fahye: ([ss] but wild and whirling words)
Fahye ([personal profile] fahye) wrote2006-08-31 09:13 pm
Entry tags:

girt by sea

Still technically hiatusing, but I took a break from study to jot down some thoughts.

~

I’ve just finished reading A Mother’s Disgrace by Robert Dessaix, whose writing I love not least because he’s like me in a number of ways: a rational aesthete, queer, and Australian. It’s that last one that I feel like talking about, because there are only a handful of Aussies on my friends list and I don’t think it’s apparent to the rest of you what kind of affect my location has on who I am aside from the inconvenience of the timezones.





I think a lot of the Australian mindset is defined by the fact that we are, to all intents and purposes, a large and mostly-empty rock in the middle of the sea. You think I’m kidding? We’re only just smaller than the US, and we have a population of just over 20 million (not even a tenth of that of the US). Most of us live within a few hours drive of the east coast, because most of the continent is a honking great desert.

Important Point: New Zealand is not a part of Australia. Most Australians and all New Zealanders will punch you if you try that one. Our relationship consists of bloodthirsty competition in the fields of rugby and netball, and the same jokes told with different nationalities substituted in, mostly concerning the other’s inappropriate fondness for sheep. They’re kind of like our version of Canada, only much smaller and without the bizarre habit of producing good musicians or the exciting prospects of actual sane civil rights and gay marriage.

The thing about Australia is that we’re under no illusions as to our relative importance on a global scale. We’re generally thought well of because we speak funny and we have nice beaches and we’re good at sports but still sometimes let America beat us at everything except cricket, and who cares about cricket? (Fact: the English are wishing they’d never exported cricket along with their criminal population and gold panners, because we kick their ass all the time.) We’re all tanned and relaxed and amble around in the perpetual sun saying “no worries”, and (in direct contrast to almost every native animal) we’re pretty much harmless. Yes, I’m exaggerating the stereotype, but that’s what a stereotype is there for. But the point is there: we don’t have much power, our leaders like to simultaneously flatter the British royals outrageously and follow the American leaders around nodding furiously and agreeing to support them in their war-on-whatever efforts in exchange for protection from the anger of countries who are mad at as for…supporting America. Oops, that would be my liberalism showing.

(For the record: the tanned-and-beaches-and-constant-sun? That’s Queensland, which is pretty much…the top right-hand quarter of the country. It’s also the most conservative state, and the home of the godawful broad Aussie accent that Hollywood seems so fond of. Please, please, please never associate me (or…a large portion of the country) with Steve Irwin. Steve Irwin embarrasses us. He makes a fuss out of the dangerous animals that we just pretty much ignore, he’s the worst kind of construct of the tourist industry, and he actually says things like “strewth” and “crikey” which, what. Nobody says those things. Well. Okay. Maybe Queenslanders do. Anyway, we do have nice beaches, but lots of us are pale (hi!) and it gets pretty damn cold in some places. It snows. We go skiing. It surprised me that some Americans think that it never gets cold. Tasmania is at the equivalent latitude to England, for goodness’ sake, and has the miserable climate to go with it. Tasmania, for those of you not aware, is the national joke. It's the island state and about as far from being Hawaii-like as you can get.)

Actually, Australians don’t have a national identity, and naturally we get tremendously insecure if we think about this too hard, so we don’t. What are our options? We’re still technically a subsidiary of the British Empire, but all that means is that the Queen is on our money and we get a holiday for her birthday. Nobody feels British. Nobody feels stirred during “Rule Britannia” (Except me. Um. Shhh. I’m actually British by blood, so I have an excuse.). We started off as Britain’s dumping ground for convicts, and assume that in their eyes we never really climbed much higher. We resent Britain. We’re trying to get away from them. At yet at the same time, the more British your accent is, the more upper-class and professional you appear.

We have a similarly dichotomous relationship with America, in that we want the stuff that they have and marvel slightly at the larger-than-life picture that we get when thinking about it (and when we visit…) but at the same time, we do Not Want To Be America. Americans are rude and ignorant and think they’re the centre of the universe. Sour grapes? Maybe a little. More later.

