On Nick Cave, And Why Australians Move Overseas
As Nick Cave's extraordinary documentary is released nationwide, an Australian expat reflects on how leaving home has become part of Australia's national story.
The Legend Of Nick Cave, And The Betrayal Of Expatriation
The narrative that wrote Nick Cave has already entered into the territory of folklore. The son of an English teacher and a librarian, Nick Cave grew up in Wangaratta and, after being expelled from the local high school both of his parents worked at, ended up in Melbourne as a boarder at Caulfield Grammar School. In Melbourne he fell in with Mick Harvey and Rowland S. Howard, formative members of The Birthday Party. His father, a fiercely intelligent Anglican schoolteacher who recited passages of Shakespeare and Nabokov to his young children, was killed in a car crash as the nineteen-year-old Cave was being bailed out of a Melbourne prison by his mother, held on charges of vandalism and drunkenness.
The Boys Next Door, Cave’s first band, staggered into existence out of 1970s St Kilda, which, in the foggy anecdotal memories of those around at the time, seems to have been all art school drop outs, punks and junkies. The Boys Next Door were all these things, and they created music that can only be described as a sonic assault. The music was all feedback glitches, atonal roars and hyperbolic wailing. One critic described them as “a mixture of paranoia, demented self-parody and neurotic, inebriated passion.” The band renamed themselves The Birthday Party in 1980, by which point the number of Victorian venues they were banned from outnumbered the ones that would have them.
The change of name was also a symbolic watershed. By 1980 Cave had become increasingly frustrated by the Australian music scene, which was enamoured instead with the Dad Rock-friendly tunes of AC/DC, Australian Crawl and Mondo Rock, which weren’t bad necessarily, but they weren’t referencing Dostoevsky or reducing Christ to a hybrid of perverted Elvis and Texas oil baron.
Believing that European audiences were more sophisticated, Cave and the rest of The Birthday Party relocated to London, where a number of the best Australian bands moved in the 1980s, including The Triffids, The Go-Betweens and The Moodists. No longer Australian so much as formerly Australian, a transfiguration integral to The Great Australian Expatriation that happens somewhere in that 24-hour flight from home. From London, Cave moved to Berlin, then Sao Paolo and New York, before settling in Brighton where he lives now. But he has never, not once, returned to live in Australia.
If the world of Nick Cave helped give shape and weight to my ambitions in early adolescence, his importance as a revered and enduring cultural figure, at home and internationally, also reinforced the cultural narrative. My mind couldn’t conceive of a situation where the self-contained and entirely coherent world could sustain itself if it had remained at home and struggled to take root in the streets of St Kilda.
But there is an internal tension to this narrative. Most Australians who leave stay away for two or three years before returning home. By and large, when we leave we always intend on coming back, as though by having made something elsewhere you can finally make something happen at home. If the boundary is pushed it feels like a betrayal, although no, that isn’t quite it. But it is, I think, what explains the reaction that’s met somebody like Iggy Azalea, who has become one of the most lauded female rappers anywhere. Australia has responded to her with, for the most part, absolutely ferocious indifference. It’s the difference between leaving for a little while versus going for good.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Peter Carey, who moved to New York permanently in the early 1990s, explained: “When one leaves, the unsaid accusation is that you’re going somewhere else because Australia is not good enough for you.”
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The Cultural Cringe
Two nights before the concert on 34th Street, I had been at dinner with a group of people. There had been some grumbling about the music, but the song changed and it was admitted, “Well, this one isn’t so bad.” It was ‘Reptile’, by The Church. “They’re Australian,” I said. I almost yelled it out. I find myself doing this a lot. I’ve done it when somebody has mentioned that Cate Blanchett’s theatre company is staging The Maids at Lincoln Center, and I’ve done it when somebody mentioned liking The Vines as a teenager, and I did it when I found a copy of a Patrick White novel on my boyfriend’s bookshelf the first time I visited his apartment. I’m not sure why I do this. Or, at least, I don’t like that I do this. But there’s a part of me that gets excited when Australian cultural artefacts show up in New York, as though, in the most secret part of myself, they’re made more legitimate because somebody from the outside has noticed them.
The literary critic A.A. Philips made his career in 1950 by coining the term ‘cultural cringe’ in an effort to describe the internalised inferiority complex Australians have. It’s what causes us to, consciously or not, regard our own culture as inferior to the culture of America and Western Europe. Australians generally don’t know a lot about our own poetry, painting, classical music, film and architecture. What we do embrace is the stuff that seems to have been bestowed with legitimacy by the outside world – the musician who moved to Berlin, the artist whose work was exhibited in Los Angeles. Songs on high rotation in London or short stories published in American magazines seem to have the weight of ten or more at home.
“Geography is as central to Australia’s perception of artistic success as the work itself. We look to the world for cultural confirmation.”
Geography is as central to Australia’s perception of artistic success as the work itself. We look to the world for cultural confirmation. And for the million or more of us have gone elsewhere for a while, the portion of us interested in creating culture, often we’ve gone somewhere that makes sense not only because it’s where the centre of production is, but because we genuinely believe, in the unspoken part of ourselves that’s been nurtured by the narrative that floats in the air like light, or sound, that we needed to go somewhere else to find success at home.
That cultural narrative is part of being Australian, a narrative which Nick Cave and his never-not-coming-home-ever success is a part of. We collaborate, all of us, in the story of the Great Australian Expatriation, and our individual stories over time become woven into the collective imagination. It’s the unsaid thing. It’s the feeling that, to prove my commitment to being a writer, to myself just as much as the people around me, I had to come to the other side of the world to begin.
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20,000 Days On Earth is released in cinemas nationwide today. Click here for theatre info.
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Madeleine Watts writes articles, stories, essays, and notes to herself on the back of her hand. She has written for The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, Griffith REVIEW and The Sun Herald, amongst others. Raised in Sydney, she currently lives in New York.
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Feature image via NickCave.com.