Cultural Differences between Australia and England
Cultural Differences between Australia and England
Australia's Convict heritage forms a kind of glue that binds it to Britain. Of course, British and Australians naturally approach the heritage in a different way. For many Brits, the heritage helps explain why Australians are uncultured, why they are dynamic, and above all, why they inferior to the English. For example, David Monre wrote in 1842,
"The extraordinary rapid growth which has followed upon settlement of the scum of the earth on the shores of Australia would make it appear that in colonisation it is as in gardening, the more your foundations consist of dung, the more rapid and striking the production."
Likewise, columnist Ian Woodridge wrote in 2000,
"A few years ago we colonised this place with some of our finest felons, thieves, muggers, alcoholics and prostitutes, a strain of depravity which I believe has contributed greatly to this country's amazing vigour and enterprise."
Australians haven't always found it easy to come back from the jokes and genuine insults made about their heritage. The creation of the word Pome (word used for English) may have been an attempt at a humorous comeback. Some have said Pome is an acronym for Prisoner Of Mother England. English critics have dismissed such an explanation because it relies on the premise that Australians can spell. Another explanation is that it is an abbreviation of pomegranate, which is rhyming slang for immigrant. The English tend to be more comfortable with this explanation because it means Australians can't count syllables correctly let alone make good use of the cockney rhyming slang that they inheirited from England.
Valuing egalitarianism may have been another way for Australians to deal with the Convict taunts. Basically, valuing egalitarianism allowed Australians to say that, even though their mothers were prostitutes and their fathers were thieves, at least they treated everyone equally and didn't judge them on their background.
English critics have pointed out that it is easier to be egalitarian when you come from the base of the social pyramid. While it may be a fair call, Australians have shown a tendency to maintain their egalitarianism even when they have reached the top. For example, when cricketer Dennis Lillee first meet the Queen, rather than be formal (as is custom in situations of unequal social status) he expressed his egalitarian sentiments by saying:
In the mind of the great man, he was just treating the Queen as an equal. After all, it wasn't her fault that she couldn't play cricket nor was it her fault that her subjects were shocking players as well. Oddly, some English thought Lillee had acted like an upstart buffon. In their minds, the Queen deserved respect as her birth right and it was irrelevant that she had done nothing special with her life other than walk in the shoes she had been given.
For most of its urban existence, the British Isles were in a state of continous war. Not only were different regions of Britain fighting each other, the entire region was continually being invaded by mainland armies. The continued rape and pillage of Britain Isles ended up producing a motley crew of cultures that the English authorities struggled to gain control over.
About 400 years ago, the English decided that after being invaded so many times themselves, it was a time to invade others. The indigenous people of Ireland, the Americas, Africa, and Asia soon found themselves with new colonial masters, and some English migrants wanting to make a buck on the side.
Although it had a distinct a profit element, English colonising was quite different from that of France, Holland, Portugal and Spain because instead of just taking things from the colonies, the English wanted to build schools, roads and hospitals in them as well. Perhaps the English realised that if they made prosperous colonies, then English merchants could make even more money. An alternative explanation was that the English wanted to help the world. Either way, English colonies generally prospered in ways the other European colonies did not.
Aside from colonising, the English devoted their mind to improving medicine and industrial development. This led to breakthroughs in infant mortality and new inventions that made many labourers obsolete. The unintended consequences of the technological developments were massive declines in infant mortality, population growth and unemployment. With similar social conditions in France leading to the beheading of the French monarchy, British authorities knew something had to be done. Ideally, population pressures could have been reduced if more English chose to migrate but it seems far too many were wedded to their homeland. The solution was to create a penal colony in Australia and force them out.
In 1788, the disturbers of the peace and hungry children that stole bread, were exported to Australia where they laid the foundations of Australian urban society. For the next 80 years, Australia was supplied with the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English troublemakers along with soldiers to guard them. The Convict history is something that forever binds Australia with England. Today, few Australians want to remember their history and few English want to let Australians forget it.
Population 60,943,912 (July 2008 est.) 20,600,856 (July 2008 est.)
GDP per capita ($US) $35,100 (2007 est.) $36,300 (2007 est.)
