10 most importnaty Aussies
Craig McGregor
Sydney Morning Herald
22 Dec 03
source: smh.com.au

Illustration: John Shakespeare

OK, here is the list of the 10 Most Important Australians of all time. They include the living and the dead. Men and women. Black and white. Youngish and old. You don't have to agree with the list or the order. It could easily have been three times longer. Maybe it should have included Simpson's donkey, the drover's wife ... and the drover's dog. And you don't have to like the people who have been chosen. As I wrote in the rock opera Hero: "Achilles was a bully. Ulysses was a thief. They were never noble. They were just hard to beat ..." These Australians, whatever you may think of them, have had an enormous impact upon this nation. That's why they are important and why they comprise the top 10.

1. Ned Kelly
You've got to start with Ned. He's the great, iconic figure of Australia - a tragic, confused but brave-hearted man who, in many ways, sums up the history of this contradictory continent. Born in chains, violent, rebellious, with a terrible sense of what was right and wrong, fair and unfair, which ended with him picking up the gun and enacting the bloody fate of many revolutionaries in post-colonial societies. Australia, too, became post-colonial. It became independent, then affluent, then sophisticated, then globalised. You'd think the image of a bearded, bank-robbing "Bastard from the Bush" would become lost in a welter of Coke ads and "Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!" footy chants.

But somewhere in the muddled history that all nations have, some memory of this Irish currency lad, with an iron Nolan mask welded to his face, stayed alive for generation after generation, decade after decade, war after war, disaster after disaster, boom after boom, until - as the never-ending stream of films and books and histories shows - Ned Kelly somehow came to be regarded as the classic Australian: irreverent, matey, fierce but jokey, a national hero of the sort no other country had created before. Of course, we hanged him.

2. Sir Donald Bradman
The Don. The greatest batsman ever, probably the greatest cricketer ever. What more do you need? In a nation that seems to adore sport and sportsmen - and even some sportswomen these days - it's enough to be superlative at something to win a people's admiration. And he was superlative. And more. When Bradman strode onto the cricket ground in his baggy green cap, the hopes of a young nation that still felt it had to prove itself against the Mother Country went with him. A hero? The word has been so misused in recent times that it has been appallingly devalued, but it's as well to remember the origin of the word: it's Greek, and it didn't refer to someone who was necessarily good; it just meant someone who did something extraordinarily well. That makes Bradman a hero. Just as well, because there were other aspects of Bradman's life that were less admirable. Some of his closest teammates thought him officious and arrogant. He made enemies among cricketers and cricket writers.

More seriously, there is a case to be made that, like many Australians of his generation, he was racist. On November 6, 1931 he was bowled out fourth ball, for a duck, by the Aboriginal fast bowler Eddie Gilbert, who apparently had no respect for Bradman and his reputation. The Don questioned Gilbert's action, accusing him later of jerking the ball. The clash became the talk of the nation. In subsequent matches, Gilbert was ferociously no-balled. His career was effectively destroyed. Bradman showed courage in the Bodyline series, when he was targeted by members of the England team. He never retaliated, except with his batting. After World War II, when his greatest victories were in the past, he came back and still entranced spectators with his grace and composure. As a schoolboy, I saw him at the Sydney Cricket Ground with fast bowlers Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller. Bradman was fielding. It was the closest I got to a cricketing god. For all his faults, there was something admirable about Don Bradman. The only contemporary cricketer who in any way approaches his achievements, because he is probably the greatest slow bowler we have had, is Shane Warne. Poor old Warney. Shows you what cricket has come to since The Don ruled over us.

3. Germaine Greer
A heroine. A pretty strange one: idiosyncratic, a deliberate controversialist, as likely to hit you with a distorted exaggeration as a profound insight. But she is also highly intelligent, radical, irreverent, sexual ... an in-your-face Public Intellectual. Maybe she's what public intellectuals should be like. She started off hanging around with the Push, went overseas, fell in with the Oz mob, and then used both her formidable mind and her bitter experience of men to write one of the great feminist tracts of the past century, The Female Eunuch. After the critical success of the book in England, she arrived in the United States to be met with deep suspicion by academic feminists such as Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem, who thought the male publishing world might be offloading a cheap imitation thinker on them. But after reading her book and listening to her, they were won over. She was the real thing. She still is.

Australia has been well served by intellectuals who have been brave enough to stand up to the scepticism of the Yahoo Country: Donald Horne, Geoffrey Blainey, Manning Clark and John Anderson, to name a few. Greer is an expatriate but we've been well served by expatriates: Robert Hughes, John Pilger, Clive James, Sidney Nolan, Joan Sutherland, Robert Helpmann, Clem Meadmore, Christina Stead ... The list stretches back through the generations. Once, Australian artists and intellectuals had to go overseas to be taken seriously and to make a name for themselves. A few came home again: Fred Williams, Patrick White, William Dobell. Now our best thinkers, writers, philosophers, artists, musicians and filmmakers stay in Australia - well, most of them, even though Hughes thinks Australia should be towed into the Pacific and sunk. Greer is a world figure but she is obviously very Australian as well. Flawed but amazing. We should be proud of her.

