavia. On succeeding Bill Kelty, Combet surveyed the changes since 1983. He claims that 'Australia is ... a country where there are now, more than ever, winners and losers.'[^60] Just as the Sydney Opera House is a singular element in space, so *Australia Reconstructed* was a unique opportunity for building a more organic Australian. But the Nordic idea continues to elude.[^61] In contemporary Australia, the Nordic star has retreated back into various sub-cultures. It is most audible in the circles of Australian poetry. #### **Icelandic Australian poetry today** Today, poetry remains a sanctuary for the Nordic sensibility, sponsored by poets such as Les Murray, Kevin Hart and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, for whom fashioning lines is more important than imposing ideas. The values of these poets can be set against what are perceived to be postmodern fashions exhibited by writers like Dorothy Porter and John Tranter. The Nordic goal is to mirror the world, rather than experiment with form. The Nordic poets share a spirit of poetic vigour, as opposed to the more conceptual interests of Francophile authors. For Chris Wallace-Crabbe, a language like Old Norse allows you to 'see the nobly little roots of words'---an etymological path to a more visceral meaning. In his poem to Seamus Heaney, 'The Bush', [^62] Wallace-Crabbe conveys the Australian landscape as a desiccated series of phrases---'wideawake', 'leathery-evergreen' and 'bemedalled with beercans'---which peter out to a series of monosyllable impulses: > flap,\ > nub,\ > hinge,\ > node, The Norse method offers a glimpse of the imaginary register of experience, prised open with tool-like words. In Nordic topography, Iceland remains pure of the Norman taint. Many of these Australian poets defer to W. H. Auden, who believed himself to be descended from heroes of the Norse sagas and accompanied Louis Macniece on a pilgrimage to Iceland in 1936, which resulted in Auden's *Letters from Iceland* (1937). The local elder, A. D. Hope, studied Old Icelandic at Tolkein's college at Oxford. For Hope, the appeal of the language was its straightforwardness: 'I started a course for advanced students and staff in Old Icelandic with its down-to-earth language and its ordinary syntax which add so much to its clarity and force.'[^63] While Latin and Greek classics are more often referenced in Hope's poetry, there are occasional Nordic themes. The *Fafnir* concerns the worm in the Icelandic *Voslung* saga, whose heart once eaten gives the power to understand the song of birds. The result is a language surprisingly brutal for Hope: > Watching the naked man, a wild and grim\ > And brutal passion kindled in her heart;\ > She felt no fear; she did not pity him;\ > But saw with joy his body torn apart,\ > With love, the blood spurt fresh from throat and limb. One of Hope's followers, Alan Gould, proudly bore his Nordic heritage. The covers of his many praise-winning books in both poetry and fiction identify Gould as 'born in 1949 of English-Icelandic parents'. His mother, Valgerdur Bjarnadottir, was born on a farm in Akureyri, a northern settlement on Iceland's longest fjord, surrounded by mountains. Gould's family returned to Iceland from England twice before migrating to Australia. While Gould is the Australian poet most directly connected to Nordic tradition, his writing only reinforces the distance. His subsequent return in 1973 as an adult is reflected in his essay 'A Ship and its Waterfall'. Gould remarks on his extensive lineage, which can be traced back to the first Norwegian settlers on the island in the ninth century. While there is a finely written natural description of the island, Gould refuses to indulge in any self-reflection on the personal meaning of the journey. Instead, the focus is deferred to his odd assortment of fellow travellers, in the manner of Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales*. There is no account of how this experience relates to present life at home in Canberra. Though not professing a personal journey north, Gould does have views about the relative paths of Iceland and Australia. They share concerns for social justice, and differ in their motives as individuals: while Australian bushrangers were largely opportunistic, their Icelandic equivalents killed on matters of honour. For Gould, both countries have geographical similarities---largely coastal populations with inhospitable interiors (deserts or glaciers). While sheep have provided the principle economy in both countries, Iceland is a country without fences, leaving its nature less fragmented and marked than Australia's. And historically, Iceland began as an independent country before it was a colony, whereas 'the Australian sense of self emerges from having begun as a colony and then grown out of it.'[^64] The close similarities between the two colonies bring the differences into relief. Though sensitive to the differences between the two islands at either end of the world, Gould's poetic use of Norse themes has no Australian reference. In 1970, Gould composed a series of poems, 'Skald Mosaic', which tells of the hard life in an Icelandic village. It features characters like Grimm, 'whose laugh was thought a marvel, like sperm-whales blowing off in the teaming seas of Greenland'.