GDP - composition by sector: agriculture: 1.4%
industry: 18.2%
services: 80.4% (2006 est.) agriculture: 3%
industry: 26.4%
Public debt 43% of GDP (2007 est.) 15.4% of GDP
Racial groups white (of which English 83.6%, Scottish 8.6%, Welsh 4.9%, Northern Irish 2.9%) 92.1%, black 2%, Indian 1.8%, Pakistani 1.3%, mixed 1.2%, other 1.6% (2001 census) White 92%, Asian 7%, Aboriginal and other 1%
Export partners US 13.9%, Germany 10.9%, France 10.4%, Ireland 7.1%, Netherlands 6.3%, Belgium 5.2%, Spain 4.5% (2006) Japan 19.6%, China 12.3%, South Korea 7.5%, US 6.2%, India 5.5%, NZ 5.5%, UK 5% (2006)
Both England and Australia suffer identity conflicts as a legacy of England's past colonialism. Specifically, in England's colonial era, it built an identity as a civilising force that enlightened foreign peoples by introducing games like soccer, rugby and cricket, by building roads, railways, schools, hospitals and by creating democratic institutions that empowered the people. The colonised people were expected to embrace the English identity under the British label, with the English being the leaders of it.
The decolonising era after World War 2 has been problematic for the English identity because the status of the past has been eroded while English leadership of Britain has caused agitation in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Finally, joining the European Union has required the English approach international relations in a more subservient position. Due to the identity conflicts, the leaders of England's main political parties have been reluctant to define or assert an English identity in the manner that has been asserted by politicians in Wales and Scotland.
Englishman John Aston talks of reconciling a British identity with a European identity.
For Australia, colonialism left a history that makes many Australians feel ashamed. American author Bill Bryson identified the shame some Australians feel about their nation's Convict heritage when he wrote:
"I can personally affirm that to stand before an audience of beaming Australians and make even the mildest quip about a convict past is to feel the air conditioning immediately elevated."
Admittedly, not all Australians are embarrassed by their nation's Convict past. For much of the 19th century, an Australian identity was formed by fusing Convict history, events like the Eureka Rebellion and Aboriginal culture to create a kind of bush identity that was different from the British identity and in opposition to it. For example, the song Waltzing Matilda built its patriotic credentials by using Aboriginal words like coolibah, jumbuck and billabong as it described a story of a man who stole a sheep but killed himself rather than be caught. Likewise, on January 21 1888, the Bullentin wrote:
' Australia began her political history as a crouching serf kept in subjection by the whip of a ruffian gaoler, and her progress, so far, consists merely in a change of masters. Instead of a foreign slave-driver, she has a foreign admiral; the loud-mouthed tyrant has given place to the suave hireling in uniform; but when the day comes to claim their independence the new ruler will probably prove more dangerous and more formidable that the old.' Rather than 'the day we were lagged', Australia's national day should be December 3, the anniversary of the Eureka rebellion, 'the day that Australia set her teeth in the face of the British Lion'.
Naturally, those institutions that were formally and informally governed by a British identity were hostile to the Australian identity. Generally, the threat was dealt with by failing to give any official approval to Australian culture or funding it in any way. Informally, this gave rise to the "cultural cringe" which led to a cultural rejection of anything with an Australian label. Formally, there was also some rejection with the NSW government banning bushranging films in 1906 and the state run ABC banning Australian accents until the 1970s (newsreaders had to be imported from England.)
When the British identity was eroded in the 1970s and 1980s, it left generations of Australians of British descent with a hostile attitude towards the Australian identity but without a British identity to promote in its place, or at least moderate the anti-Australian prejudice with some cultural respect. The identity that has filled the void has been largely based upon creating derogatory caricatures of Australians but without seeing themselves as part of their derogatory caricatures. Examples of the identity at work include Anglo commentator Catherine Deveny, who said in 2010:
"An Australian Flag in your front yard tells everyone you're only a couple of Bundy and Cokes away from lynching a wog, slope or Arab."
England has shocking weather that makes people miserable. Darkness at 4pm, sleet and returning home to rising damp really isn't the type of environmental conditions that lead to a happy life. On the positive side, England is a safe country where the most dangerous wildlife to be encountered is a ruminating cow. (That said, English sometimes point out that cows can be dangerous.)
Unlike England, Australia is a harsh land with plenty of sunshine, snakes, spiders, sharks, droughts, and bushfires. The English have long used the environment to explain why Australians are good at sport but no good in culture. In the minds of the English, Australians spend more time outdoors playing while the English spend more time indoors creating and learning.
