The Real Australia

(3 of 12)

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 elitism. 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 antielitism. If you want to nuke an enemy, call him an elitist, especially if he is an intellectual. The word is empty, since no society, including Australia's, has ever been able to function without elites 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 nonelitist 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.