We deal with our history by not dealing with it, so unlike New Zealand we haven’t learned to embrace the native culture as something to draw on and be proud of. Besides, we haven’t got warriors with exciting facial tattoos and war chants and whaling boats, we have a largely pacifist race with some art that now gets hawked to tourists and a really cool mythology, and they suffered pretty much the fate that you’d expect when a pacifist race runs into some white colonialists. No identity to be found there for most Australians, who are the descendents of said colonialists. So Australia is running towards America and away from Britain and trying to be all laidback and independent at the same time. Sometimes it even works, but not in a constructive way.

When trying to define a national identity, the government likes to throw around words like “Aussie battler” and “multiculturalism” and “the Australian Dream” (which is – get this – to own your own house) but we don’t have much history that anyone cares about and isn’t to do with the embarrassing slaughter of a generation of native people and the abduction and brainwashing of their children. Australians are taught the history of more exciting places, like Europe.

Nobody pays any attention to the words of the national anthem, which is probably just as well because the second verse is all about us having “boundless plains to share” for “those who come across the sea”, which if you’re at all informed about the mess that is our immigration policy is so laughably ironic that it’s painful. Everyone mumbles it under their breath, can’t reach the high notes, and nobody feels proud singing it except for the army, who are at least paid to look patriotic. Lots of us would kind of like the national anthem to be Waltzing Matilda, which is a song about a sheep thief who jumps in a billabong (trans: small lake) and drowns as an act of defiance when he gets caught. It’s brilliantly apt, when you think about our national history, and nobody else in the world knows what a jumbuck, a billy or a swagman is. Not to mention a billabong.

But we don’t mind. Especially for the younger generation, being proud of Australia is reserved, for the most part, for sports. Personally I find the appeal of national competitive sports mystifying, but that’s just me. And I haven’t got a shred of patriotism in me.

I like living here. That’s as far as my pride goes. And I really, really do like living here, but it’s not like living in America and it’s not like living in Britain. We’re not just an amusingly distant copy of the rest of the English-speaking Western world, with spelling stolen from the Brits and brands stolen from America. And a newfound obsession with Denmark that’s quite funny, actually – did you know that an Australian real estate agent is now Crown Princess of Denmark? Met the Crown Prince at the Olympics and actually married him? No? I’m not surprised. It was enormous here, revived the princess-dreams of a whole generation of girls who were old enough to know better, sparked a reality TV show, and managed to make some of us feel royalist for about ten minutes. I doubt it made much of a blip on the worldwide scale, though.

What I think is difficult to articulate – and I’m going to add the caveat that I’m getting more personal here, and the generalisation might not apply with the looseness that I’ve been using it, so I’ll switch pronouns – is the fact that I’ve always taken it for granted that everything important is far away. To misuse 'important'. We watch American movies and TV shows, we follow American celebrity gossip, we listen to American music, and yet the concept – for me – of actually living in the same city as someone well-known, of the bands I listen to actually playing somewhere near me, of any convention having more than one semi-well-known actor or writer, is very alien. That’s a Canberra thing, perhaps, but even the big world acts would only play a handful of shows on an Australian tour, and they wouldn’t come here often because we're so sodding far away. Walking around San Francisco and seeing posters for bands that I’d actually heard of was bizarre. Pop culture is something that, on an abstract level in my head that doesn't have a lot to do with rational knowledge and quite a bit to do with pragmatic indifference, is produced on a distant planet and then sort of sent over in packets. We get TV later than you do (which can actually be quite useful in that we only get the successful shows, even though success in the States doesn’t always equal success here), we get most movies later than you do.

(I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that whilst there are some good Aussie films and TV shows, on the whole…we can’t compete. We can’t. We don’t have the resources, we don't have the really serious amounts of money, and our talent generally (and understandably) buggers off to LA. So we get American everything, and a single free-to-air channel, the ABC – Australian Broadcasting Corporation, thank you – that plays a lot of British stuff. Lots of BBC histories and comedies and period dramas and crime shows and, um, Doctor Who.

