Word: australian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there are Australian traits that do, indisputably, come down to modern Australia from the vanished days of the bush, and even from the convict era. They are wound tightly into our social history. One of these is the value set on "mateship"; another, related to it, is a much paraded dislike of elitism. Mateship--essentially, male bonding--began in the harsh world of the penal settlement. It continued in the hardly less tough environment of labor that was the lot of most men in the bush: shearers, station hands, shepherds. To have a mate was to survive; to betray that...
Less admirable than this loyalty is the Australian fetish of antielitism. If you want to nuke an enemy, call him an elitist, especially if he is an intellectual. The word is empty, since no society, including Australia's, has ever been able to function without elites of skill, intelligence and ordinary competence. Yet Australians can rarely bring themselves to say they value human superiority. It sounds undemocratic...
...field of exception to this unseemly prejudice is sport, the real religion of Down Under. The idea of nonelitist sport is, of course, an absurdity. No Australian would waste time watching a football match in which nobody was better than anyone else, or a horse race in which every nag plunked along at exactly the same speed. And (of course) Australians find no contradiction in that. Ours is the meritocracy that dare not speak its name...
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...