In the Foreword to Patterns of Australia, Jim Leslie, Chairman of Mobil Oil Australia, says he wanted a book he could give to his Chinese hosts in return for their favors paid some years ago – ‘a handsome, intellectually rich book’. Well, he got one – after his company had invested that $120,000 to finance photographer Harri Peccinotti (ex-art director of Nova), someone called Genevieve Hamelet and Geoffrey Dutton to travel all over Australia. ‘Handsome and intellectually rich’ … handsome maybe; but intellectually rich – we shall see about that. The Chairman of Mobil Oil Australia says that Geoffrey Dutton was not asked to shy away from controversy, but again as we shall see, the author does just that – whether voluntarily, or under gentle chummy duress from Mobil, we shall never know.

Given the fact that Patterns of Australia is funded by one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world, it must follow that the text and the photographs proceed from assumptions of wealth, leisure and education. The Preface accurately reveals these assumptions:

In the thick shade of mango trees by the Pacific Ocean north of Cairns, I (Geoffrey Dutton) discussed with Gret Vitiello and Jim Cass from Mobil their company’s idea for a book about Australia. ‘Imagine: suggested Greg, ‘half a dozen friends sitting around having a drink, talking about Australia. A couple of them are Australians, and the others have never been there. ‘But what’s Australia really like?’ one of them asks. ‘What moulded and shaped it to be what it is today?’ asks another.

Dutton then goes on to say that this book is an attempt to answer such questions, but it’s a vast task and there are many areas of Australian life and passions he does not mention, such as football and gambling. Dutton apologises for omitting football and gambling, but he does not apologise for omitting other ‘patterns’ which l shall bring up later. Patterns of Australia, then, is a transnationally funded confection – a plausible technicoloured mixture of dishonest honesties, a collection of chi-chi photographs taken by a man who clearly didn’t understand what he was looking at, at a bargain­basement subsidised price of $19.95 to give to people who want to know what Australia is really like.

Of course, Geoffrey Dutton certainly knows the history of Australia and its landscape. He writes well: the smooth poetic prose and the interesting anecdotes roll. We love the country and we hate it. Australia is the world’s most urbanised country, but there’s the Outback; droughts can last for as long as five years, but when the ram does fall, there’s a Switzerland of wild flowers; Australia makes nothing easy, except for its wild beaches; there is something sexual in the relation of people to their country; the whites were beastly to the blacks; Burke and Wills died needlessly at an abundant Cooper’s Creek, and so on. It’s pleasant, tranquillising reading – superb copywriting.

On the landscape, the flora and fauna, the droughts and the fires, the Australian anecdotes, the painters and the poets, the explorers and the navigators, Dutton is skilful. He knows and loves it all. Like a good Channel 2 TV program, his text on the Outback is thoroughly enjoyable and informative – it is rich in texture and lovingly observed. Underlying his wise and witty observations of rural life, the Simpson Desert, the Congee Lakes, the Family Hotel at Tibooburra, a hawk hovering near finches, Sturt’s Stony Desert, and those Mango trees by the Pacific Ocean north of Cairns, are the assumptions of a well-heeled, well-educated man with the money to travel – or the Kudos to raise the cash from Mobil. If the results of the cash and the education are honest, who can complain? But if the results of the cash and the funding are found to be at best soothing, and at worst, wanting and dishonest, we have every right to raise our voices.

After the creaminess of Dutton on ‘Loving and Hating Australia’ and the landscape, he tackles the treatment of the Aborigines with historical accuracy, drawn mainly from Rowley and Stanner. But what characterises the text is the absence of any real, hard, contemporary social comment. Dutton has to deal with the European maltreatment of the Aborigines; the word genocide is not used, but certainly implied. Incredibly however, accompanying the text dealing with the destruction of the Aborigines, we have two photographs of young white women on the beach in bikinis – the captions: The good life … horizontal and The good life ... vertical. Such a lack of editorial sensibility, if not crass vulgarity, is unforgivable. Dutton then goes on to link our racist treatment of the Blacks with our attitudes to Balts and Reffos, with the inevitable references to how the Europeans have improved Australian life: the trite salami-has­replaced-luncheonsausage observation. Our attitudes to the European migrants of the forties and fifties have nothing to do with our fundamentally destructive treatment of the Blacks, and Dutton says nothing of the trans-nationally funded present-day policies of Charles Court and Joh Bjelke­Petersen.

