Why So 'umble?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 251, 14 April 1944, Page 5

Why So 'umble?

T is astonishing that it should still be necessary for Australia and New Zealand to justify their presence on the earth: to justify it to Australians and New Zealanders. But Mr, Fraser had to refuse to accept a Uriah Heap role for New Zealand in the debate on the Anzac Pact, and Dr. Evatt a few days later had to take the same stand for Australia. In both cases the necessity for a stiff attitude was created by domestic criticism. It was not outside countries, friendly or unfriendly, that complained of our existence, but people within our own borders, and in two or three disgraceful cases within our own legislatures. Outside countries are in fact astonished that we cling so pitifully to our inferiority. The Americans, for example, whom we are alleged to have affronted in the Anzac Pact, don’t quite understand what we are quarrelling about. They expect people who have a name to answer to it: who have a home to give its address; who have interests to state them; and who have friends to acknowledge them in public. Except in fanatically isolationist circles, which are not America at all, the United States would pity us if we were afraid to accept an Australian invitation to tea, and laugh at us if we accepted-it furtively. There are of course ways of doing these things, and ways in which they should not be done. If a twenty-stone man stands inadvertently on one’s toe in a tram-car it is neither manners nor sense to ask him rudely if he thinks he owns the world. But it is neither manners nor sense to pretend that we like him there. It is tame-rabbit stupidity. We are not expected to be so ’umble as that. We cannot be so ’umble and remain something that fat men respect. Or lean men either. In New Zealand more than in Australia, but in both countries to some extent, we have played that foolish part too long.