4. Rupert Murdoch
Love him or hate him, he bestrides global media like a colossus. After the US president, he is probably the most powerful man in the world - and even the president depends upon him to manipulate the masses in his favour. At the News Corp annual meeting in Adelaide this year, Murdoch began to show the first signs of old age: a bit hard of hearing, not sure where the questions came from. But at 72, he is still a formidable and threatening figure. Murdoch, in fact, is a perfect example of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony, namely indirect rule through cultural and ideological control. It helps that Murdoch is himself a control freak, as hapless editors all over the world have found; do what you're told, follow the Murdoch line or get chopped off at the knees. Some heavyweight politicians have found the same.

Yet you have to admire an Australian who starts off inheriting a dowdy little newspaper in Adelaide and parlays it into the most powerful media empire history has known - his newspaper, television, movie and electronic media interests now reach across China, Britain, Europe, the US, much of Asia and, of course, this continent. It made $4.4 billion last financial year. An Australian? Well, Murdoch is now a citizen of the US. But we claim a lot of New Zealanders as Aussies, from Neil Finn to Reg Mombassa to Russell Crowe, so we shouldn't be too worried about the Americans borrowing Murdoch. He became a US citizen just to qualify for ownership of TV chains and the Fox empire. But in terms of media ownership, the Australian Government regards him basically as an Australian. Rupert Murdoch doesn't think nationality counts for much any more: think globally. As usual, he's ahead of nearly everyone else.

5. Cathy Freeman
What a triumph! Not because she is a great athlete - which she is - but because of what she surmounted in her personal life: born to a struggling Aboriginal family, confronting the endemic racism of a Queensland coastal town, lacking anything in her background that might have given her confidence to take on the entire world. And worse; my brother, Adrian, wrote her biography, and it was to him that Cathy first revealed that she had been sexually abused as a child by a family friend, and the traumatic effect that had had upon her. She overcame it, Adrian says. "She lived on her instincts, in her running and her life; she has an instinct to do the right thing at the right time in both."

Freeman has been accused by some of her indigenous peers of being apolitical, of not taking up the Aboriginal cause sufficiently. But she did drape herself in the Aboriginal flag after winning the 400 metres at the 1994 Commonwealth Games, much to the explosive ire of sports administrators such as Arthur Tunstall. You could argue that lighting the flame at the Olympic Games, dressed in her shining white jumpsuit, she became the perfect token ... white. (My grandfather used to say, about any coloured person he admired: "He's a white man."). But that's a blindly white perspective. But don't knock Cathy. She belongs to a long tradition of Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal sportspeople, from Eddie Gilbert to Dave Sands to Evonne Goolagong-Cawley to Nicky Winmar to Gorden Tallis, who stand up for their heritage by what they do rather than what they say.

6. Barry Humphries
Australia's greatest living satirist. Also, possibly, our greatest living misogynist? Or even our greatest living misanthrope? He is adored by Clive James, Martin Sharp and Phillip Adams, plus most of the theatrical establishment as well as the urban cognoscenti overseas. And rightly so. Australia badly needed someone like Humphries to puncture our pretentiousness and point a hilarious, stabbing finger at everything that was sacred in (to use a phrase beloved by our worst politicians) the "Australian way of life". He also had the intelligence to turn his satirical portrait of the average Aussie housewife, Edna Everage, into an amazing self-parody in the form of globetrotting megastar Dame Edna, who projects all the extremism of Humphries himself. I once had the temerity to describe Humphries as "a brilliant satirist" but "anti-humanist". He never forgave me. For a while I appeared in his stage shows as Craig Steppenwolf, a typical Paddington pseudo-intellectual. I was flattered. Still am. Come back, Barry, all is forgiven. Yet I fear Humphries remains, for all his importance and deserved success, a reactionary, people-slating, woman-baiting performer. The perpetual stage image of him is of a befrocked figure with her dress hitched up dissing all the "sharing and caring" people he lampoons.

7. Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Art critic John McDonald has described Australian Aboriginal painting as the most important art in the world today, and although this art can be very much communal, some individuals stand out: from earlier painters such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Rover Thomas to contemporary artists such as Kathleen Petyarre and Dorothy Napangardi, women who create work of incredible power and refinement. The most extraordinary of them all, however, is Kngwarreye, a dignified desert-dweller who was born in 1910 in Alhalkere country, near Utopia, and didn't even begin painting on canvas until she was an old woman. She began with batik fabrics, then turned to creating the western desert "dot" paintings that won her an international reputation.