[^65] Gould says he wrote these poems: > because I found them taking me back to landscapes that were > half-recalled, a range of characters I dimly perceived to be outside a > British or Australian repertoire, and I tried to match the style of > those poems with the narrative directness and concision I had found in > the sagas.[^66] Gould admits using the Monaro landscapes in his vicinity to help imagine the poetic scenes, though they have different waterscapes and 'our distinctive trees afford a softening of outline that is absent from any Icelandic horizon.'[^67] Gould is an Unaustralian poet. Les Murray described his poetry as 'sparse, understated pieces unlike anything else I've seen published in this hemisphere' that express 'a surprisingly mature understanding of ultimate perversity'.[^68] Poems in *Icelandic Solitaries* (1978) depict Lief Erikson's journey across the Atlantic to Vinland, on the eastern coast of present-day Canada. Like A. D. Hope, Gould resists the imperative to write about his personal response to place through a Norse visor. Self-reflection does come indirectly in his essay on model shipbuilding. He writes about the Scandinavian knorrir, a vessel of simple design that has evolved to respond to the sea like an animal. > They gave, they flexed, they twisted to each buffet of the sea. More > important than the strength was their animate tolerance. It is > estimated that the knorrir evolved in Scandinavia over a period of > eleven hundred years, reaching its peak in the ninth century, when, > with its loveliness and simplicity of line, its combination of shallow > draught and a deep keel which, for the first time in maritime > development, allowed a ship to use a wind that came before the beam, > it was a supreme example of the shipwright's art.[^69] Gould compares this to the skill of writing a good poem, where all the components must act together, with no room for excess. Such a metaphor focusses the attention on the bench rather than the heart. Like his mentor Alec Hope, Gould professes an apolitical politics. In 1988, Gould had a residency in the English town of Lincoln. Joseph Banks, George Bass and Matthew Flinders were all from Lincolnshire and Gould was invited by the local branch of the Conservative Party to commemorate the Australian link with a bicentennial address.[^70] Gould used this occasion to argue for the apolitical nature of Australian identity. He described patriotism as an attachment to 'that environment which, with increasing familiarity, never loses its power to enchant'. Gould identified light and distance as the two elements of the Australian landscape that create this effect on him. Gould illustrated their interplay by a personal epiphany with historical resonance that he felt when first arriving by boat in Sydney Harbour. Gould placed his own poetic encounter with land in the context of other colonial beginnings---the 'foot-wetting' introductions to Australia by Captain James Cook and to British shores by Vikings. He contrasts the political idea of *nation*---the artificial scaffolding of the state---with the poetic experience of *country*. For Gould, the bicentenary celebrations contained too much fabrication of national pride and too little experience of the land, echoing Les Murray's call for an Australian Shinto as necessary compliment to global monotheisms. As representative of the more 'protestant' writers in Australia, Gould's works celebrate the labour of well-crafted compositions rather than plays of ideas or confessional outpourings. The content of his work harkens to the naïve romance of colonisation---an epic tradition that has largely retreated from 'sorry' Australia to the mythical battlegrounds of Iceland. And thus the Nordic star disappears into the horizon, perhaps to rise again when a new spirit of possibility takes Australia. #### **From failed warriors to dancing queens** It is worth the risk to claim that since Solander's arrival in 1770, the Nordic ideal has been more critical in the development of Australian culture than any English influence. Such a statement highlights the centrality of Nordic values to Anglo-Saxon mythology, and the cringing nature of English aspirations. While declining in significance, the Scandinavian ideal continues to provide an important landmark by which Australians can take bearings. The most recent issue on which they are judged sub-Nordic is the treatment of refugees. By contrast with the hostile reaction here to refugees, Sweden seems both more humane and more rational in its accommodation of asylum seekers. Melbourne writer Arnold Zable issues the familiar call: 'Sweden receives twice as many asylum seekers each year as we do, with half our population. Theirs is a far more humane government than ours ...'