When I returned to the United States last November, my Keats book was unfinished. I had assumed that my work on friendship had already been completed, but my experience in Australia had made it clear to me that this was not so. Not only was I struck by my own personal experience of friendship in Australia, but I was astonished to discover just how central considerations of mateship have been to Australian discussions of national identity. I therefore spent a considerable amount of my time in the country last year grappling with the complexities of mateship, which I recognise is not identical with friendship, but which surely has close connections with it.

According to an old Latin tag, ‘Friends are people who waste time together’. For Americans, sadly, wasting time is considered unproductive, which is to say, wasting money. Australians feel increasingly rushed as well, but they still seem much less frenzied than Americans, for whom time has become yet one more commodity. Many Americans have great difficulty conceiving a notion of leisure beyond the shrivelled categories of the weekend, the holiday, the vacation or retirement – and even those we feel compelled to fill with clearly defined activities. By contrast, the Australian concept of ‘having a yarn’ is deeply appealing, implying as it does the kind of conversation that is unconstrained by time, and that need not issue in some result or product but rather is savoured as an end in itself.

In this respect, Australia seems a more fertile ground for the flourishing of friendship than America. But so unaccustomed are we to reflecting on friendship that the very posing of the issue undoubtedly strikes us as bizarre. Yet I would argue that our failure to think seriously about friendship, both in America and in Australia, has impoverished our relationships as much as it has impoverished our cultural discourse. Exploring the influence on friendship of the acceleration of time is just one of the numerous crucial issues about friendship that have gone largely unexamined.

In Faster: The acceleration of just about everything, science writer James Gleick describes the hundreds of ways in which time has been speeded up in recent years. My favourite examples are the Tokyo restaurant that charges by the minute rather than the food, or the practice of hitting eighty-eight seconds on the microwave timer because for something requiring a minute and a half it’s faster to punch the eight button twice than to hit nine and then have to move your finger to zero.

In the United States, we now have lights that actually count down the number of seconds you have to wait before crossing. Just a few years ago, nobody would have considered this wait a unit of time worth noticing, let alone measuring or using. But now, if I know I have fifty seconds to wait, I can pull out my mobile and make a call, or even take out my Blackberry and write a quick email. Ten years ago, if I was five or ten minutes early for my class, it never would have occurred to me that I had a unit of time available in which I could actually do something. Now, however, five minutes is unquestionably a unit of time of which I am aware.

How has this acceleration of time affected friendships? Deeply tied to the shrinking of space through technology and the increasing obsession with work and productivity – at least in the American context – the acceleration has proceeded so far that we can barely imagine the kind of time that friendship requires.

In Australia, of course, no consideration of friendship can ignore the powerful and uniquely Australian tradition of mateship. While it would be a distortion to understand mateship only as a version of friendship – clearly it is quite different, in some respects, from traditional conceptions of friendship – it would be equally inaccurate to see no connection at all between the ideas of mateship and friendship. This essay attempts to bring into focus both the differences and the similarities between mateship and friendship, and in the process to raise some questions about the legacy of mateship that may take us beyond the polarised controversy and oversimplifications that have characterised earlier discussions.

A decade has passed since the controversy about whether to include mateship among the values celebrated in the new preamble to the Australian constitution. ‘Australians are free to be proud of their country and heritage,’ John Howard wanted to say in the preamble, ‘and free to pursue their hopes and ideals. We value excellence as well as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship.’ The storm of criticism that followed is perhaps best summed up in the official response of the Australian Women Lawyers:

The reference to ‘mateship’ in the preamble is an insult to those women who have striven to show that mateship has often been at the core of their exclusion in business and public domains. ‘Mateship’ has come to represent the symbol of lesser treatment for women … By ignoring women, the Prime Minister and Opposition leader, Beazley, who doesn’t see a problem with ‘mateship’, have shown they do not understand the changes in our society over the past 30 years. It is not political correctness – it is a question of accepting that both women and men have equal rights in our nation.

To an American these debates are familiar enough, dramatising, as they do, hotly contested issues of gender, exclusivity, power and national identity. Over the past few decades, the ‘old-boy network’, as we refer to it in the United States, has been the familiar target of a variety of critiques of male privilege, and literary critics such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have developed influential theories of what she calls ‘homosocial bonding’, or male-male heterosexual friendship that necessarily entails, that both assumes and enforces, the inferiority of women and gays.