But it is in the treatment of our cities that Dutton is most lacking: he describes our urban life with the romantic, condescending attitudes of the leisured grazier’s son. Sydney is ‘romantic’ – no mention of the Western Suburbs, life in Blacktown, Mt Druitt, Liverpool, Punchbowl and Woollongong (the future Glasgow of Australia). Melbourne is seen as ‘conservative’ – the home of the Melbourne Cup (which Dutton first saw in 1944 when he and his wife drove to Flemington in an old open Bentley). Again, no mention of Sunshine, Altona, Lalor, Thomastown or Preston. Has Geoffrey Dutton ever had a beer in a pub at the top end of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy of a Saturday night? I think not. Adelaide is seen from a loving, chintzy point of view. There is Don Dunstan in Parliament wearing his pink shorts, but no mention of Adelaide’s declining industrial base and the troubled’ shipyards at Whyalla. Peccinotti’s photographs are of the same elitist banality: ‘Making music ... Adelaide’ and ‘Making friends, Adelaide’ – but more of the photographs later.

Another major crime is committed in Dutton’s hazy, rose-coloured view of Suburbia, where despite the vulgarity of Kentucky Fried Chicken, all is implied to be dormant, defensible and happy. If the author has ever contemplated the view from the Hume Highway at Bankstown or the Princes Highway at Altona, he has seen nothing. Those who live in the vast, unserviced, neglected hinterlands of Sydney and Melbourne’s Western Suburbs certainly have no place in Mobil’s Patterns of Australia.

In a book so misconceived, one would expect the photographs to be appropriate – and they are. Apart from one rosy picture of Aboriginal children fishing, there is not one picture of an adult Aborigine – a station Black, tribal Black, small country town Black, Redfern Black or successful Black, in the entire book. The photographs have the inevitable quality of soporific sophistication – close-ups, long-shots, night-and-day shots certainly worthy of Nova. The captions are stunning: ‘Just Sheilas, Queensland Gold Coast’, ‘Boats in everybody’s back yard ... Sydney’, ‘Urban discord ... Perth’, ‘Waiting for tram . . . Melbourne’, ‘Entertainment unlimited ... Adelaide’. Even though Harry Peccinotti currently divides his time between Paris and London as a photographer, pictures of human beings in conditions good and bad are obviously beyond his ken, Where at least are the unshaven chins and the beer bottle labels? Previous collections of photographs of Australia have been pretty bad, but this must be the worst cosy grab-bag ever.

Finally, Dutton dredges up yet again the threadbare ‘knocker syndrome’: we shouldn’t be overly arrogant and nationalistic, but we do have lots to be proud of. Indeed we do – along with most other capitalist democracies, but not the clichés of supposed egalitarianism, the lack of extremes of wealth and poverty, the good life in the caravan on wild beaches, the endless Outback (which Dutton always seems to see from the windows of his sister’s private Cesna) that are recited in this Christmas-present confection. The economy, politics, issues of legal and political reform, unemployment, the ownership of natural resources, education, the aged and the infirm, even the names of our politicians (past and present) do not rate a serious mention in this book. And at the end of this long, long trail of slick half-truths, we have such gems as:

Despite unemployment, economic problems and the unresolved dilemma of the Aborigines, no other country in the world has such an uninhibited full life for most of the population as Australia …

followed by:

Australia has no tyrants, no assassinations, no race riots, no violent extremes of rich and poor. Her cities are almost free of slums and ghettos; there are no city blocks of misery and desolation ...

Tyrants? Well maybe there are, for example, Amax, CRA, I BM, Dow Chemical, the Melbourne Club and even Mobil. Patterns of Australia is the life of our country seen from the back of an old open Bentley, from the ex-art director of Nova and the vision of Jim Leslie, the Chairman of Mobil Australia. But Mr Leslie has certainly had his way. I’ve no doubt his Chinese hosts will give him a ‘handsome and intellectually rich book’ about the intrinsic advantages of living in a communist society in return.