Behind America, England has arguably the world's most internationally successful movie industry. The staple of the English industry is the chic flick romantic comedy that deals with a considerate English gentleman in a feel good story. Not surprisingly, most of England's famous actors are the likes of Jude Law and Hugh Grant that play the kind of emotionally sensitive funny man that a woman might advertise for in a personal ad.
Australia has produced plenty of actors and actresses that have found great success in Hollywood. Most of the Australian actors, such as Russel Crowe and Mel Gibson, are quite masculine in comparison to the English actors. (Perhaps relationships with such men might motivate women to place a personal ad.) Conversely, the Australian actresses, such as Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts and Cate Blanchett, have been able to retain a strong feminine quality that has seen them win the kind of elegant lady roles traditionally won by the English.
In regards to movies, Australia's industry was successful in the 70s and 80s, but went to poo in the 90s. The new millennium continued to be as barren as the outback in regards to quality Australian movies, but still showed that hope can spring in the desert. In 2012, this hope came in the form of a dog. Based on true events, Red Dog told the story of the Port Headland mining outpost being brought together by a canine. It combined the fantastic tales of the dog's life, including the time he swam into the ocean with a steak to distract a shark on the verge of eating someone, with more plausible truths, such as being made a member of the union and being elevated as an icon of the community.
For hundreds of years, being a British citizen meant little more than being expected to recognise the authority of British rule and die for Britain if required. After World War 1 and 2, movements started growing amongst people in Britain that being a citizen should come with benefits, and one of those benefits should be a government that looks after its people. This led to dramatic improvements in public health, education and social welfare. It also meant that having British citizens all over the world was potentially quite expensive.
Aside from being expensive, an ethic that the government should be responsible to its citizens also meant that it had to treat citizens equally. In practice, this meant allowing British citizens in Pakistan, West Indies, and India to move to England and gain the same rights held by the Indigenous English.
Not all indigenous English were particularly happy with such versions of equality and they wanted something done about the migrants. The British government's solution to the cost and social tensions was to encourage their colonies to seek independence in a process that became known as ‘de-colonisation.’ In a short period of time, England shrank from leading the largest empire the world to leading a small island off the coast of Europe.
The process of decolonisation affected Australia slightly differently to how it affected the motherland. In keeping with British wishes, Australia created its own citizenship in 1948 and progressively dismantled most of its legal ties to Britain over the next few decades. Papua New Guinea was the closest thing that Australia had to a colony. In 1975, a couple of chiefs asked for independence and Australia was more than happy to help all Papua New Guineans attain it.
Historically, the British have been fond of using Australia's Convict heritage to explain uncouth behaviour amongst Australians. For example, they have defined an Australian as someone "who reads comic books without moving their lips" and an Australian gentlemen as "someone who offers to light his girlfriend's farts." At the cricket, the English often chant, "we came here with back-packs, you with ball and chains" or they may sing the song "we all live in a Convict colony" to the tune of Yellow Submarine.
Although Australia has its fair share of bogans who haven't had the greatest education in the world, most Australian bogans have quite a reasonable set of values. For example, if they saw somene in need of a hand, they are the type of people to lend it. They definately are not the sort of people that would see a wounded international student and only pretend to help so that their mates could more easily rob the student. Not so England. In 2011, riots all over England showed that a large percentage of the English have such lack basic human decency that they celebrate such thefts as the little bit of fun that goes hand in hand with looting, smashing glass, burning cars, and destroying family-owned businesses.
For many people in England, neither the riots nor the lack of human decency in such actions came as any real surprise. According to Theodore Dalrymple, an English writer and psychiatrist:
" anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country's young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined."
"No sensible employer in a service industry would choose a young Briton if he could have a young Pole; the young Pole is not only likely to have a good work ethic and refined manners, he is likely to be able to add up and — most humiliating of all — to speak better English than the Briton, at least if by that we mean the standard variety of the language. He may not be more fluent but his English will be more correct and his accent easier to understand."
It would be wrong to say that the unsavoury behaviour is confined to low socio-economic groups in Britain. In truth, every section of British society leaves much to be desired. Specifically, in the 1990s, many Brits from well-to-do families loved nothing more than listening in to secretly recorded messages that involved Prince Charles telling his lover that he wanted to be a tampon so that he could be closer to her. More recently, Britains eagerly followed journalists who tapped phones to gather dirty secrets on celebrities. Australian journalists have never sunk to such depths because the Australian public has never shown much interest in it.