However familiar the issues of gender and power at stake in such debates may be to an American ear, what is astonishing to me is that the subject of mateship could become the focus of a national debate in the first place. Having lectured and written about friendship for the past few decades, and repeatedly observed that its place in the modern world has been trivialised, ignored and misunderstood, I was flabbergasted to discover this Australian controversy, since it would be simply unimaginable for matters of friendship to move into the spotlight in the United States.

That they did so in Australia will have come as no surprise to most Australians. While the kind of heterosexual male bonding and exclusivity that one associates with mateship can be very much a part of the American ethos of male friendship – from the fraternities of American university campuses to the boozy camaraderie of jocks at the football – mateship entails a much deeper association with certain qualities that are taken to be uniquely Australian. In this respect, the Australian conception of mateship is much more inextricably tied up with narratives of national identity than is the American conception of friendship. That is why it seemed so important to Howard that mateship be officially inscribed in the constitution. He sees it not as one among many Australian phenomena but as something at the core of national identity, something that distinguishes Australia from other nations and should be celebrated. ‘I want to dedicate my government to the maintenance of traditional Australian values,’ Howard said in 1998. ‘And they include those great values of mateship and egalitarianism.’

Americans, of course, share the value of egalitarianism. Equality, as Tocqueville pointed out long ago, is the central ideal of the American experiment, and all American narratives of national identity have some notion of equality at their centre. But, unlike its Australian counterpart, the story Americans tell themselves about their national identity does not include friendship. Americans may see themselves as a friendly people, but our sense of what makes us distinctive as a nation is not at all related to some special claim to valuing – or being proficient in – friendship; whereas, for Howard, it is precisely that claim that he is making for Australia. Mateship is, for him, somehow at the heart of what it means to be an Australian. One reason his proposal to enshrine mateship in the constitution struck such a raw nerve in Australia is that he was simultaneously promoting a sexist conception of friendship and suggesting that mateship is at the centre of what it means to be an Australian. Fighting for its inclusion in the preamble, Howard insisted that mateship was ‘unarguable, distinctively and proudly Australian’.

The problem with that position is that, while it aggressively represents itself as non-exclusive, it is just the opposite. In its response to Howard’s 1999 proposal, the Women’s Electoral Lobby observed that ‘mateship has always been about Anglo male bonding. It excludes women, Aboriginal people and men who look different.’

In this respect, there is a parallel with the way in which the American claim to value equality seems so contradictory to the nation’s history of slavery and racial discrimination. But what is so striking about the Australian situation is that, unlike the American, it locates the connection between equality and friendship at the core of its understanding of itself as a nation at the centre of its narrative of national identity. This can be seen in the outcry that surrounded the ban that was placed on the use of the term ‘mate’ by security guards in the Australian parliament in 2005. The intent of the ban was to prevent the possibility of patronising or insulting prominent visitors, perhaps even heads of state, by calling them ‘mate’. But the ban was quickly lifted after protests that this use of ‘mate’ represented the best Australian anti-hierarchical traditions, its wonderfully unpretentious open friendliness, the tacit sense that distinctions are irrelevant for we are all just ‘mates’. That such a term might be banned in the Australian parliamentary gallery seemed antithetical to the dominant understanding of the national character.

That understanding was given its most influential articulation by Russel Ward in The Australian Legend (1958). Ward traces the development of a national character that is deeply associated with mateship, whose origins he traces from the communal spirit of the convicts, through the early pastoral workers, or bushmen, who had to rely on each other – usually without women – in very difficult circumstances, just as the goldminers did, and after them, the soldiers of World War I and II. For Ward, the critical moment in the development of this Australian legend, in this founding story of national identity, occurs in the writing associated with Henry Lawson and The Bulletin, which brings to fruition the concept of mateship that was implicit in the noble bushman and that in the 1890s is profoundly tied up with the development and ideology of the labor union movement. The apotheosis of this myth begins with the diggers of World War I and culminates in the evolution of Anzac Day after World War II.

