Word: australia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these, we had little or no perceptible stake of our own. Britain, with grim enthusiasm, condemned us to assist in the creation of dead colonial heroes. In World War I, Australia lost 59,258 young men out of a total of 330,000 sent abroad. Both as a proportion of troops killed or missing and as a proportion of national population, this was the highest figure for any Allied state. It left us in the 1920s as a psychically devastated nation of widows, spinsters and orphans. This enormous death toll was rationalized as a cleansing, an erasure of the inherited...
Underknown culturally, Australia is also politically obscure. Why? Because we're so well behaved. We are not the mouse that roared. Historically, we have rarely even contemplated roaring. As former Prime Minister Paul Keating has pointed out, Australia has always been short of the defining value systems that are gained through conflict. We have never had a civil war or a revolution. We have never been invaded--though we nearly were during World War II, by the Japanese. We are piteously short of good political scandals and low on graft. Nobody has ever called us a Great Satan or even...
...absolutely not a threat to anyone. But this does us no good in the media. It is why you do not read about Australia in U.S. newspapers. Practically nothing in Australia is considered worth reporting. In all the 30 years I have lived in New York City, I doubt that I have seen as many front-page stories about my country in the New York Times as you'd get about Israel in a month. Why would you want to know about us? We don't rock your boat or export much you're interested in, except for our admirable...
Historically, Australia felt little resentment about its colonial control by Britain and its sovereign. Its population was heavy with Irishmen and Irishwomen, but the resentments their ancestors had brought with them soon mellowed into ineffectuality in the antipodean sun, not much more than folk costume, once the chains of convictry were abolished. As a colony, we were content peaceably to fulfill our natural destiny, which was to supply Britain with cheap wheat and wool and (when required) with cannon fodder for wars against the Boer...
...Australia still had a largely colonial mentality when I was born, in 1938. Only vestiges of it survive today. The most important of these relics is, of course, its monarchy. It is a bizarre fact that no Australian can be the head of state of Australia. That role is reserved for the King or Queen of England, by definition a foreigner, and not even an elected foreigner: the office of the Australian head of state remains purely hereditary, open only to a small clan of Anglo-German squillionaires known as the Windsor family. This appreciably narrows the field of talent...