Art should represent the pinnacle of emotional, logical and moral thought of a nation. Similarly, it should attract a nation's finest minds to appreciate it. In the case of British art, it seems the finest minds want to consume work that is the pinnacle of a turd. When asked to define British art, Tim Marlow, director of the White Cube gallery, said,
"British art is amazingly diverse, but I guess British artists often deal with the dominance of the literary in our culture."
With the dominance of the literary, it might be expected that the art would inspire intelligent thought amongst journalists who work in words, but the opposite is the case. In Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton wrote:
"In Britain, the press never tires of the question “Is it art? and finds it impossible to resist sex jokes. "
Defining British art as diverse and literary was perhaps a polite was of saying that it is an unrefined dogs breakfast where artists use words to compensate for the fact that their work can't speak for itself. To put it more simply, British art is the visual equivalent of punk rock.
Australia also has its fair share of crap artists, but a clear difference between iconic British art and iconic Australian art is the level of intelligence in the work. The iconic artists of Australia include names like Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, and Russel Drysdale. The Australian artists combine a kind of European expressionism with sociological inquiry to produce works that had great feeling, but were also highly cerebral.
The more intellectual approach to art has led to its rejection in England. For example, in 2013, the Royal Academy's exhibition of Australian art drew extreme criticism from English art writers. Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times wrote of John Olsen
“Olsen's Sydney Sun, a giant panel of art installed above your head, successfully evokes the sensation of standing under a cascade of diarrhoea.”
He also wrote of Aboriginal art that it “managed to create what amounts to a market in decorative rugs” and
“Opening the show with a selection of these spotty meanderings, and discussing them in dramatically hallowed terms, cannot disguise the fact that in most cases the great art of the aborigines has been turned into tourist tat.”
Admittedly, Australians are not renowned as great promoters and much of the poor reception in England could be put down to how the art was presented by Australian curators and marketers.
Britain has few natural resources, has relocated most of its manufacturing to Asia and has a population that is relatively unskilled and uneducated. Despite these facts, for decades the British have enjoyed one of the most lavish lifestyles in the developed world.
The key to Britain's success is a smoke and mirrors trick by the financial industry. Basically, the British economy is based on creating financial packages such as derivatives, which have no intrinsic value but derive their value from something else. They can even be bad debts that operate like a pyramid scheme. As long as people buy them, they can return an interest payment. The more money that is circulated between the institutions and the more that derivatives are sold, the more wealth that can be created.
As the British financial industry literally creates money, an Englishman may look over his stock portfolio and confidently feel that he is worth tens of millions of dollars. Feeling rich, he will spend extravagantly in Britain's restaurants, art galleries, or travel agencies.
The good life continues until creditors start asking for their original loans back. The money that was created just disappears. A derivative that was bought for millions of dollars then reveals that it was nothing but a pyramid scheme whose only value was in the fact other people believed it had value. Banks crash, stocks fall, and the multimillionaires can no longer live the high life. The economy then crashes.
In the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Britain was hit particularly hard by the line of credit suddenly being cut off and derivatives revealing that people who thought they had made wise investments had actually bought the financial equivalent of magic beans. Unfortunately for England, its Government and financial industry is almost bankrupt and other governments around the world know it so are less inclined to invest in Britain. With no money, the British government has had to cut spending, which has caused pain in the service industries. The inevitable future for Britain is a sharp decline in living standards, which is usually a trigger for social unrest.
Like Britain, the Australian economy is basically built around a service industry circulating money around but unlike Britain, Australia's economy is actually built on industries that do actually produce something. The star of the Australian economy is the mining industry and farming industry that constitute the majority of exports. With a service industry built on something other than magic beans, Australia's economic prospects are much more assured than those of England.
As painful as it may be for Australians to admit, English do humour in a far more intelligent way, which usually results in the English coming out on top during cross-cultural piss-taking. For example, comedy by Monty Python was highly educated as it used absurdities to generate a laugh and get an audience to consider an issue from a different perspective. In What Have The Romans Done for Us (from Life of Bryon), Monty Python gave an interesting take on anti-colonialism sentiment. The sitcom Yes Minister likewise had an highly educated take on the political process. In opinion polls, it used humour to demonstrate that surveys are not always as informative as the media manager makes them out to be.