By the way, Australia has exactly five free-to-air television channels. Five. And only three of those – Ten, Prime and Win – play American shows. The other two are the government-funded ABC and the random channel of SBS, which plays an eclectic assortment of world stuff and, for some unknown reason, the Tour de France.)

This might make it sound like the country has the global version of a small-town mentality (something that a Sydneysider or Melbournite would find horridly insulting, I’m sure) and in some ways, yes, perhaps it does. There’s always a little bit of wonder, a little bit of admiration for someone from among us who can make it big over in America (because we kind of assume that you don’t notice us, on the whole…really, I have no idea what YOU as a country think of US as a country). But at the same time, I think it adds a kind of maturity and awareness. We can’t be self-contained when our pop culture is pieced together from other countries’ selective exports. We can’t be unaware of the world outside our boundaries. We’re curious. American policy affects us; maybe not overtly, but certainly the intellectual strata of our society keep a wary eye on you lot. An American could eat American food and absorb American entertainment and never have to even think about the world outside their own continent. That’s simply not an option here. We’re an isolated island, but we’re acutely aware of our own isolation.

The thing is: traveling to any other country, for an Australian, is traveling overseas. And thus not only expensive, but (for the majority of the population) rare. You can’t just drive down to Mexico to celebrate the end of school or drive into Wales and suddenly find all the street signs in two languages. We’re so far away from the two countries most like us – there’s the whopping great Pacific between us and America, and all of Asia, Europe and Africa between us and Britain. It’s a liberating distance, but it’s also frustrating. To get to another English-speaking Western country, you have to travel the greatest distance of all.

I think I'll stop there; this isn't an essay and I've reached no satisfactory conclusion, but the thoughts needed airing. I have another set of thoughts on Canberra - why it's a fantastic city and why I'm leaving it - but that can wait.

A disclaimer should probably be added here about the fact that I am a second-generation Brit, a white, educated member of the upper middle class, living in one of the most educated and liberal cities in the country. (No, really. The politicians may meet here, but by and large we don’t like them. Every time the national news says anything along the lines of “Canberra decided…”, the city’s residents twitch collectively.) So my opinions are coloured by my upbringing, and my cheerfully sweeping generalisations are probably far less than universal. And as I said: I'm not patriotic. But that doesn't mean I am not profoundly affected by where I live: this is my sense, of my country, and I haven’t seen a lot to contradict a lot of what I’ve said.

Any Australians are of course more than welcome to pitch in now and scathingly rip my opinions to pieces :D

I will also be fielding questions from the foreign-alien floor. (And any illumination as to exactly what opinions – political, cultural or stereotypical – of Australia the rest of the world holds would be very welcome. What do you think of us? What impressions of Australia do I give you, through the medium of LJ? And why are Americans so easy to fool into believing that we all ride kangaroos to school?)

Thank you.
ext_12491: (Not ague-proof)

[identity profile] schiarire.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:24 pm (UTC)(link)
(insert usual disclaimer about this being one person's opinion)

I suggest that Australia||Canada to us, except that Australia is farther away. Like, we don't really think of you as abroad, because you speak English. Abroad is places with different languages. And then, if you do think of English-speaking foreign countries, it's Britain. + the UK.

And then the other ones.

So you're more foreign than Canada, but not that foreign, and . . . not a threat, certainly, neither economically (like Japan) nor politically. I would suggest that, in terms of the balance of trade (which is as in basically all cases heavily tilted in favor of America), you don't really have anything we want.

So there's no real reason to, well, think of Australia at all, and if you do, then not seriously. So why not kangaroos? Sure! Cute!

. . .

That all sounds awful. Ummm, it is an assessment, and not personal? *shame*

I want to see your post about Canberra.
ext_12491: (Omniscience)

[identity profile] schiarire.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Wow, you'd think I could vary my vocabulary a little bit more, in retrospect.

*cries*
ext_21673: ([comics] let's act pretentious)

[identity profile] fahye.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:31 pm (UTC)(link)
The short version of the Canberra post is: it is so easy to live here that if I live here much longer I will never leave.
ext_12491: (Boulevards)

[identity profile] schiarire.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Awww! It's the Book-a-Minute version!

