‘Australia has come of age, and has a civilization which is distinctive and independent’, the dustjacket of Coleman’s anthology boldly proclaimed; two decades later most of the contributors are querying our culture, arguing that it is not independent, and exude pessimism about the future.

The earlier book was published by Andrew Fabinyi and this later one is by way of tribute to him; it begins with a warmly personal account of him by fellow publisher John Hooker. The subjects covered, whether by intention or not, are much the same as in the earlier anthology: the environment, education, religion, the arts, the media, migrants. A sign of the changes which have occurred is that A Nation Apart includes chapters on the economy, women and Indigenous Australians which the other lacked. Dr Sol Encel is the only author to contribute to both, on ‘Power’ in the first and an incisive survey of ‘Capital, Classes & Occupations’ in the second.

Otherwise the books are tilted, politically, in opposite directions. The approach of the first was basically right-of-centre, as the list of contributors reveals: Peter Coleman, James McAuley, Vincent Buckley, Max Harris, etc. The current book is tilted to the left, with particularly bitter essays like the one on ‘The Media: at our Expense’ by Julie James Bailey, which is radical, pessimistic, and offers virtually no solutions to the media impasse in which we have mired ourselves.

And here, perhaps, is one clue to the tone of the book. Whereas Australian Civilization was essentially a celebration of our culture by intellectuals who felt in tune with the prevailing social/political climate, A Nation Apart is written mainly by people who feel totally out of sympathy with it. Another difference: the earlier writers were mainly generalists, like Donald Horne, and wrote better; the current group are mainly academics, and give more information. Finally, they are writing about a different Australia. The first was buoyant and apparently certain of its identity; the second is disillusioned, sceptical, and profoundly worried.

What a difference, what a collapse in self-esteem, in twenty-one years!

The opening essay is George Seddon’s history of ‘The Man-modified Environment’, which starts in an extraordinarily ambitious manner but dribbles off somewhat towards the end. ‘Living in Western Australia’, by Fay Zwicky, is brilliantly personal and therefore somewhat out of kilter with the dourly academic manner of most of the book, yet the ambivalence she displays in ‘our isolation can be seen either as an empty doubtful freedom experienced at too high a cost or as a liberation of the spirit’ could act as a metaphor for Australia itself.

Elizabeth Perkins’s Living in the Deep North’ is disappointing. The switch to the city, however, works well with essays by Graham Dunkley on ‘The Economy’, Belinda Vaughan on ‘Women’, Lorna Lippmann on ‘A Migrant People’, Leonie Sandercock on ‘The Cities in the ‘Eighties’ and Sol Encel’s overview.

The arts are well-treated. Laurie Clancy contributes a typically perceptive account of Australian literature over the last thirty years as secular in tone, urban in geography, and formally conservative, and uses Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s line ‘Finding our heroism in rejection / Of bland Utopias’ as a motif; his own assessment of contemporary writers, including the ‘Generation of ‘68’ poets, is perhaps a reflection of the conservatism he discerns. Ronald Millar performs the considerable feat of writing an essay on ‘The Visual Arts’ without mentioning a single Australian artist; it’s a good guide to the intellectual currents and vogues of the last decade, and ends by being sceptical, even cynical, about the future.

Finally, there are essays by Gwyneth Dow on ‘Education’, Brian Stoddart on ‘Aspects of Contemporary Australian Sport’, which mounts a somewhat suspect case in defence of commercialism in sport, Colin Bourke on ‘Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders’, J.D. McCaughey on ‘Churches, Sects and Cultures’ and Bruce Grant arguing for self-defence in ‘Australia and the World’. The book is well-edited, with an index, not too many footnotes, several pages of references and further reading, and a simply awful jigsaw jacket which looks like a BHP ad or one of those Film Australia documentaries of the 1960s.

Which leaves the second of Leonie Sandercock’s contributions (why two from Ms Sandercock?), ‘Work and Play: the Architect, the Bees, and the Space Invaders’.

One essay which I remember with particular clarity from Australian Civilization, and which had a considerable impact upon me when I read it, was Manning Clark’s essay on ‘Faith’, which first delineated the two great secular faiths which he believed ran through Australian culture, politics and thought, and which he symbolised by the intellectual cultures of Melbourne and Sydney. If there is a similarly outstanding essay in the current collection it is this one of Leonie Sandercock’s, which doesn’t attempt anything like Manning Clark’s grand design but does focus upon one of the crucial questions of our time: how do we make work available to everyone, and how do we make it worthwhile?

In a closely argued critique of the way in which new technologies are being deployed (she rejects the Luddite alternative of opposing them) she sees the heralded Age of Leisure being transformed into a world ‘in which a privileged elite in control of the technology, the jobs and the wealth use their position and power to repress the new caste of untouchables – the permanently unemployed’, unless work is redistributed and redefined.

That would mean, perhaps, cutting the ‘normal’ working week in half; sharing jobs; allowing people to move in and out of the ‘paid’ or ‘normal" workforce for days, weeks, years; recognizing that the housewife’s domestic labour is work, and creating a mix of formal and domestic labour; and making sure that nobody suffered a financial penalty because they had reduced or no conventional employment. If work is redistributed in this way, and the increased productivity of the new technologies used to pay for the redistribution, we may escape the horrific futures postulated for us by writers like George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, and Doris Lessing.

Leonie Sandercock also argues that many of the new technologies have hierarchical systems of control built into them to reduce workers to ‘bees’, and that these should be changed, quite deliberately, to designs which make the workplace more democratic. After all a machine, in theory, shouldn’t need a boss … any more than a worker does.

Another strategy is to encourage the informal, self-sufficient economy, whereby people are less dependent on the formal economy and have less need of conventional paid jobs.

All this will have to be paid for, which means massive changes in taxation and welfare systems – this, in the land of ‘the bottom of the harbour’! It will mean reinforcing public control over the new production systems, the way wealth is shared, and the protection of paid and unpaid workers. As Bruce Petty pointed out in his Oscar-winning film on leisure, all the present arrangements are artificial.

This is too brief a summary of Sandercock’s argument, but it might at least indicate its timeliness. A Nation Apart is timely too. The government of Canberra may have changed, but the problems remain, and the ALP’s ‘new pragmatism’ doesn’t look like it is solving them. For a start, under Scenario A adopted by the new government at the summit, unemployment will be just as high in a year’s time as it is now. In the long term it may get worse; there are predictions of two million unemployed by 1990. Where does that leave our social democracy?

If I had to come up with a single (fashionable) word to describe the tone of A National Apart it would be ‘dystopian’. It was conceived and written during the last years of Fraserism, which was enough to make anyone feel gloomy. Yet perhaps this is, to some extent, a mark of maturity in our thinking, a willingness to abandon utopias and face a forbidding future. As Leonie Sandercock writes, ‘Something has gone wrong somewhere’. Yes.