Underground
By Andrew McGahan
Allen & Unwin, 2006
304 pages, $29.95 (pb)
Following his acclaimed 2005 novel The White Earth, the winner of that year's prestigious Miles Franklin Award, Andrew McGahan could have easily chosen to play it safe. After all he could be assured that a conventional, politically uncontroversial follow-up novel would still be a bestseller no matter how dull. But to his credit McGahan appears to have chosen a far more uncompromising path.
His latest work, Underground, is a furious, scathing, work of political satire. Underground targets the hypocritical policies, rhetoric and ideology associated with the bogus "war on terror". The novel poses the potentially dire consequences for Australian democracy and civil liberties if this manipulative "anti-terror" fear campaign led by the Howard government and its major media backers is allowed to continue.
Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the World Trade Center the Howard government has cynically used the "war on terror" to justify policies to promote fear and prejudice among Australian working people and thereby help maintain its grip on office. Under PM John Howard desperate refugees have been cruelly imprisoned in detention centres while anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry has been given the green light in parliament and in the mainstream media. An attack on Iraq has been launched with Australian support at the staggering cost of more than 600,000 Iraqi lives. At the same time hard won workers' rights and democratic liberties have come under sustained attack.
This political climate has been engineered without a single terror attack having taken place on Australian soil. Underground asks: what would politicians of Howard's ilk try to get away with if Canberra was destroyed by a nuclear bomb detonated by Islamic terrorists?
Set only a handful of years into the future, the Australia of Underground has swiftly become a military dictatorship in the wake of such an attack. In order to preserve "democracy" the Coalition government severely restricts all democratic rights. The ruins of Canberra have been preserved as a national shrine and are strictly off-limits to any visitors.
All Australian Muslims are now forcibly detained in "designated detention suburbs" said to be for their own protection. Suburbs like Melbourne's Brunswick and Sydney's Bankstown have been turned into permanent ghettos reminiscent of the imprisonment Palestinians face in Gaza and the West Bank today.
National Identification Cards have been transformed into internal passports necessary to pass through the countless government checkpoints and roadblocks dotted through the suburbs. Leftist political parties are banned and the security forces have the legal right to shoot and kill suspected terrorists or agitators on sight.
Internationally, Australia is isolated. South Africa refuses to play cricket against Australia in protest against the racist persecution of minorities. But still supporting Australia are the staunch "coalition of the willing" allies Britain and the US, which have implemented draconian attacks on freedom similar to our own. In the US a law has even been decreed deeming it illegal for anyone to compare the US to the Roman Empire.
The rapid descent into a police state is presided over by Liberal Prime Minister Bernard James — a character who in almost all respects is strikingly similar to Howard.
Following the nuclear attack James urged the Australian people to meet the challenge with determination and fortitude. He declared a state of emergency, cancelled the elections, purged parliament, and, in collusion with top military and business figures, scared the population into accepting his leadership in the ever-ongoing war against terrorism. On top of retaining his position as PM, James also had himself appointed as the Minister for Freedom.
Under James's government Australian ultra-nationalism is promoted and cultivated as an unofficial state ideology enforced by the thousands of shock troops in a semi-government mass organisation called The Patriotic Society.
The main character and narrator of the novel is Leo James — the PM's hard drinking, profligate, property developer twin. Always something of an embarrassment to his politician brother, Leo is kidnapped twice in the wake of a Queensland tropical cyclone: first by a mysterious Islamic terrorist group made up of white Australians with zero knowledge of Islam and then by the Australian Federal Police who plan to summarily execute both the "Islamist" group members and Leo as well.
Leo is rescued from the police by the partisans of the OZ Underground — the clandestine armed resistance group organising against the Liberal Party dictatorship. In an Underground safe house Leo incredulously watches as his brother announces on television that Leo was not kidnapped but was killed by terrorists. He realises that his brother wants him dead. But he can't work out why.
Corpulent, self-centred and cynical Leo lacks even the most basic qualities normally associated with an underground revolutionary. But without any other options Leo agrees to be smuggled across Australia to meet with the Underground central leadership and find out why the authorities suddenly want him dead. This desperate flight eventually takes him to the prohibited, radioactive ruins of Canberra where Leo encounters something he never, ever expected to see.
McGahan's imaginative depiction of the OZ Underground invites comparisons with the much maligned Iraqi resistance in the current Iraq war. Both liberation movements are largely composed of ordinary working people — many of whom are part-time fighters. The repressive authorities in both cases proclaim that the armed opposition is the work of dangerous, fanatical terrorists and not genuine liberation movements. Finally both the fictional Oz Underground and the real life Iraqi resistance would agree that it is legitimate to use whatever means necessary to achieve victory over their oppressors.
Towards the end of the book Leo is recaptured by the federal police. As he awaits what he believes is his certain death, McGahan has a philosophical Leo mouth a central theme of the novel. Leo contrasts the ease with which his brother's dictatorship was established with the inspiring campaigns against conscription in World War I and the defeat of Robert Menzies' attempt to ban the Australian Communist Party in 1951.
"The strength of those decisions", says Leo. "The courage of them. I mean, World War I was no joke. The Cold War and the communists were no joke. People were scared. And yet the nation refused to be stampeded by their leaders."
McGahan's Underground appeals to this particular Australian tradition of struggle against attacks on democracy. It's a positive tradition that needs to be reinvigorated in Australian life and politics today.
Given this preoccupation, the novel's failure to comment at all on the ALP's use of "war on terror" propaganda alongside the Liberal party is disappointing. From the moral panic about Islamic Australians to the military alliance with the US, the ALP leadership clearly has a "me too" position with the Liberal Party on the "war on terror". But in no way is this reflected in McGahan's book. This omission slightly blunts the novel's satirical clout.
After 11 years under the Howard government the political situation in Australia is certainly difficult for radicals and progressives. For refugees and Muslim Australians the political situation is unmistakably threatening. But Australian fascism is not just around the corner either.
The kind of military dictatorship so caustically depicted in Underground is not a serious option for the Australian ruling class at this time. Yet it is important to campaign against the false propaganda of the "war on terror" today because it is the key ideology used to justify the plunder of the impoverished Third World by the rich nations and multinational corporations.
Unless this rotten ideology of fear and hypocrisy is exposed and defeated, a powerful international movement of human solidarity will never emerge. Underground is a welcome and necessary contribution to the undermining of the big "war on terror" lie.