[identity profile] -leareth.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:44 pm (UTC)(link)
Insert addenums about the Asian countries:

Australia is basically an English-speaking western country surrounded by well, non-English speaking, non-western, /ASIAN/ countries, most of whom get rather ansty about what they perceive Australia's behaviour as US's Pacific extension. That plus the fact that Australians don't quite understand that some countries view issues like oh, drug smuggling, a little differently to them, and that the rules will not change for them just because they kick up a huge fuss when Australian citizens get arrested for drug possession.

[identity profile] -leareth.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:49 pm (UTC)(link)
As an extra, I just have to relate my story of travelling in the US in the months leading up to the 2004 election, and wowing all the Americans I talked to with the fact that not only did I know there was going to be an American election in November, I knew the leading Democrat candidates, the traditional blue and red states, and a lot of the main issues and political positions of the parties, the result being an exchange that went something like ...

American: You KNOW all that? Wow O.o that's amazing -- we don't even know who your President is!
Me: ........... we have a Prime Minister.

[identity profile] cybermathwitch.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I'll have to think on this, and come back when I'm more awake for a more thought-out response, but in brief:

I'm in the American south (Tennessee), and was born and raised here, just to kind of frame where I'm coming from on my end. (We also have to deal with lots of stereotypes about what we, and our daily life, is/are like - and at least one state down here (Georgia) was also created initially as a dumping ground for the convicts.)

I'm kind of fascinated by Australia. The culture (from the outside, at least) seems much more laid back than our own. (And the idea of living in a country that *isn't* a major force in often unpopular international policy events is looking pretty damn good right now, lemme tell you.) I have gotten the impression from bits and peices of information that I've gleaned from various sources that the social climate is more relaxed and liberal about all sorts of things than ours is here. It is a running joke (which we're more than occasionally at least half serious about) among my friends that we would very much like to move to Australia (realizing that unfortunately the immigration laws are too prohibitive for most of us) to get away from certain things here. (The conservative right is getting a little too powerful for my tastes, and seems to have forgotten this little document we wrote once called the bill of rights.)

I know that a great deal of what has shaped my views of Australia was watching Farscape - but more to the point listening to the people on the show talk about their life and experiences, as well as talking to some fans from there.

I absolutely love the above post and the insight it provides. Would you mind terribly if I linked to it in a post? I think that several other people on my f-list would be interested in the discussion.

[identity profile] cybermathwitch.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:52 pm (UTC)(link)
(And regarding And why are Americans so easy to fool into believing that we all ride kangaroos to school?: Probably for the same reasons that the rest of America is shocked to visit the southeast and find us wearing shoes, and speaking understandable (if somewhat accented) english, in complete sentences. And we actually have, shock, books down here. And computers. And running water and indoor plumbing. Yeah. ::headdesk, because Americans as a rule are stupid.::)

[identity profile] -leareth.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 12:55 pm (UTC)(link)
You're not stupid, rather, a big percentage of your population needs to be enlightened to the fact that there is a whole different world out there beyond your borders. Emphasis on the 'different' :P

[identity profile] cybermathwitch.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 07:12 pm (UTC)(link)
a big percentage of your population needs to be enlightened to the fact that there is a whole different world out there beyond your borders. Emphasis on the 'different' :P

Oh yes, that is definately true.

The people who come down three or four states and are shocked to find that we (fellow americans) do, in fact, wear shoes on a regular basis to go about our daily lives... they are stupid.
ext_21673: ([qaf] what have you done today?)

[identity profile] fahye.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 09:57 pm (UTC)(link)
The thing is, the conservative right is in power here too. And we have compulsory voting - insert rant here about how everyone who doesn't really care much gets swayed by short-term economic promises and civil rights suffer as a result - but we don't have quite the same prevalence of Christianity, and most Christians here are Anglican anyway (Anglican = Church of England = immortalised by Eddie Izzard for giving people cake and being generally quite affable about things like female/gay priests). Gay rights keep looking like they're going to get better and then...not. Because the government controls both houses of parliament, and they decided to intervene when my territory passed a gay civil unions act.