Ward’s book, which was itself influenced by the earlier formulations of Vance Palmer and others, has generated an enormous response. Historians, literary and cultural critics have pointed to the emergence of important gender and sexual issues; John Hirst has pointed to Ward’s neglect of alternate legends of national identity; and Graeme Davison has observed that, rather than actually finding the origins of mateship in the historical bushman, the writers of The Bulletin were, in reality, projecting back onto the bushman certain contemporary values and biases of their own, including the loneliness of the emerging cities. Richard White, among others, has raised questions about the very viability of the quest to establish the accuracy or inaccuracy of any account of national character or identity, arguing that ‘Australia has long supported a whole industry of image-makers to tell us what we are. But in fact,’ White claims,

there is no ‘real’ Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention. There is no point asking whether one version of this essential Australia is truer than another because they are all an intellectual construct … When we look at ideas about national identity, we need to ask, not whether they are true or false, but what their function is, whose creation they are, and whose interest they serve.

Attempts to do just that have kept these issues very much alive in a variety of fields. Among the most illuminating is the work of Marilyn Lake and Miriam Dixson, both of whom have written perceptively about the extent to which mateship excluded women and about the costs of that exclusion. Pioneering as those studies were, it is redundant to summarise them here, precisely because the feminist critique of mateship has had such wide currency in recent decades as to be very much a part of the ongoing public debate about the subject. In 1965 the poet Judith Wright had observed that ‘the “mateship” ingredient of Australian tradition … left out of account the whole relationship with women’. Forty years later, ABC journalist Virginia Haussegger writes, in the Canberra Times of 16 December 2006, that ‘mateship has nothing to do with at least half of the Australian population … It has,’ she says,

grown out of the stories of men, about and for men. It comes from war stories, bush ballads and bar yarns …To proclaim mateship with its blokey and ‘male only’ overtones a national virtue, worthy of enshrining in a citizenship test, is embarrassingly old-fashioned … and sexist.

In addition to excluding women, mateship can also exclude other groups. Even Ward acknowledges that ‘the mateship of the pastoral workers rigidly excluded Asians’, a subject that Humphrey McQueen explores in detail in A New Britannia (1970). In a penetrating essay published twenty years ago in Meanjin, Dennis Altman, after observing how extraordinary it is that the myth of mateship has been so persistent, examines the various ways in which the myth has obfuscated our understanding of male bonding and sexuality, and militarised our understanding of loyalty. He concludes, however, that

we should not be too ready to abandon the concept altogether. A revamped ‘mateship’, one that ceases to exclude along lines of race and gender, and that stresses the sense of solidarity and co-operation, may well offer some cultural and ideological hope to a demoralised and deradicalized labor movement.

The authors of Imagining Australia: Ideas for Our Future (2004) – Macgregor Duncan, Andrew Leigh, David Madden, and Peter Tynan – are also intent on redefining the tradition of mateship instead of catapulting it. Acknowledging that ‘the rituals of mateship have been, historically, male-dominated – mateship has been quintessentially a relationship between Anglo-Celtic men’, they concede that ‘women, Indigenous Australians and non-Anglo immigrants have often been suspicious of elevating mateship to a higher role in Australian national identity’. They ‘strongly believe’ that:

mateship is a concept ripe to be updated. We should work up the notion of mateship so that, far from being something between blokes, it is used generically within the Australian community to refer to ‘good citizenship’ and an ‘ethic of care’ between citizens. It should come to be viewed as the connection that all Australians have between each other, regardless of our background, ethnicity, or circumstance, reflecting the humanist ideals of ‘brotherhood’, ‘fraternity’, ‘community’ and even ‘love’.

There is obviously something attractive in this appeal to the wisdom of finding a middle ground between trenchant but occasionally glib critiques of mateship on the one hand, and reactionary, never-say-die defences on the other. Given the persistence of mateship, perhaps it is better for Australians to try to come to terms with this important part of their past and culture and to reconceive mateship rather than eliminate it. The authors of Imagining Australia see mateship as just one example among many traditional Australian values that political leaders ‘should continue to emphasize … when describing the type of country that they envisage for the future, but [should also, they claim] consciously try to expand the meaning of those values to make them more inclusive for all Australians’. According to this view, John Howard’s culpability would not be that he used the term ‘mateship’ in the preamble but that he did so without reinterpreting it to be more inclusive. ‘As a society,’ Imagining Australia claims, ‘we need to learn how to express the new values of tolerance, compassion and diversity through the language and the values of our history’.

