The age of entitlement idea is shallow and facile not only because it is apparently selective about those who are entitled and those who must relinquish whatever entitlement they have managed to lay claim to, but also because the 'end of an age' is such a venerable and much resurrected image which historians, writers, politicians in particular, and others turn to their various purposes at different times.
In the last couple of decades we have lived through the age of endings. The 'end' of the communist regimes, the fall of the wall, the 'end of history', the end of nature, the death of God, the death of the novel, the bonfire of the vanities, the end of ideology, the demise of the book culture, the age of anxiety, and so on and on and on ... until we reach the end of entitlement which — set against its family background of this or that conclusion, this or that 'dying fall', this or that last gasp — looks feeble and derivative. And it is.
Announcing the end of an 'age' is just another way of obscuring the truth that you're not quite sure, or perhaps haven't the faintest idea what the hell is going on; or that you suspect what's going on but not how to influence, redirect or stop it. So you fall back on this persuasive notion of a great shift in the times, you claim to have detected that one sweep of history is mysteriously running out of puff and another — of an as yet unknown type or tendency — is about to supervene.
Joe Hockey, the Federal Treasurer, is just such a detector, but there is one difference: he claims to know what the next 'age' will be like. In a word, it will be — for those whose entitlement is disappearing — unpleasant.
Those who announce a new age, or the death of the old one, seem to be ahead of the game, but are of course always a step or two behind it. Before he could make his tendentious pronouncement about the 'end of history', Francis Fukuyama had to observe and, so to speak, accredit the end of the Cold War. One of the more famous and well-known 'ages' was 'The Age of Aquarius' ('When the moon is in the seventh house ... And love will guide the stars ... Aquariuuuuus!'). But though the song proclaimed an age, it was actually memorialising one: the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury was already finished by the time Hair hit the boards in October 1967.
Closer to home, when Marcus Clarke was researching and writing His Natural Life — one of the great Australian novels of the 19th century — he visited Port Arthur, the most evil of the convict system's prisons. His description of his first sight of the settlement is eerily familiar to us in 'The Age of the Turned-back Boats'. From his approaching boat he saw Port Arthur 'beneath a leaden and sullen sky' and 'beheld barring our passage to the prison the low grey hummocks of the Isle of the Dead'. The dreary prospect convinced him 'that there was a grim propriety in the melancholy of nature ... Everybody ... begged that the loathly corpse of this dead wickedness called Transportation might be comfortably buried away and ignored of men and journalists'.
Indeed. Boat loathsomeness, in its contemporary manifestations, is something many of us would like to see not buried and ignored but, like the various 'ages', summarily discredited and forever ended.
Nevertheless, like Hockey and other wranglers with the 'ages', Clarke was behind the curve. Vestiges of convictism were still visible in the 1870s when he visited Port Arthur and Hobart and saw there the last living convicts. The actual convict system, however, and organised transportation, were gone, abolished on the east coast ten years before Clarke's arrival in the country in 1863. Clarke wrote about 'Van Diemen's Land', but the place he visited had officially been called Tasmania since 1854.
Convictism lingered only in the stones, shattered historic remains and grim buildings dotted around the landscape at Port Arthur and other infamous sites, mute evidence of a repressed and melancholy past. But Clarke needed to prolong the age of the convict system for his own purposes just as Hockey needs to invent the death of an 'age' for his.
So, all things considered, we know the age we don't live in — not entitlement, that seems to be over for most of us, though quite a few, including Hockey himself, won't notice — but where, or rather when, do we live? Is the moon in the seventh house? Is Jupiter aligning with Mars? Is peace guiding the planets? Is love steering the stars? Well, not bloody likely. If there's a dawning to be glimpsed in all this it is the dawning of The Age of Scott Morrison/Scott Morrisooooooon/Scott Morrisooooooon ...
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer. He is February's Australian Book Review Critic of the Month.