[^71] Australia seems destined to lurk in the shadows of Scandinavia. Why is there not the same frequency of comparison made with England or America? Why are there not the same calls to aspire to English reason or American energy? One obvious difference is that Australia is in a subservient position to the major English-speaking powers---subservient to England historically and America culturally. Any aspiration will consign Australia to a subaltern status. Scandinavia offers a back route to progress by means of which Australia might surpass England and America in egalitarianism and humanity. But there is an impenetrable barrier along this path. As a country of more diverse and competing interests, Australia will never achieve the kind of consensus necessary for Scandinavian style policies. Australia is left, as Manning Clark intimated, to define itself by its distance from these ideals. A sublime Nordic moment in Australian iconography occurred during the climax of the Sydney Olympic opening ceremony, when Cathy Freeman stood with the flame aloft, about to set a surrounding ring of water alight in a moment of Wagnerian alchemy. But the mechanism stuttered, and for three minutes the ceremony was held in suspense. To fill in this unscheduled break, the orchestra played a (pre-recorded) selection from Percy Grainger's *Warriors* ballet music. In 1956, Grainger had offered *Warriors* to the Melbourne Olympics, but it was considered too radical to be used. It seemed fitting that the Australian Nordic spirit should be heard, forty-four years later, during the one dramatic glitch in Sydney's otherwise seamless opening ceremony. By contrast, the Olympic closing ceremony celebrated the inauthentic glamour of Australian popular culture. It drew heavily on the iconography of glam films such as *Priscilla* and *Muriel's Wedding*, where characters find self-expression in miming Abba hits. At the climax of the evening, kitchen diva Kylie Minogue combined the camp and suburban in her performance as the 'Dancing Queen'. Rather than a 'pale imitation' of the Swedish band, Australians display themselves as even more gaudy, more theatrical and glitzier. Scandinavian backpackers loosen up under open skies. Australia has become a karaoke Sweden---an Iceland melting in the south. #### **Sources** The original workshop to explore Viking colonisation of Australia was held at Sydney's Object Galleries. Special thanks to the following for their contributions: Brian Allison, Ragnar Arnalds, Alan Gould, Olavi Koivukangas, Ian Lodewyckx, John Stanley Martin, Philip Mead, Anders Ousback, Bob Priestly, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Neil Watson. Alison Alexander, A Mortal Flame: Marie Bjelke Petersen, Australian Romance Writer 1874--1969, Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1994. John Bird, *Percy Grainger*, London: Macmillan, 1976. Marie Bjelke Petersen, *The Captive Singer*, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916. Robyn Boyd, *The Australian Ugliness*, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1960. Frank Clune & P. R. Stephensen, The Viking of Van Diemen's Land: The Stormy Life of Jorgen Jorgensen, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1954. Craig Cormick, Kurikka's Dreaming: The True Story of Matti Kurikka Socialist, Utopian and Dreamer, East Roseville, N.S.W: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Philip Drew, *The Masterpiece: Jorn Utzon: A Secret Life*, South Yarra: Hardie Grant Books, 1999. Alan Gould, *Icelandic Solitaries*, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978. Alan Gould, *The Totem Ship*, Hahndorf, S. A.: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1996. Percy Grainger, 'The Value of Icelandic to an Anglo-Saxon', in Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (eds), *Grainger on Music*, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 (orig. 1921). Alec Derwent Hope, *Chance Encounters*, Cartlon: Melbourne University Press, 1992. Vilbergur Juliusson 'Links Between Iceland and Australia', in Mark Garner and John Stanley Martin (eds), *Australia: The Scandinavian Chapter 1788--1988*, Swedish Section, University of Melbourne, 1991. Jorgen Jorgenson, *The Convict King: Being the Romantic Life and Adventures of Jorgen Jorgenson*, (trans. and retold by James Francis Hogan), Hobart: Oldham, Beddome & Meredith, 1932. Søren Kierkegaard, *Papers and Journals: A Selection* (trans. Alastair Hannay), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Bruce Kirmmse, *Kierkegaard in the Golden Age of Denmark*, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Olavi Koivukangas, Sea, Gold and Sugarcane: Attraction Versus Distance, Finns in Australia, 1851--**194**, Turku, Finland: Institute of Immigration, 1986. Karel Alex Lodewycks, The Funding oOf Wisdom: Revelations of a Library's Quarter Century, Melbourne: Spectrum Publications, 1982. Karel Alex Lodewycks, *The Belgians in Australia*, Bowen Hills, Qld: Boolarong Publications, 1988. Augustin Lodewyckx, *People for Australia: A Study in Population Problems*, Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1956. William Morris, 'The lesser arts', in Ada Briggs (ed.), *News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs*, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 (orig. 1878). Les Murray, *The Peasant Mandarin: Prose Pieces*, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978. N. J. B. Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land, Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1991. Betty Roland, *The Eye of the Beholder*, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1984. Dan Sprod, The Usurper: Jorgen Jorgenson and his Turbulent Life in Iceland and Van Diemen's Land 1780--1841, Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 2001. Jenny Teichman, Justus Jorgensen: Conversations and a Memoir, Cambridge, 1976. Derek Townsend, Jigsaw: The Biography of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen : Statesman---Not Politician, Brisbane: Sneyd & Morley, 1983. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, *Selected Poems: 1956--1994*, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995. ## **Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech from Agnes the Grim** This award means piss to me, as it would mean piss to anyone else from my country. I write badly, worse than any other wordsmith in my land. My nouns are drowned in blunt adjectives and my verbs jump awry like a bucket of cane toads. My sentences twitch about madly groping for full stops and the characters in my ramshackle tales complain in my dreams at the indignities they suffer at the tip of my clogged pen. Yes, I guess that makes me just the right nark to be up here tonight. I've got nothing to lose. My word womb is barren. My life has reached the ragged end of the thread. I am fit for nothing better now than to be thrown to the wolves of flash, the slaughtermen of gloss, and the vivisectors of fame. I will have five husbands, two wives, three eating disorders, ten nervous breakdowns, five hundred fits of rage, and disown all my children. There is nothing left of me but the brain-sink of magazines. My lip-glossed enemies are whooping with joy. There is one fellow countryman I'd like to finger for my current calamity. He has tried to avoid any notice by you, but I will set him in your sights now. For my deathly plight, I blame Ragnar the Thriftless, that layabout inlander, our self-smugged wordsmith who lacked the guts to accept this onerous burden. Ragnar wants to bask greedily in the shades of obscurity on his cattle station with dust-eating dingoes and a mangy wife. If he hadn't refused the shame of this highbrow prize, I wouldn't be here now, smelling like stale piss and smearing your ears with this ungrateful moaning. He's the one who should be taking this prize. Ragnar is a mean specimen of *Homo erectus*, scratching out his ditties between bouts of cock-pulling. Like *After* *Ragnarök,* his word-picture of the firestorm that routed the cassocked drones of White Christ glittered and cavorted on the page, and the noble Turiganna who discovers Thor's children in the desert, and the brown magic they use to knot the bowels of Gnirt and his marauding outlanders. It was shamefacedly gut-heaving action unlike any that has found itself on the page before. Ragnar is a vile and sneaky goat. He is the prime inheritor of the spirit that the dribbling fibbers brought to this miserable arsehole called Australia on the camel-dragger's dhow a millennium ago. If this bruised world was law-straight, then Ragnar should be here now, not me. In case you did not get the rub, Inlanders are canny in not being around when they should be. And Ragnar is the cunningest Inlander lizard of all, and he would sooner set fire to his own beard than get on an aeroplane. What's this? Ha! I'm glad to see some of you sneaking off, huffing and puffing. Go back to your Sofitel penthouses where you can chat about some savoury Third World issue over a glass of French piss. And what about you? Why aren't you joining them? I can hear some of you sniggering. You probably think me a breath of briny air after all the gormless mumblings of suits you've heard tonight. You're relieved to hear someone vent the truth, aren't you? Someone who gives bellow to their inner rumblings? Well, dear friends, fellow travellers, honest souls and true believers, you lie far beneath my scorn. At least the suits are see-through in their double-speak. At least it is obvious they are only here to freshen up the guest list for their little villa on a Greek island somewhere in the sun-cursed Aegean. But you, with your warm human touch, with your sympathies for the other, with your righteous anger at Logo-world. You are not fit to hold my toenails. You're stuck in dream world without grown-ups where poems embroidered with many colours shine with the spirit of a people as seen in a recent art-house flick. For you, everything is chocolate, innocent play-things of tango, ikat, whirling and bagpipes. To the world, you are just a pimple, swollen with the pus of envy that I just want to squeeze out and ... \[Sound lost as microphone is knocked over\] ... better to see the rest of you going now. You see rightly that I am without hope. I have not a kind sinew in my rusted bone frame. There is nothing in me that you can recover. I am vile. I bear my country's insult to the world, so let us grow strong in the jaw your wrath. \[Indecipherable holler\] Now there seem to be a few of you left. A couple of dozen perhaps. Mr Wilkins from the *Guardian* I see. You can't leave, can you? Not while I'm talking, just in case I stretch your ears with some other ripe indignity. Your unsteady neurones are fumbling about for the right kind of ditty to amuse your readers. As you are bone cold lazy dirt scratchers, allow me to suggest something like world championship wrestling. They always have a bad guy who mouths off, don't they. That would tickle your gormless readers and give captive brains a way of dodging my truth canon. You're the scab on the pile of pus that goes by the title modern civilisation. I bear my arse at you. You're bringing everyone else down to the rump of the world with Australia. Just a few years and we'll be sharing worms together. \[Followed by indecipherable vocalisations and body sounds. Agnes the Grim is escorted off the stage, with typical Australian protestations.\]