The attempt to salvage certain qualities that remain attractive about mateship – e.g., loyalty, cooperation, compassion – while eliminating such unsavoury aspects as sexism and racism seems not only sensible to me but an important part of the larger project of connecting the past with the increasingly multicultural future. The question is whether this is a real possibility or a pipedream.

Hirst takes up this question in the introduction to his reader The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the Australian National Character Since 1770 (2007). ‘Those who have attacked the old Australian character and the very notion of a national character,’ he says, ‘argue that a diverse nation has no need to discover or define or celebrate a distinctive character; it should be committed solely to the civic values of democracy, the rule of law and toleration – or better, the welcoming of difference – the values that a liberal nation anywhere needs to cultivate.’ Thinking along these lines, the only reasonable response to mateship would be to reject it entirely as an impediment to the values of tolerance and justice. Under the section on mateship, Hirst thus includes an excerpt from Dixson’s The Real Matilda, which seems to be based on precisely that assumption. But Hirst also recognises the option I have just sketched: namely, the call to synthesis that we have witnessed in Altman and Imagining Australia. His final reading on mateship is therefore an excerpt from Imagining Australia which includes some of the material I quoted above.

Hirst wonders whether ‘there may come a time when the rule of law and toleration … are enough, though it is hard to imagine a nation so defined being one to love or die for … For the moment anyway we cannot manage without a sense of what unites us as Australians.’ I would argue, on the contrary, that whatever one’s position may be on the viability of defining national character, one can still be committed to salvaging the best elements of a traditional value and eliminating the worst elements. This is one area where left and right, essentialists and postmodernists, can find common ground. I agree with Hirst that ‘the civic values are not enough, that if rights are to be protected there must be a community to which people are warmly attached so that they will care about each other’s rights’. But I disagree that one can only define such a community if one embraces the notion that there is indeed a distinctive national character.

I stress this issue because I am concerned that the very history of the Australian debate about mateship may have led to a paralysing pattern of deferral. Hirst’s requirement that, before defining the kind of community we want, we first need to agree that it is legitimate to define national character strikes me as unnecessary. But it also strikes me as characteristically Australian, insofar as it reflects a virtual obsession with resolving the multifaceted complexities of national identity.

It is precisely for this reason that discussion of mateship seems to have focused almost exclusively on issues of national identity rather than on models of friendship. Australia may well be the only culture in which an ideal of friendship has been so deeply tied up with a developing sense of national identity. Whatever one’s views of the accuracy or explanatory power of Ward’s Australian legend may be; whatever one’s position on the viability of constructing national identities in the first place may be: clearly any serious understanding of mateship cannot ignore this complex historical context. I would submit that the most salient feature of that history is that such an intimate connection between mateship and national self-understanding developed in the first place. We need to remind our-selves just how unusual that connection is.

For all of these reasons, and many more, I have no doubt that the national discourse on mateship will continue to grapple with these issues. But let me turn in the final section of this essay to registering one large concern. Precisely because mateship has been so tied up with issues of national identity in Australia, most serious discussion of the subject has focused on the kinds of civic issues that we have been examining here. What is largely missing is reflection about the strengths and weaknesses of mateship as a model for friendship. Although it clearly serves a much larger function in Australian culture than as a model of friendship, surely there is an important sense in which mateship can indeed be understood in this sense.

In my own country, the larger subject of friendship has also been terribly neglected. Thirty years ago, when I first began seriously studying friendship, I was surprised to discover that, despite the fact that for centuries friendship had been a principal concern of the humanities, it had been so neglected in recent years that one wondered whether it had been relegated to cultural deep storage until further notice. Aside from technical and narrowly defined treatments in certain areas of psychology and sociology, the only attempts to take up this general subject were in pop psychology and self-help manuals, or in occasional breezy and superficial articles in glossy popular magazines.

