The federal parliamentary seat of Lindsay, west of Sydney, was formed in 1984, honouring the great Australian illustrator and writer Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The seat has been held since 2019 by the Liberal member, Melissa McIntosh.
When McIntosh’s colleague Angus Taylor was elected leader of the opposition in February, he immediately framed his political strategy around “Australian values”. He distanced himself from the government’s multiculturalism, called for a reduction to immigration and claimed to be in favour of “social inclusion” based on support for the “Australian way of life”.
Lindsay’s classic children’s book The Magic Pudding, first published in 1918, is an interesting commentary on those “Australian values”.
His story about a bad-tempered pudding, which never diminishes no matter how much you eat it, has been widely interpreted as defending our “way of life”. For a century, critics have praised Lindsay’s beautifully illustrated text as showcasing the “Australian dream” and the national character. The book has been celebrated for its depiction of the norm of blokey larrikinism and our love of mateship, at least among males.
In fact, The Magic Pudding is a clever critique. The wily Lindsay was warning readers that Australian culture and civic morality were dangerously shallow.
His tale was inspired by his reading of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Lindsay was one of Australia’s first enthusiasts for Nietzsche, whose political philosophy was about transforming democratic culture, moving it away from what he called “slave morality” and towards a new world of the “master morality” of elite artists.
Lindsay treasured works by Nietzsche, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with its message that “God is dead”. He feared that the crass philistinism of contemporary Australian democracy was tainted by “slave morality” and saw himself as a champion of “free spirits”.
The Magic Pudding was his attempt to tell that tale in a comic form.
‘Owners’ and ‘thieves’
The crafty depths of Lindsay’s critique can escape many first-time readers. But if they take a careful second look, many highly regarded “Australian values” emerge as second rate.
What many critics have fondly called the Australian dream is actually a grim picture of three self-declared “owners” monopolising control over a magically replenishing resource: Albert, the mean-spirited but endlessly edible pudding.
If Albert is the treasure of the story, then the koala Bunyip Bluegum is the hero. Bluegum initially appears as a young lad out to “see the world”. He might even be a potential artistic “free spirt”, having been coached by the unusual poet Egbert Rumpus Bumpus (who is also a koala).
But Bunyip Bluegum falls into company with Bill Barnacle and his sidekick, a penguin named Sam Sawnoff, the so-called “owners” of Albert. There follows a funny story about two gangs – pudding “owners” and pudding “thieves” – using their fists to fight for control of Albert.
But is it really true that, as critic Eleanor Whitcombe commented, Lindsay “created the ultimate ocker” in Albert the pudding? It might well be true that the book is “a true guide to the Australian national character” – but is Lindsay supporting or opposing this version of it?
In fact, Albert the pudding is an alien. He was “invented” out at sea by a non-Australian ship’s cook called Curry and Rice, whose sole ownership of the pudding caused Bill and Sam to become “justly enraged”.
The pair effectively drown Curry and Rice when they seize Albert, who never stops complaining about the malicious intervention of his new “owners”. The two “pudding thieves” see no legitimacy in the claims to ownership or the “the way of life” celebrated by Albert’s captors, who manage Albert as an alien slave.
Eventually, the two warring gangs end up in court, where Lindsay displays his most un-nationalistic portrait of the waywardness of Australian law and order. The mayor is ridiculous in his endless appetite for free bananas. The police officer is awkward and fearful of Albert’s rebellious distemper. The court usher is servile, treating the judge to repeated games of cards and plying him with glasses of port.
The hero Bunyip Bluegum beats the legal system with a clever lie that “Albert has been poisoned”. This so upsets the court that the “owners” are able to flee with their captive.
The tale ends with what many critics describe as an ideal conclusion: three “owners” high up in their tree, with the ever-miserable Albert secured in “a little Puddin’ paddock”.
Food and fighting
The Magic Pudding can be read as Lindsay’s black-humoured portrait of the primitive nature of a culture of “food and fighting”. The Australian way of life displayed in The Magic Pudding revolves around the life of the belly, not the life of the mind.
In a 1916 letter to publisher George Robertson, Lindsay describes Bunyip Bluegum as “the hero” of a story written against the background of “the brutal reality of war” – a story intended “to stiffen the younger generation to a more decent frame of mind”. Lindsay later wrote that his hope for “this generation” is “to see life clearly, and without the false equation of sentimentality”.
My conclusion is that Lindsay is not promoting civic pride in Australian nationality, but attempting to stimulate interest in alternative sources of national pride.
The Magic Pudding says nothing explicitly about Nietzsche, but it illustrates Lindsay’s deeply personal attempt to move beyond the ethos of military struggle at the end of the great war, in which he lost a younger brother in France at the end of 1916.
Nietzsche’s concept of the “higher man” sought to break free from the doctrine of social equality favoured by democratic movements.
What Lindsay learned from Nietzsche was that the military victory Australia earned in 1918 had merely protected a barbaric public culture.
In his book Creative Effort: An Essay in Affirmation, published not long after The Magic Pudding in 1920, Lindsay proposed that artistic “great souls” could use their talent for comedy to undermine the conventional “spirit of gravity” nurturing modern democracy, symbolised by the preeminence of “bellies” and lesser beasts like the “grunting pig”.
The aristocratic few, according to Lindsay, despise most ordinary citizens, who are “no more than a walking belly”. He observed sadly that “it is for the belly alone that half the energy of society is exerted”. The mind of the many fails to reach the higher levels of artistic spirit because it “is almost wholly concerned with the belly.”
The fate of Bunyip Bluegum, who is not given to fisticuffs, might be viewed in this sense as something of a cautionary tale. He is at his finest when he confronts the pudding-thieves and recites a long poem about the immorality of stealing, which moves the thieves to renounce “their evil courses”.
This is Lindsay’s most challenging test of Bunyip’s contribution to the society of pudding-owners: to try to use his poetic powers to turn the pudding thieves towards virtue.
Lindsay’s story is very much about Bunyip Bluegum rounding out the forceful skill-set of Bill and Sam – who clearly emerge as the very first pudding thieves, determined never to yield Albert to any competitor.
Gifted with poetic knowledge, Bunyip discovers that he has everything – “except food”. He uses his cleverness to help Bill and Sam, and is rewarded with a version of the high life, savoured by an endless supply of Albert’s hearty pudding.
But once he has access to Albert as a useful food slave, Bunyip loses interest in everything that might make his life more poetically noble.
Lindsay’s book warns readers that the humdrum complacency of Australian public culture needs the artistic excellence of “free spirits” as a cultural corrective to its misplaced dreaming. The Magic Pudding provides a belly full of laughs for children, but it is also a reminder of the importance of the life of the mind for adults uncomfortable with many practices of the “Australian way of life”.
Inspired by Nietzsche, Lindsay was hoping to provoke Australian readers to dream of something grander than a full belly.
Correction: an earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that the federal seat of Lindsay was established in 1948, not 1984.
John Uhr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