What astonished the art world, however, is that in subsequent years she produced work in radically differing genres, which virtually reimagined some of the major movements of the 20th century: pointillism, abstract expressionism, colourfield, even op-art. She used stripes, dots, splotches, streamers, loops and whorls, monochromes, black-and-white graphics, colours that ranged from pastel to high- intensity. She installed tribal helpers. Much of her work related to women's ceremonies and body painting and the traditions she had learnt as an Anmatyerre woman. Yet Kngwarreye's art also seems saturated with the forms, and even the metaphysics, of the Central Australian Desert. After Fred Williams she is probably our greatest landscape painter. What she represents, however, is even more important: a 40,000-year-old cultural tradition that still has the power to fill Australians with awe.

8. Slim Dusty
I'd included Slim Dusty in this list before he died. Before his death, he'd been identified as a national treasure; since then, he's become even more so. All the eulogies were deserved, especially those by the singers who said that Slim Dusty provided a link between the folk singers and bush balladists of our past, such as Duke Tritton, Sally Sloane and Banjo Paterson, and contemporary country songwriters, including John Williamson and Eric Bogle. Born Gordon Kirkpatrick in the hill country behind Kempsey, he became our best-loved country singer and turned The Pub with No Beer into a national anthem. Not the least of his achievements was the way he (like Buddy Williams) took his music to outback Aboriginal communities and helped make country music the staple music of young people there. I first heard him as a kid growing up in Gundagai; it was the first music I ever really liked. I couldn't understand why the performers all seemed to have American names: Tex Morton, Buddy Williams, Slim Dusty... Later I came to realise that this was a great example of the way in which local cultures, such as Australia's, could make over an imported culture instead of being simply taken over. That's what Slim Dusty and his mates did: took American country music and turned it into a distinctive local sound. The guitar and the high nasal voice were borrowed, just as Kasey Chambers does today, but the songs, the nuances and the messages were authentically Australian. In an era of globalisation, it's important to recognise what Slim Dusty demonstrated: the global can be turned native.

9. Bruce Petty
Cartoonist, filmmaker, animator, installation artist, illustrator, writer - there isn't much Bruce Petty hasn't done. Australia has produced an astonishing array of world-class cartoonists over the years, from Phil May, Hop and Lowe through to Mercier, Molnar and the current spectrum of black-and-white (and colour) artists. But Petty is the greatest. He's influenced cartoonists as diverse as Patrick Cook, Michael Leunig and Bill Leak; and throughout his career he's turned an uncompromising, fiercely radical intellect upon Australian life and society. A wry, diffident man, you wouldn't expect from his self-deprecating manner that he is called a "genius" more often than any other Australian I know. Fellow cartoonist Les Tanner once said of him: "The worst thing that can happen to a cartoonist is that he becomes a guru or a crying drunk. Petty has become a bloody great guru." He has a formidable mind and insatiable curiosity.

When he turned to drawing for film the results won Australia's second Academy Award, for best animated film. When he turned to installations such as The Money Machine , he astonished critics by making the machines actually work. He even made them funny. What Petty has done is push cartooning, which has always been a triumphantly pop art form, into high art. As Charlie Parker did with jazz. His last book, The Absurd Machine , is nothing less than a postmodern masterpiece - a 150-page cartoon history of the world (and its future) with simultaneous disjunctive running text, cartoon balloons, graphic-novel visuals and the sort of commentary he writes in the intro: "Every now and then, the planet starts to smoke, a bad rattle develops, and it has to be grounded for repairs. The whole thing has to be stripped of its dogmas and have its memory rewired. This involves loud music, funny dancing, designing your own clothes, annoying the police, and throwing things around a bit. It is called the 'SIXTIES' ... And the thing is, on all the evidence, the next 'Sixties' refit might have to be brought forward a bit." He's right.

10. John Howard
A bit of a surprise, perhaps. But prime ministers are important; he may be the most reactionary and divisive prime minister Australia has had, but Howard has also had an enormous impact on Australian society. In many ways he's a throwback to a past we thought we'd left behind; he evokes that white-picket-fence golden age that many Australians think of with nostalgia, while he exploits the national traits that accompanied it: our racism, our xenophobia, our ocker jingoism, our historic willingness to fight other people's wars whenever the chance arises. He's also got characteristics we like to think of as typically Australian. Like, he's got guts. He's believed in a consumption tax all his life and finally got it through, where Bob Hawke and Paul Keating squibbed it. He's got amazing persistence: nobody thought he could defeat Andrew Peacock and all the other contenders for the Liberal leadership, and beat Labor into the ground, and then become our longest-serving Liberal prime minister after his hero, Sir Robert Menzies. He was a nerdy, undervalued man for most of his life, the underdog who became top dog. Another popular Aussie fable. Gough Whitlam, a transforming, turbulent leader, would have been a safer choice for the Top 10. But he lasted only three years and couldn't even stop himself getting sacked. A great and tragic figure. Whereas Howard ... whatever you think of him, one thing must be admitted: he brings out the worst in Australians. For that alone, he's in the top 10.