Since that time, scholars in numerous fields have turned their attention to friendship. In philosophy, the subject has become remarkably prominent. The interest in questions of gender and sexuality has led to a proliferation of ambitious studies of friendship in those contexts in a variety of disciplines. But despite this renewed scholarly interest of the last few decades, it is still the case that there has been a dearth of serious reflection on the subject. It is only because there was precious little at all a few decades ago that one is grateful that at least some scholars have taken up the subject. Certainly, when one compares friendship with love or sexuality or marriage, it becomes clear how little has been written on the subject, not only by academic scholars but by novelists and poets as well – and especially by essayists and cultural commentators.

My book Friendship and Literature (1986) was an attempt to redress this balance by raising a number of questions about the particular challenges of friendship in modernity. It focuses on the implications for friendship of gift theory and on what seem to me the crucial analogies between the use of form in art and form or ritual in friendship. Because friendship remains something about which most educated people, including most academics, do not know there exists a serious body of thought, I then turned my attention to compiling an anthology of writing about friendship (The Norton Book of Friendship, co-edited with Eudora Welty, 1991) that might help retrieve for a new generation the great poems and stories, essays and fables, letters and reflections that constitute the vast world literature of friendship.

As someone struggling to get friendship back on the American cultural agenda at a time when it has assumed a new importance in the wake of convulsive changes in the family, marriage, gender, sexuality, and ideas of romantic love, I continue to fight an uphill battle. Thus to see mateship so squarely at the forefront of national discourse in Australia was thrilling to me at first. But it was not long before I realised that virtually all of that discussion concerned the kinds of issues that I have been exploring in this essay – issues of politics and national identity – and that, in Australia, the ease with which mateship filled the vacuum of any discussion about friendship posed even stronger impediments to serious examination of friendship in Australia than it did in America. Many Australians must feel exhausted by the endless discussions of mateship, but ironically they must also feel starved for serious discussions of friendship. The exceptions are Graeme Little’s book Friendship: Being Ourselves with Others (1993) and Robert Brain’s Friends and Lovers (1976), which do consider the larger subject of friendship.

So close and yet – perhaps because of that very proximity – so far! The continual preoccupation with mateship is so busy with questions of national identity that it rarely considers mateship’s adequacy as a model of friendship.

Let me return now to the issue of time with which I began, and provide a few additional examples of the many crucial issues about friendship that remain relatively unexplored. Aristotle maintained that an important prerequisite for friendship is that friends actually live together. In most cultures, throughout most of history, friends did indeed live at least in the same village or town. But for centuries now, all around the world, friendships have existed against a background of frequent movement and relocation. A seven-year-old child in most American towns today makes friendships with the full awareness that it is not uncommon for a family to move to another town. Such a child would be no more consciously aware of such a reality than he would be aware that if he were to jump up, he would certainly come down. His sense that people move around would be part of that same body of tacit knowledge that includes the law of gravity. Have we come to understand what effect such knowledge has on the formation and development of friendships? Consider the analogy with divorce. When I was a child, divorce was still rare enough to be an anomaly. But now every American child, even in the smallest towns, grows up knowing that marriages are not necessarily forever. Surely, just as this awareness must have an effect on the development of romantic love, so an awareness of mobility subtly affects the way friendships develop and the kinds of expectations that one brings to such a relationship.

It wasn’t so long ago that the main way to keep in touch was by the telephone. How have email and text messaging affected our understanding of what it means to ‘live together’? When I first started raising these questions years ago, I told a seminar that in the not-too-distant future you would be able to talk very cheaply with a friend across the globe with perfect video to boot – which is how I now communicate with friends via Skype.

