OPEN YOUR REVIEW section of the Guardian on any Saturday and there’s a fair chance you’ll find a connection with Australia. Perhaps it will be a review of the latest novel by Murray Bail or a collection of poetry by John Kinsella. It might be a piece by the expatriate Australian feminist author and publisher, Carmen Callil, marking the centenary of the publication of Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest, or a feature article on Thomas Keneally, dominated by a massive colour photograph of his laughing, bearded head, topped by a dome as distinctive as St Paul’s. Perhaps Simon Schama will be announcing his favourite books for 2008, wondering why others are not singing the praises of the novelist Julia Leigh (“Because she’s Australian?,” he asks) and describing Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia as the “one stupendous starburst of wild brilliance” in the year’s non-fiction. And, as I write, Germaine Greer’s attack on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia in the pages of the Guardian is being reported back in the homeland she left over forty years ago.
You might conclude that Australia’s reputation in Britain is now that of a singularly urbane, cultured and cerebral society – one in which things of the mind and spirit are greatly valued, poets national heroes, novelists feted for their contribution to the great conversation of humanity, intellectuals honoured with state funerals and feminist authors possibly rivalled only by Hollywood stars as the country’s most cherished export since decline of the fine wool industry. In short, as Barry McKenzie so eloquently put it in the 1970s, “back in Oz now we’ve got culture up to our arseholes.”
But the reality is that Barry McKenzie himself still sets the predominant tone for coverage of Australian matters in the British media. My own casual reading of the press in the last year or so has reminded me of the resilience of old images of Australia as a wild frontier country, and of Australians as its inevitable and not always lovely products. The Australia you find in the Review pages of the Guardian has almost no bearing on the “real Australia,” the one you can read about in the tabloids, in the free give-aways that you pick up on the way home from work each evening, and even, to some extent, in the ordinary news coverage of the quality papers.
Here, Australia remains a dangerous place where shark and crocodile attacks are an everyday happening, especially if you happen to be a British tourist. A gap year working on a cattle station turns nasty when the young the Briton picking up some experience becomes the victim of “redneck humour,” in which an electric cattle-prod features prominently. A kangaroo cull is always worth a few paragraphs; how could those cute, furry, bouncy creatures possibly be a pest? That there are holes in Western Australia’s rabbit-proof fence, and the wild dogs are killing the sheep, is also newsworthy in London, helping to fill a steady appetite for “bush” novelty stories. It helps if, as in this case, you can orient your reader with a reference to a film they might have seen a few years back.
Anyone who spends more than five minutes in London would realise, as they engage in some fancy footwork to avoid that unspeakable reconstitution of ales from the previous evening sitting in the middle of the footpath, that there are some pretty big drinkers in this town. But they apparently have nothing on the Australians. How, otherwise, could a driver have been pulled over by police out there for putting a seatbelt around a case of beer but not around his toddler? (Fortunately, none of this will affect the quality of Australian democracy because, as faithfully reported in the British press, in future Australian politicians might be breath-tested before casting parliamentary votes.)
It’s not that the local media ignores the more serious side of Australia. In my own job, I’m occasionally called on by the media to interpret Australian politics for a British audience, and there was polite and genuine interest in the 2007 election and the apology to the Stolen Generations. But why should any Briton care about what Kevin said to Brendan or Malcolm and whether Peter’s biding his time if the Mayor of Mount Isa is calling for “beauty disadvantaged” women to come to his town to hook up with the local blokes who outnumber the local ladies five to one? Needless to say, this story received substantial coverage over here as an example of “The ugly face of Oz.” An extended and intelligent treatment of the matter in the Guardian did have the grace to point out that the women of Mount Isa were, after all, protesting against the Mayor’s comments and that the country had managed to produce internationally important feminists such as Callil, Greer and Lynne Segal. Similarly, I saw a recent report that an Australian pub’s offer of free drinks to women who took off their underwear as part of a “No Undie Sundie” promotion had to be scrapped after protests from women’s groups that it amounted to an invitation to sexual assault.
There’s an affection and perhaps even a quiet envy underlying some of these images, based on the longstanding idea that the antipodes can provide an escape from over-civilisation, an opportunity for the good life and a simpler existence where, I learn from an Australian quoted in one paper, “if you see a girl you fancy on the street, you just go over and talk to her.” The occasion for this remark was an article on an initiative by the South Australian government, described as “government-sponsored speed-dating,” to encourage young English women to migrate by matching them at a Soho function with “a host of Adelaide hunks over tinnies and Australian wine.” While one paper warned that Australian foreplay was “Wake up, Sheila!,” the experiences of Emma, a twenty-year old from South Yorkshire, might have reassured her fellow Londoners in search of love – or at least sunshine. She was already in Adelaide and admitted that although she missed “her friends and the chip shop curry sauce,” the beach was only half an hour away. For the same reason, it seems, thousands of Australians are turning their backs on Britain’s faltering economy and returning to the Australian sunshine; up from 1750 going home each month in 2005, to 2700. The London Paper illustrated this story in November with a coloured photograph of a large group of young and attractive women – presumably Australians – standing on a beach in identical white bikinis, their hands raised in triumph at their apparent good fortune in being down under. Its enough to make any jaded and nervous City type resign immediately and head for Heathrow.
It’s hardly surprising that knowledge of Australian politics should be limited when the author of a Guardian piece locates Canberra in the “southern desert of Australia.” (No wonder getting lost in the great Australian outback causes such concern among the British: I’d probably feel similarly panicked if I tried looking for my Tube station in the Scottish Highlands.) One paper’s interest in the 2020 Summit centred on the proposals for universal provision of crayfish dinners, the installation of jukeboxes in nursing homes and, more seriously, euthanasia kits. The revelation that Kevin Rudd has convict ancestors fitted nicely into old images of Botany Bay and the British taste for convict jokes. One very opinionated commentator in the Guardian recently said of the United States that “uniquely among developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.” An Australian expatriate replied to complain about “the amount of often undeserved criticism levelled at Australians by the British media,” arguing that Australia had a most erudite prime minister who could even speak Chinese. She might have added that among Australia’s prime ministers since the war you’ll find a Rhodes Scholar, a couple of others with Oxford degrees, the odd QC, and so on, but I suspect she’d be wasting her time, just as generations of Australian diplomats and academics have been wasting their time when they imagine that the much-maligned stereotypes will be dissolved by skilled cultural diplomacy, fancy PR work or, least likely of all, learned tomes. The antipodes of the British imagination does have some basis in Australian reality, but is so powerful because it’s mainly a product of British dreams. I sometimes wonder whether those legendary hard-drinking Australians of Earl’s Court feel they’d be letting the side down if they didn’t live up to local expectations.
My own history students over here, mainly in their late teens and early twenties, are amused by the popular images of Australia but fully aware that there is much more to the country than that. They laugh when I commiserate with them on having been “crook” during the week, telling me they might have heard the term on Neighbours but couldn’t be sure. Together, we explore the origins of the national stereotypes they find in the media and contrast them with the more complex realities of Australian history and society. And then one of them will spoil it all by announcing to the class that she’d caught her Australian boyfriend on the phone explaining to his mother back in Queensland that he’d “found himself a sheila.” •
