SS 2011                  exam translation (advanced)        (Staatsexamen Herbst 2003)       additional  text #3

The Making of Australian Conscionsness*

Writing more than a century ago, when Americans had not yet settled the question of their 'identity' or discovered for themselves an independent role in the world, and when Made in

America had not yet become a mark of imperial authority, Henry James spoke of the complex fate of those who are children both of the old world and the new, and of the 'responsibility it entails for fighting against the superstitious valuation of Europe'. What James was concerned with was how, in the face of all that Europe represents in terms of achievement and influence, we are to find a proper value, neither brashly above nor cringingly below its real one, for what belongs to the new world; for what is local but also recent, since part of what is 'superstitious' in our valuation of Europe has to do with the reverential awe we may feel in the presence of mere age. Our ways of thinking and feeling and doing were developed and tested over many centuries before we brought them to this place, and gave them a different turn of meaning, different associations, a different shape and weight and colour, on new ground.

Australia and the United States are variations, though very different in tone and constitution on the same original. This means that we share qualities that will always lead us to make comparisons with our American predecessors, forms of social and political thinking that are peculiar enough to keep us close, however we may deviate in practice, and rare enough to be worth noting.

Australia and the United States derive their legal systems from the English Common Law*. That is, a system based on precedent rather than principle as in Continental Europe. Each case, as it comes up, is referred back to a previous one, and a judgment arrived at by comparing the two. This preference for the particular over the general has affected more than just the workings of the law. It has kept thinking in both our societies close to the example and fact, made it pragmatic and wary of abstractions, and if this has remained stronger in our intellectual life than in the American, it is because we missed the influence of Continental Europe that came early to the United States with successive waves of migration, and especially the one that came with the exodus of so many European intellectuals to America between the two wars. It was an influence we did not feel until the middle 1950s.

(from: D. Malouf. A spirit of play. The Making of Australian. Consciousness.
Sydney 1998: ABC Books)

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