In recent months in Iran we have seen dramatic indications of how these new technologies, and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have been affecting the political world in revolutionary ways. We also need to ask how they have changed friendship. How will they continue to alter its forms and textures and nuances? Are the new technologies themselves becoming an obstacle to the most meaningful communication between friends while providing only the illusion of being closely in touch? Or are the constant text messaging, mobile phoning, instant messaging and emailing actually enabling friends to stay more closely in touch than they could in the past? At one level, our shorter attention spans, our faster pace and the ubiquity of multi-tasking are the inevitable by-products of the new technology. Readjustments will be made in response to a sense of what has been lost, and new forms will continue to emerge. Over the last two centuries, the increase in the frequency of movement and the pulling up of roots has been accompanied by an acceleration of time whose dimensions I hinted at earlier and whose implications we are just beginning to grasp. How those changes are affecting friendship is precisely the sort of question we need to explore. Issues such as time or the impact on friendship of recent technology are merely two examples of important cultural shifts with crucial implications for friendship. What better place to take up such questions than in Australia, a culture that already has within it both a deep tradition of valuing friendship and an inclination to value the kind of time that friendship requires? But to do so, Australians will have to move beyond the obsessive concern with national identity that characterises so much of the discussion of mateship that has deflected it from the more searching examination of friendship that the discussion of mateship entails.

Not only must that deeper exploration confront the impact of cultural changes on friendship; it must also confront more fundamental questions about the nature of the ideal itself. Here, the best example is the issue of gender and sexuality that I touched on earlier. The question here is twofold. First, how have actual friendships between men, between women, and between men and women actually been affected by the revolutionary changes of recent decades surrounding matters of sexuality and gender? I mean here not only the increasingly widespread acceptance of both gay and women’s rights but also the new models of gender and sexuality on which they are based. What, then, is the status of the old assumption that friendship between men and women is always fraught with erotic issues, or of the old Freudian model of same-sex friendship as sublimated homosexuality?

Clearly these old shibboleths need to be re-examined. But considering how certain cultural changes have actually affected friendship still leaves us with even tougher questions about matters of value. However important the code of mutual protection in a dangerous environment may have been to the evolution of mateship, what are the costs of mateship’s legacy of a male ideal of not revealing weakness or vulnerability? In the United States, traditional gender distinctions gave much more permission to women rather than men to express vulnerabilities, to express affection verbally or physically without the implication of sexual interest. But change has been so rapid in recent years that the spectacle of the ‘sensitive man’ has already become a tired comic trope. How the legacy of mateship continues to affect this dynamic in Australia is not just an empirical question, though certainly open to empirical investigation. It is also a question of value. Has the tradition of mateship created even larger obstacles to overcoming traditional stereotypes of men as limited by taboos against the expression of affection, both verbally and physically, or against admitting weakness or frailty than those faced by American men? How healthy is it for male friends to be so fearful of the mutual self-disclosure and intimacy that so often characterise the friendship between two women?

In posing such questions, I want to warn against just the opposite danger as well. More than twenty years ago, I wrote at length about the many creative ways in which men have improvised forms for expressing affection despite taboos against direct expression. What I then called ‘the insulting game’ is an American version of what Australians call ‘rubbishing’, and when used creatively, it can indeed be a subtle way of expressing friendship. And the same is true at the opposite end of the equation. Not everyone who attempts to express affection directly succeeds in doing so. The social forms of confession and sincerity are as difficult to use creatively as any other form, and as we know from the arts (and especially from confessional poetry), they are just as subject to cliché and parody as any other form. Self-disclosure is not easy, and we would do well, when considering it an ideal for friendship, not to mistake conventional stabs at it for the real item.

But being aware of such dangers should not prevent us from pressing the issue of whether the tradition of mateship has not made this already vexed issue of male anxiety about intimacy even more intransigent. Whatever one thinks about issues of national identity, it has been very striking to me to discover how many Australian women I have asked about mateship immediately claim that it is mainly about men. They may use the term ‘mate’, just as young people of both genders continue to; but the ideal of mateship does indeed seem to be a largely male concept, and one whose resonance is much diminished in the younger generation as well. In this respect, attempts to rethink the value of mateship as a model of friendship pose a special challenge. But before Australians can face the challenges posed by these and other related questions, they first need to move these discussions beyond the contentious politics of national identity, which have been blocking, or at least deferring the larger consideration of friendship. I believe that the centrality of mateship to Australian national discourse is unique and that, for that reason, Australia does indeed provide fertile ground for the re-thinking and reimagining of friendship. But in order to draw on whatever may be the lasting virtues of mateship, in order to make it more inclusive and reconceive it as a viable ideal for future generations, questions such as those posed here need to be addressed freshly. That, in any case, is my hope or, perhaps more accurately, the fond wish of a grateful visitor.