Whose Australia? A view from Birmingham

Brought to you by the wonders of modern technology, some thoughts through a Guest Post from British Brummy Blogger Crushed By Ingsoc, always interesting and thoughtful and usually provocative and quirky

When I was a very small child, my view of the world bore no relation to reality.

England was somewhere in the middle, with Scotland and Ireland attached to it, everything else was overseas. I knew that countries were either ‘West’ or ‘East’ and to me Western ones were like us, Eastern ones were different.

Beyond a little stretch of sea were France, Holland, Spain and the other countries of western Europe. Somewhere beyond them were Russia and other strange countries, like Albania, Transylvania, Yugoslavia, Ruritania, etc.

Then beyond a bigger sea were America, Australia and Japan.

On the other side, to the East, lay China, India and Africa.

When I looked at a globe, years later, I was surprised to see where Australia really lay.

Because it is a little strange, when we think of it.

Many has been the time I have been channelling surfing and thought ‘This film looks all right. Looks like a British film as well.’It’s only been gradually that I’ve realised that these are Australian accents, not Cockney accents I’m hearing, and the city is Melbourne or Sydney, not London. The culture I see is even more like ours in the UK, then the US is even, and it still remains true that America always seems less like a foreign land than say, France.

Partly this is language, but also culture.

Even our slang is almost the same.

And yet geographically, you can’t get much further away.

Part of the reason why the British are such bad Europeans is that there are so many things which you can say about almost every continental country that bind them culturally, but are not true for the British Isles. The UK and Ireland stand out as a different culture with different values and outlooks. Australia and New Zealand, likewise do not fit culturally with their neighbours. We all know why this is, but it does raise issues.

Australia, like the Americas is a stolen continent in origin. Australia, like The USA, exists today, in the form it does, because of a series of actions we would condemn if they happened now.

But what can we do about it? None of this can be laid at the door of current Australians or current Americans, any more than the Europeans alive today can be held responsible for slavery. England is stolen too, long ago, by invading Saxons.

It is a pernicious tendency to judge the living for the actions of the dead. I think this is an issue which affects Australia’s psyche more than it does the US, because it’s foundation is so much more recent. Australia’s sense of being Australian is something that has really only flourished with the World Wars and it is still growing. But this battle of conscience seems to run deep.

The problem with following this guilt trip about Australia’s origins, is that if you follow it’s logic only the aboriginal inhabitants can really call themselves Australian, and most of it’s people are in reality Brits who live on the other side of the globe.

But that’s very damaging for Australia’s sense of identity. Too much soul searching can be a bad thing and Australia needs to move out from between the two extremes of feeling guilty how it was born and clinging to that origin.

Australia is about the people who make it up today and it doesn’t matter how they got there.

Australia has a lot to be proud of in the way it has taken it’s place on the world stage in it’s own right. Australia has assumed leadership in it’s part of the globe and has an important role to play in the future of the world.
And be doing that, by doing it more confidently every day, it shows the world what being Australian means.

Thanks Crushed.