The Australian National Character: Shaped in the Sunburnt Country

[VladTepes]

An interesting piece I reckon, and aside from a few minor points (in my opinion) - pretty much bang on.

________________________ ________________________ _______

The Australian National Character: Shaped in the Sunburnt Country
Australia Day 2020
Michael Pezzullo, Secretary, Department of Home Affairs, 26 January 2020
________________________ ________________________ _______

Deeply fixed in the Australian national character are twin traits of independence and mateship,
whereby a free-spirited people form a powerful collective which comes together unhesitatingly
in times of strife, such as we are seeing during this summer of fire.

On the occasion of Australia Day 2017, I wrote the following about our national character:

As our forebears grappled with an unfamiliar land, and built a nation, they created a
cultural system of norms, codes of behaviour and language (including slang). A
recognisable sensibility was seared into our national character between European
settlement and the terrible crucible of the Great War. Australians...knew and sensed
that social acceptance and approval flowed from the simple traits of our national
character - do your job well; avoid pomposity and excessive deference; crack a joke
and share a laugh...be practical and utilitarian in your outlook; give everyone a 'fair
go', irrespective of social 'rank' and standing; and help your mate.


This national character had been formed in part through encounters with the land, as those
who settled the vast land sought to come to terms with isolation and an arid interior.

Many years ago, Russel Ward in his classic work of Australian history The Australian Legend
(published in 1958) sought to explain the development of the Australian self-image. Ward
wrote of the "Australian Legend", which was grounded in our colonial era, the Federation
period, and the Great War and its aftermath. This self-image was generated by the drovers,
shearers, stockmen, station hands, farm workers, and miners, who were scattered across the
vast outback in those early days.

It was transmitted through the networks and platforms of the day – newspapers, journals (such
as the now defunct The Bulletin), novels, short stories, and poems. Impressionist painters of
bush scenes and landscapes played their part. Folklore was passed through stories and
"yarns', songs and ballads, as well as during the course of the multitude of personal
encounters that occurred in the bush, the station, the town, the mine, and the district church.
This self-image moved from the interior to the cities, where most people in fact lived, until it
became pervasive.

Of course, the Australian Legend continued to evolve, not least in the trenches of Gallipoli and
the Western Front, the muddy trails of Kokoda, and in the makeshift hospitals of the Burma
Railway. It was on display on construction sites, in factories and on the dockside, on sporting
ovals and pitches, and of course in the public bars, clubs and other social venues across the
land. Later, in the 1970s, it was even mobilised to sell products, when the Mojo method burst
on the scene: irreverent TV advertisements, with accompanying jingles which were
constructed in the Australian idiom and accent – as distinct from the clipped and English imitating
voices typically heard on Australian television before that time.

Today, the Australian Legend lives on, as Australians come together to confront an old foe -
fire. We are staring at the face of the Australian Legend when we look at the weary and grimy
faces of the men and women of our rural fire services on the fire grounds, faces that Banjo
Paterson would have immortalised in verse and Frederick McCubbin on canvas.

The Australian Legend was and remains no doubt a mythologised self-image. That is the
point of a national legend – it is a people's idea of itself, a self-consciousness formed over
time. It is the story of what we like ideally to believe about ourselves. A national identity
sustains in each generation common outlooks, understandings, norms, and beliefs which
indicate and signify what is to be valued, and what is to be imagined, about a national story.

As we tell these stories, a shared idea of ourselves emerges, which is conveyed and reconveyed
through the years. In anthropological terms, most of us are genuinely connected to several hundred people at most. National identity is a vehicle by which we connect to millions of compatriots beyond our immediate social networks, most of whom we will never meet.

We see ourselves as practical, self-reliant and resilient; inventive and willing to improvise;
orientated to action, rather than philosophy and theory (although the universe's secrets and
eternal mysteries have been solved by many an Australian late at night around the camp fire
or in the front bar – if only they could remember the answers the next morning...). We are
willing to work hard – when it is worth our while, and with good cause. We get the job done,
without fuss. We are scornful of pretence and affectation; irreverent and gregarious; loyal to
mates and egalitarian, in the land of the Fair Go. We are not afraid to claim a right but are
equally willing to share a bounty. We value reward for hard work and enterprise. We cherish
independence and equality of opportunity, seeing no contradiction between Liberty and
Equality.

We value our space, love our home, and cherish solitude and privacy when that suits. We like
to do as we please, within the law. Mercifully, our reverence for the outlaw expresses itself in
suspicion of persons in authority but we tend to be obedient to impersonal authority where we
can see that rules are being commonly observed, binding each and all. Helping out a mate?
That arose no doubt from the sparseness and isolation which led the early settlers to depend
on one another. In a harsh land, new forms of social obligation and expectation emerged –
especially in the face of distance, drought, fire, storm and flood.

In fact, early isolation and hardship engendered those twin tendencies - individualistic and
communitarian at the same time – which were blended and fused in the national character.
Another historian, Keith Hancock, explained this duality when he wrote a one volume history
of Australia (1930). Australians possessed, he said, a thoroughly utilitarian view of the State
– its function being to maximize the greatest level of happiness for the greatest number.

