TIME EUROPE
September 25, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 13
The Real Australia
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The answer from abroad is benign but not satisfactory. Many foreigners' idea of Australia is mostly thin and vague. They fantasize in a desultory way about Australia but know much less about us than we do about them. The basic idea of the Australian male is-who else? — whatsizname, him with the big knife, star of Crocodile Dundee. Aussies (wrongly pronounced Awzies; the correct pronunciation is Ozzies, though we'd rather you dropped the dumb pseudointimacy altogether and just called us Australians) are all supposed to be as straight as Harrison Ford or John Wayne, despite our superficially confusing habit of addressing a friend or a stranger of the same sex as "mate."
Here we supposedly have the last stand of the last Wild West, the place and ethos that were buried in America a century ago: a celluloid fiction, reinvented with kangaroos. Australia, largest of islands or smallest of continents, does something to compensate for that loss, or so you think. In the bush, men are men and women must be grateful. And don't Australians all feel the bush at their back, amplifying their memories, shaping their values?
Well, uh, no. Australians are among the most urbanized people on earth. They have seen their national animal, the kangaroo, only in a zoo or as roadkill on the Hume Highway. Nearly 90% of us live on the coast, not in the outback, wherever that elusive place may be defined as being. (The "bush" is outside the suburbs, the "outback" beyond the bush, and the "black stump" is the term for a very remote datum point, as in, "He lives way out there beyond the black stump.") Our country towns are in decline. Their inhabitants keep moving to the coast, away from the center. Because Australia has no fertile center — no Great Plains, no Mississippi — there is no place for them in that immense, empty outback.
So the "typical Australian" is not, as foreigners once thought, a bushman. He is a slightly worried guy with a tan, a bald spot, a mortgage, a mower and two kids, whose Australian dream is a double-front brick bungalow on a quarter-acre lot in the suburbs less than 30 minutes' drive from the nearest beach, with two other nice, two-kid, one-PC families on either side of him.
And yet there are Australian traits that do, indisputably, come down to modern Australia from the vanished days of the bush, and even from the convict era. They are wound tightly into our social history. One of these is the value set on "mateship"; another, related to it, is a much paraded dislike of élitism. Mateship — essentially, male bonding — began in the harsh world of the penal settlement. It continued in the hardly less tough environment of labor that was the lot of most men in the bush: shearers, station hands, shepherds. To have a mate was to survive; to betray that mate was to be a scab, less than a man; such was the hard calculus of colonial life, and its traces are very much alive in Australia today.
Less admirable than this loyalty is the Australian fetish of antiélitism. If you want to nuke an enemy, call him an élitist, especially if he is an intellectual. The word is empty, since no society, including Australia's, has ever been able to function without élites of skill, intelligence and ordinary competence. Yet Australians can rarely bring themselves to say they value human superiority. It sounds undemocratic.
The one field of exception to this unseemly prejudice is sport, the real religion of Down Under. The idea of nonélitist sport is, of course, an absurdity. No Australian would waste time watching a football match in which nobody was better than anyone else, or a horse race in which every nag plunked along at exactly the same speed. And (of course) Australians find no contradiction in that. Ours is the meritocracy that dare not speak its name.
Some Australians will tell you they have a classless society. This is the merest fantasy. Never since human societies began has there been a classless one. We began with the most ironbound of all class distinctions, between prisoners and the free. The freeborn (the "sterling") were bitterly opposed to giving up their social placement above the ex-convicts and their children (the "currency"). But the "lower orders" — that is, most 19th century Australians — fiercely resented the pretensions of the nobs and were well aware that in a pioneer environment Lady Luck was a more powerful queen than Victoria Regina. This was rammed home after the discovery of gold in Ballarat in 1851, just after the California gold rush. "All the aristocratic feelings and associations of [England]," wrote John Sherer, an observer of the gold rush in 1853, "are at once annihilated ... It is not what you were, but what you are, that is the criterion."
Today's Australians may be more sophisticated than last century's digger with his pockets full of gold dust, but the dotcom millionaires of the late 1990s are not so very different from their mining ancestors. The metaphor of all wealth production is gambling, and Australians are among the most shamefully obsessed gamblers in the world. Our styles of wealth production enforce the belief that superiority is luck and only luck: no moral lessons apply.
And we are poor at symbolizing ourselves. Many of us would like to snip the Union Jack off our flag, but no one can agree on a new design. Our official Olympic mascots and emblems are kitsch, climaxing last month in the Great Medal Screwup. It turned out that all the Olympic medals, the bronze and the silver as well as the gold, had been designed to feature not the Parthenon in Athens, not even the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, but the Colosseum in Rome, less noted for Olympic-style friendship than for gladiatorial butchery. What the hell, the officials of the Sydney Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games apparently reasoned; it's still the ancient world, right? Then it befell some luckless S.O.C.O.G. flack to claim it wasn't meant to be the Colosseum, just a colosseum. Nice try, kid. It was too late to make new medals.
Apart from the kangaroo, the koala and other enchanting marsupials, Australia seems short of identity icons. There is, of course, Ayers Rock, the most sublime stone on earth. There is also the incomparable Great Barrier Reef, a single coral organism some 1,250 miles long. We have two famous structures, both in Sydney: the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, the latter a masterpiece by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Perched on one of the world's most beautiful sites for a ceremonial building, a headland in Sydney Harbor, and surrounded on three sides by sapphire water, this great building was never seen in completion by its architect. He resigned under stress and never came back to Sydney, so that the promise of those lovely tiled arcs and shells is not fulfilled by the interior, awkwardly finished by a local designer.
Where it counts — which is more in production than interpretation — Australia has a vigorous cultural life, sometimes enthrallingly so. The list of first-rank Australian novelists, headed up by Murray Bail, Peter Carey and David Malouf — writers of exceptional power and social insight — is a considerable one. London has a brilliant biographer and diagnostician of past culture in Peter Conrad, an erudite and dark-minded expatriate from Tasmania.
Books, of course, circulate everywhere, whereas paintings and buildings do not. Consequently major architects like Glenn Murcutt and Philip Cox are little known outside Australia. This is a pity, and even worse is the general ignorance of Australian contemporary painting. At a time when serious pictorial talent is so thin on the ground, it seems bizarre that artists as excellent as John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Tim Storrier and Mike Parr aren't the world figures they deserve to be. The only Australian art that attracts much overseas attention is contemporary Aboriginal art, which varies enormously in quality.
The clarity of Australian cultural achievement is often muddied by our most irksome cultural shortcoming: a peevishly insecure hatred of "tall poppies," people distinguished by their achievements in any area except, of course, sport. Australia has never honored its artists, intellectuals, writers and musicians as fully as its sports figures; there is always an undertow of resentment, of the lowbrows' residual suspicion that the highbrow is conning them. Everyone bitches about this; nobody does anything about it. It is hardwired into us, a proof of "toughness."
Underknown culturally, Australia is also politically obscure. Why? Because we're so well behaved. We are not the mouse that roared. Historically, we have rarely even contemplated roaring. As former Prime Minister Paul Keating has pointed out, Australia has always been short of the defining value systems that are gained through conflict. We have never had a civil war or a revolution. We have never been invaded — though we nearly were during World War II, by the Japanese. We are piteously short of good political scandals and low on graft. Nobody has ever called us a Great Satan or even a little one.
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September 25, 2000
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WHAT DO YOU THINK?
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