[identity profile] -leareth.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 10:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Election next year. TAKE BACK THE SENATE!
ext_21673: ([coupling] spiderman dance)

[identity profile] fahye.livejournal.com 2006-09-01 02:52 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, and I certainly don't mind if you link to it :)

[identity profile] kcdl.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 02:31 pm (UTC)(link)
>>>They’re kind of like our version of Canada, only much smaller and without the bizarre habit of producing good musicians or the exciting prospects of actual sane civil rights and gay marriage.<<<

WITHOUT?! err, crowded house, flight of the conchords, Dave Dobbyn (okay a one hit wonder...), wendy morris etc.
And they do recognise gay civil unions, sure "gay marriage" is banned but it still shitload more than we've done. Plus half the good supposedly Australian musicians and actors are originally New Zealanders.


>>>>The short version of the Canberra post is: it is so easy to live here that if I live here much longer I will never leave.<<<

Canberra would be even better if the interesting people stayed! I'm so fucking sick of everybody leaving! In fact the only reason I've really considered leaving permanently is because everybody else does (oh and for work).
ext_21673: ([aa] take the blue pill (harper))

[identity profile] fahye.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 09:59 pm (UTC)(link)
...only things I am aware of are half of Crowded House and Russell Crowe. And Canada has STACKS of good music.

I'm not leaving because it's not an interesting place. I'm leaving because I don't want to stay in one spot for all of my adult life. Canberra has one of the most mobile younger generations in the country in terms of efflux AND influx, thanks to the public service.

[identity profile] miscellanny.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 04:24 pm (UTC)(link)
What was interesting to me was how long it took me to get into "Down Under" by Bill Bryson. I love Bill Bryson, but every other book was talking about something I was aware of, no matter how tangentially. Europe, America, the English Language, they're all things that I come across daily, whereas Australia is just... we have Neighbours, and that's about it. Neighbouts and a film called The Castle with Eric Bana in.

("How's the serenity, mate?"

"So much serenity."

*slow nods*)

It's weird how alien it could be. When I eventually got into the book I found it fascinating, but I've only read an outsider's view - I've read someone marvelling at the oddness of everything where I should like to find out what it's like from the inside, so this was pretty interesting.

Thanks for writing, basically.

(There was going to be a point but I've had wine and can't remember.)
ext_21673: ([other] if only summer rain would fall)

[identity profile] fahye.livejournal.com 2006-08-31 10:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, dear, The Castle. Yeah. I can recommend you some other films/TV shows that give a slightly better picture of Australian life, but I don't know how much access to them you'd have over there.

Hahahaha Bill Bryson didn't like the roundabouts in Canberra. He assumed everyone got lost on their way home. I admit that living in a city designed principally to look pretty on paper can make for some interesting navigational issues at first.
silveraspen: picture of seashore backed by mountains with caption (fly to the edge of the world with me)

[personal profile] silveraspen 2006-09-01 07:25 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you for writing this, because it's a fascinating set of insights. Sadly, due to exhaustion I am not coherent enough at the moment to contribute intelligently to discussion. I will try to remember to come back later and add something more useful.

I will take a moment to note, at least, that I am aware of the difference between NZ and Australia, and know enough about the dichotomy there to never confuse the two. For a while, I was able to tell accents apart between the two countries, even, which startled several New Zealanders and Australians I ran into here in the US. (I credit that to working for an investment banking firm that had offices in Perth and Sydney, among other places.) I've always been aware of the sheer size of Australia, too, along with the basics of its geography -- such as the fact that Sydney is not "right by" Perth. I was so horribly embarrassed when I found out that there were Americans who were asking pre-Olympics about making that sort of trip in "a quick drive." I wanted to shake them all and then shove maps down their throats. Sorry about that.

(Evidently I did get a bit talkative after all, hm.)

I do intend to visit someday, when I have both time and money enough to make a two-week plus trip. But again, thank you for writing this, because it's the sort of information that I find incredibly interesting and which is so difficult to discover save through experience.