Word: australian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Australia for the first time, is your idea of the place and its people. Probably you think the 2000 Sydney Olympics is a vastly important event for all of us, a huge national rite that will "put us on the map"--the same map, presumably, on which the last Australian Olympics, in Melbourne in 1956, failed to inscribe...
...think Australians are rather like Americans and that we want to be more so. Dead wrong. No idealism attended the birth of Anglo-Australia. White colonization in America began as a religious venture; the Puritans thought they were, literally, creating God's country. Australia, by contrast, began as the continent of sin, the dump for English criminals. Australians, unlike Americans, have never felt they had a mission or a message for a fallen world. There is no doctrine of Australian exceptionalism. If this deprived us of the heights of American moral expectation, it spared us from the anguish of American...
Especially in Sydney, we still tend to embrace the disreputable. Organized religion doesn't play one-tenth the part in Australian life that it does in American. The churches have power, but compared with the U.S. our civilization is almost entirely secular. Our state-sponsored education is excellent, and we do not give a cent in subsidies to church schools. And we have fierce democratic commitments that hardly exist in America. It is, for example, a (lightly) punishable offense not to vote in a national election. As for campaign contributions, and all the corruption and perversion of democracy that...
...fact that they have any serious political power at all is remarkable because Australian whites, in the course of waging an undeclared war of conquest against the Aborigines, systematically denied them any access to the culture of politics right from the moment of settlement in 1788. Aborigines weren't mentioned in the Australian constitution when it took force in 1901. Not until 1962 were they given federal voting rights. The historical weight of discrimination against them is crushing...
...white Australians think of this minority as a bunch of thievish, ignorant welfare bludgers who are played upon by a handful of black demagogues. They oppose the idea of a national apology for past treatment of the Aborigines--a deserved and, in liberal opinion, an essential gesture of goodwill--by saying all this happened in their grandfathers' time, and the living bear no responsibility for it. This is Prime Minister Howard's view too, although--significantly enough--he is quick to drape himself in the nobler emblems of Australian history with which his generation had nothing to do, such...