Word: australian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...satisfactory. America's idea of Australia is mostly thin and vague. Americans fantasize in a desultory way about Australia but know much less about us than we do about them. Australia, we hear, is rather like Texas 50 or 100 years ago. The basic American idea of the basic Australian male is--who else?--whatsizname, him with the big knife, star of Crocodile Dundee. Aussies (wrongly pronounced Awzies; the correct pronunciation is Ozzies, though we'd rather you Yanks dropped the dumb pseudointimacy altogether and just called us Australians) are all supposed to be as straight as Harrison Ford...
...such a setting, Australians--Sydneysiders in particular--have evolved a natural ethos as pleasure seekers in all areas of life. As the writer David Malouf points out, we don't even think of ourselves as hedonists because that would be too self-conscious. Australian culture is for the most part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well. It is no longer "provincial," a distant and nervous response to norms generated in imperial centers. It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social revolution conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more complex, shook...
...carriage, is with us only some of the time. Jingoism still disfigures the lowbrow end of our journalism. "One of the ways in which we have matured is that we don't give a stuff about what other people think," blustered one such "cultural" columnist, Susan Mitchell, in the Australian, a national daily, last month. "We no longer feel we have to explain ourselves to anyone but ourselves...
This dismal, Serbian-style solipsism was actually meant as self-praise. But on some levels it is, alas, true. One sees it, for instance, in the bristling posture of denial that the Australian government recently took against U.N. criticism of its flouting of the human rights of Aborigines. Australians still tend to be worried about what outsiders think, keep asking and then get furious if the answer is even fractionally less than flattering...
...typical Australian" is not, as foreigners once thought, a bushman. He is a slightly worried guy with a tan, a bald spot, a mortgage, a mower and two kids, whose Australian dream is a double-front brick bungalow on a quarter-acre lot in the suburbs less than 30 minutes' drive from the nearest beach, with two other nice, two-kid, one-PC families on either side...