Settlement and migration had scattered the settlers across a wide land, and bonded them into
a powerful collective of free individuals, with the State in Australia being the collective vehicle
for effective cooperation. Hancock saw no contradiction between Australian individualism and
reliance upon the collective to maximize public utility.

Some argue that human values are universal and human nature is constant. This is perhaps
so. We are all joined in a common humanity. Hunger is hunger, and there are other deep
biological constants. For all that, how is it that we know instinctively when we are in Australia,
and in the company of Australians? In Italy, with Italians? In Vietnam, with Vietnamese?
If land, time, and climate do not shape a people over the long duration of history, how might
we otherwise account for national differences? Conduct this thought experiment: unlike the
American frontier experience, Australia's settlers did not have the benefit of rich soil, teeming
forests, high mountain ranges and wide inland rivers. Imagine if after 1788 we had become a
second America – settling a land able to sustain 100 million, or more. Applying Frederick
Jackson Turner's famous thesis of the significance of the frontier in American history, surely
we would today be describing a country with a very different self-image, and with a different
place and role in the world.

Australia as it was formed became proof that nurture trumps nature in social character
formation. Unburdened by old world authority structures and social practices, by bonds of
deference, class and privilege, our national story took on its own distinct shape within a few
decades of the settlement that is marked by Australia Day. Free settlers, emancipated
convicts, soldiers, officials, and native-born Australians all started to think of themselves as a
people in the early 19th Century, with different sensibilities and a new outlook on how best to
organise society and give effect to government. The transportation of "undesirables" to a
place of systematic oppression and terror (the "Fatal Shore" thesis) in fact brought forth a new
world which was marked by a democratic temperament and an egalitarian social outlook.

It helped of course that we had a continent of our own, sheltered by the sea, and protected by
the Empire. We had enough confidence to choose quite consciously freedom and
independence within our land, while at the same time being determined to remain within the
Empire. This new people was vitally interested in the liberal political and constitutional ideas
that were emerging in Britain at the time. Our forebears drew on these ideas, especially as
they related to democratic reform. The Australian dual focus on individual liberty and equality
of opportunity was seen in the building of the national institutions of government, which
culminated in Federation on 1 January 1901. On 26 January 1788, the best of the
Enlightenment and the core ideas of political liberty arrived with the Fleet, and within a little
over a century these ideas were fashioned into those institutions.

Some argue that the Australian Legend is outmoded and overly-mythologised, a project of
male-bonding amongst White Anglo Men. I contend that the values of this older Australia
continue to speak to us today and can be adapted and mobilised effectively in an era of global
disruption and social dislocation. They can be made to transcend ethnicity, class, gender, and
circumstance otherwise. To apply the religious lens, the values that are intrinsic to the
Australian national character can be lived equally and authentically by Christian, Muslim, Jew,
Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic or other.

Of course, today Australia is a radically different place, as compared to the Australia described
by Ward and Hancock. We hardly need to spell out the demographic changes, the passing of
Anglo Australia, urbanisation, the technology which has largely mastered distance and
isolation, the increased connectivity and engagement with the world, and so much more
besides. Today's Australia would be unrecognisable to the bush poets – and yet would we
wager against a new Banjo Paterson finding inspiration to pen a verse about a modern Man,
or Woman, from Snowy River?

Today's Australian Legend should of course be broadened to include the story of the
Indigenous peoples of Australia, and their custodianship of the land. There is much, for
instance, to be learned from that tradition in terms of fire management and care of the land.
Women need to be included, as too should those Australians who have come from lands
beyond the Anglo-Celtic world of the Australian Legend. Other elements should be retired
from the Legend – excessive and addictive drinking, for instance, is nothing to be celebrated,
knowing what we know today about physical and mental health. While the content and forms
of the Australian Legend will always need to evolve and be cast more widely, its core claims
– and especially the twin commitments to freedom and collective purpose; individualism and
mateship – should always remain central to who we are.

In My Country (1911), Dorothea Mackellar invoked in verse how Australians had been shaped
by a land which was so very different from that of England – the land of "green and shaded
lanes". By contrast, Mackellar, loved "a sunburnt country // a land of sweeping plains // of
ragged mountain ranges // of droughts and flooding rains". Australia was in her poem a land
of both beauty and terror.

It is fitting today that we should recall the largely unremembered fifth stanza:
     Core of my heart, my country!
     Land of the Rainbow Gold,
     For flood and fire and famine,
     She pays us back threefold –
     Over the thirsty paddocks,
     Watch, after many days,
     The filmy veil of greenness
     That thickens as we gaze.

As we celebrate Australia Day, and welcome our newest citizens, let us draw on the strength
of our national character to see us through once again to the better days that our land and
providence have always provided.

[Bigger Birdie]

 

Thanks for that.

[GSXKING]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_6o_FIs1Q this resonated with me.