By Amanda Lohrey
Amanda Lohrey: “At times I find myself nostalgic for the old Australia where ambition was an optional extra.”Credit:Peter Mathew
The word “ambitious” is one of the most loaded in the English language. It can be a term of approval, but it can also be weaponised as a put-down. A lot will depend on the company you keep.
When in the 1960s I was a student in the hothouse of a selective high school, ambition was a core value. We were being educated to join a complex of governing elites and treated to regular exhortations to strive, to aim high and to make our mark.
But this kind of talk tended to leave me feeling uneasy. Strive for what, and why? There seemed to be an implied goal, something to do with “proving yourself”. But what part of yourself needed proving? And to whom?
And then there was the question of what could be argued to constitute proof and – this was crucial – who decided?
Applicants for jobs are asked where they see themselves in four years’ time, and they had better “see” themselves higher up the pole.
This bolshie adolescent resistance may well have been influenced by the fact that I grew up in a family of working-class hedonists.
To say they were not ambitious would be an understatement. A drink, a bet, a swim, a good book (they were largely self-educated), a sing-along at a supper night and the pleasure of playing and watching just about any kind of sport – this was what life was about.
Work was a necessary evil and no sane person wanted the foreman’s job. Someone had to pay the bills, so you did your work and did it conscientiously; otherwise you were letting your fellow workers down and were a parasite or, in the parlance of the day, a bludger. Meanwhile, the union existed to keep a lid on excessive striving.
This was the old Australia of the 1950s and ’60s where the ethic of mateship was primary. Mateship had evolved as a defensive response to hard times when it was felt that any form of self-seeking individualism could undermine communal bonds. It was an outlook that could be generous and loyal, but it could also be narrow and conformist. It meant you could be warned not to “get above yourself” or be confronted with the belligerent reproach, “Who do you think you are?”
As a member of Labor Youth in the 1960s, I listened to other and older members of the ALP deplore Gough Whitlam because he was “ambitious”. I soon realised that this was code for the fact that he wanted to overhaul the party and promote a radical agenda of reform and, worse, he made this plain with an arrogance that was considered un-Australian.
Amanda Lohrey grew up in a family of working-class hedonists.Credit:Peter Mathew
When I began work in a conventional job, one that paid the bills, I worked under a team leader who was gifted. But two of his peers in the same department warned me that he was “ambitious”, a boat-rocker. They seemed to think that the good ideas he was promoting were purely a matter of his own self-advancement. And so I learned that “ambitious” could be a term used to discredit someone more able than you, or at odds with your own agenda.
Since then, much has changed. To be ambitious now has become an entrenched norm in the radically – some would say ruthlessly – individualistic culture that has developed over the past 30 years of neoliberal capitalism. Today, every able-bodied citizen is expected to morph into some kind of entrepreneur, contractor or consultant, and that means aspiring to an ever-increasing income on the back of an ever-expanding workload in the service of which each individual is expected to devise their own distinctive PR profile and promote it energetically via social media.
Applicants for jobs are asked where they see themselves in four years’ time, and they had better “see” themselves higher up the pole. Does anyone ever say: “Well, by then I’m hoping to go part-time and take up pottery or windsurfing?”
Politicians get shouty about “productivity”, while education in the arts and humanities, for its own sake, is considered a frill and a luxury.
Children are told that there are no limits to what they can achieve, an official piety that floats like a puff of cotton wool over public schools that are chronically underfunded. Could this possibly have anything to do with epidemic levels of depression and anxiety among the young?
At times, I find myself nostalgic for the old Australia where ambition was an optional extra. Fine if that was your thing, but don’t expect the rest of us to buy in. I recall a moment in the late 1970s when the great US tennis champion Billie Jean King declared that Australians lacked self-respect. Why? Because crowds at Australian tennis tournaments tended to barrack for the underdog. They did not identify with winners and were, by implication, “losers”.
What King was reacting against was the residue of an old convict-based culture of comradely fatalism. Winners got the big land grants and ran the chain gangs, and you kept your sympathy in reserve for the unlucky and the game. It was a culture that had its downside, but it had its egalitarian strengths. In its place we are all free traders now.
Amanda Lohrey is in conversation with literary critic Julieanne Lamond, author of Lohrey, at the State Library on September 10 for the Melbourne Writers Festival.
The Age is a festival partner and is pleased to offer a 20 per cent discount on tickets for Age subscribers.
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