Word: australia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...times as many "pokies"--poker machines--per person as Americans. Our styles of wealth production enforce the belief that superiority is luck and only luck: no moral lessons apply. The Puritan impulse toward social responsibility that created the American system of educational, cultural and scientific philanthropy hardly exists in Australia...
Apart from the kangaroo, the koala and other enchanting marsupials, Australia seems short of identity icons. There is, of course, Ayers Rock, the most sublime stone on earth. There is also the incomparable Great Barrier Reef, a single coral organism some 1,250 miles long. We have two famous structures, both in Sydney: the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, the latter a masterpiece by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Perched on one of the world's most beautiful sites for a ceremonial building, a headland in Sydney Harbor, and surrounded on three sides by sapphire water, this great building...
Where it counts--which is more in production than interpretation--Australia has a vigorous cultural life, sometimes enthrallingly so. The list of first-rank Australian novelists, headed up by Murray Bail, Peter Carey and David Malouf--writers of exceptional power and social insight--is a considerable one. London has a brilliant biographer and diagnostician of past culture in Peter Conrad, an erudite and dark-minded expatriate from Tasmania...
Books, of course, circulate everywhere, whereas paintings and buildings do not. Consequently major architects like Glenn Murcutt and Philip Cox are little known outside Australia. This is a pity, and even worse is the general ignorance of Australian contemporary painting. At a time when serious pictorial talent is so thin on the ground in the U.S., it seems bizarre that artists as excellent as John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Tim Storrier and Mike Parr aren't the world figures they deserve to be. The only Australian art that attracts much overseas attention is contemporary Aboriginal art, which varies enormously in quality...
...clarity of Australian cultural achievement is often muddied by our most irksome cultural shortcoming: a peevishly insecure hatred of "tall poppies," people distinguished by their achievements in any area except, of course, sport. Australia has never honored its artists, intellectuals, writers and musicians as fully as its sports figures; there is always an undertow of resentment, of the lowbrows' residual suspicion that the highbrow is conning them. Everyone bitches about this; nobody does anything about it. It is hardwired into us, a proof of "toughness...