A tale of two nations
Posted on Tuesday 22nd January 2008
Since coming here I’ve noticed a strange dichotomy in Australia. There are two personalities to the country.
On the one hand you have a nation so at ease with itself that a state premier can attend Parliament in pink shorts; a nation that has a public holiday simply to celebrate the great Aussie way-of-life; a nation in which even doctors can turn up to work in jeans; a classless state where rednecks and businessmen can be seen standing next to one another in the pub; a nation that coined phrases like: “No worries” and “She’ll be right”.
Yet on the other hand it is also a nation with some of the harshest immigration legislation in the world; the nation that cancelled Haneef’s visa even after he was cleared of all charges; a nation with no sense of humour when it comes to patriotism, immigration, the indigenous population and terrorism; a nation that feels it has to cosy up to the US for fear of being left out in the cold; a nation with a conservative element that would rival the Deep South.
Sometimes this comes across as a country that has tried hard, and managed, to export the archetype of the laid-back Aussie to the world, yet still seems ill-at-ease with itself. One could almost liken it to an adolescent - on the way to maturity but still a conflict of competing emotions and struggling to assert it’s sense of individuality.
If you think about America in terms of the ‘adolescent’ - Now theres a country going through teenage tantrums. Or perhaps a baby going through the ‘its mine!’ phase.
brave observation rick. i’ve noticed this myself - the totally, almost schizoid split, of the laid back & generally extremely pleasant & genial Aussie simultaneously with some unpleasant views/stances when prodded further. Ofcourse this in itself is a generalisation that can’t be extended to any single individual, but when applied to the poulace as a whole to describe the lay of the land, i think the shoe fits.
If Don Dunstan (the State Premier who wore pink shorts in Parliament) was still here. This would never have happened.
He was a man with insight…what a different place it would be.
But unfortunately, we had the Howard Federal Government for a 11 years. They bought out the worse in us as a nation. But don’t write us off just yet. Now we have “King Kevin” . I’m hoping he can turn things around for us on the world stage and we once again give people a “fair go”