Guy is replying to Patrick West's Article:

Thursday 15 March 2007
Guy Rundle
Australians are uncouth? Rack off!

Last week’s TV column by Patrick West, in which he
called Australians ‘white trash’, caused an uproar
Down Under. An Aus journalist responds.

‘The Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting an
exhibition of Kylie Minogue’s costumes’ said Sandi
Toksvig on a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s News
Quiz. ‘It’s on loan from the Australian Arts Centre,
which is now presumably empty.’ Boom boom. As far as
anti-Australian gags go, that is pretty much par for
the course. Increasingly, British views of Australia –
especially as expressed by the middle-class
commentariat – take as their starting point the idea
that Down Under symbolises all that is cultureless,
naive and vulgar.

As an Australian in Britain, you simply get used to
it. More often than not such anti-Australian
sentiments find their expression in the leftish
mainstream press, where ostensible liberalism often
serves as a mask for cultural elitism. It was a bit of
a shock, then, to open up spiked last week and find in
Patrick West’s TV column every British cliché about
Australian culture and life stuck into one article.

Based largely, it would appear, on conversations with
a few ex-pats, West’s startling conclusion is that
Australia is not the sunny, fresh-minted utopia of
Neighbours, but is more like the Gothic suburban
fantasy of Kath and Kim - a cultural predicament which
has apparently driven from Australia not only record
numbers of smart people but also just about the whole
A-list of Aussies, from, er, Clive James to Germaine
Greer. However, wherever they go, Australians retain a
childlike naiveté which comes to the fore when they’ve
had a skinful, says West, which is very often of
course. Oh, and the women will push you to the floor
and have your fly open before you’ve even finished
your ‘scooner’ (sic).

Well, if your research sample is the front bar of the
‘Shebu Walkie’ (the Walkabout beer barn in Shepherd’s
Bush, London) over a schooner (a beer) or two, then
inevitably you’re going to uncover those kind of
back-of-the-beermat findings. Let’s dispel a few of
the myths in West’s piece.

For a start, there’s the ex-pat diaspora. There are
around one million Australians living outside of
Australia, or about seven per cent of the adult
population. About half of them say they have left
permanently, although a proportion of these
subsequently change their minds (1). By contrast, the
number of British citizens living overseas is 5.5
million, or about 12 per cent of the adult population;
around 100,000 Brits a year leave Britain permanently
(2). Their most favoured destination is a place called
Australia, with Spain coming second.

True, the make-up of British and Australian ex-pat
communities differs, with the British composed of more
retirees and fewer professionals than Australia’s
diaspora – but that is simply a consequence of
Australia being part of the global periphery. Like
Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and many other fairly
sparsely populated places, Australia’s citizens are
responding to the increased mobility afforded by
globalisation, and to the creation of global capitals
like London and New York, which offer professional
opportunities that are unavailable in their homeland.

The second mistake in West’s article is his claim that
all Australia’s leading intellectuals have left. This
leaves me no choice but to take the odious path of
cultural boosterism and reel off a list of those who
haven’t left, or didn’t leave, Australia: Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Patrick White; world-class
poets Les Murray and AD Hope; Nobel Prize-winning
scientist Peter Doherty; philosophers David Armstrong
and Rai Gaita; Booker Prize-winner Thomas Keneally;
France’s most performed overseas playwright Daniel
Keene; Pritzker (architecture’s Nobel) winner Glenn
Murcutt; actor (now artistic director) Cate Blanchett;
scientist Tim Flannery. There are many more.

Those whom West cites as ex-pats (and he left out the
most talented ex-pats, such as novelist Peter Carey
and critic Meaghan Morris) are overwhelmingly those
who are either global travellers, such as John Pilger,
or metropolitan performers such as Germaine Greer (who
alternates between A-list work and Celebrity Big
Brother-style fiascos) and former clip-show host Clive
James. It’s those who stayed – such as White, Murray
or Murcutt – who produced world-class work, connecting
local traditions to global modernism. Maybe West
hasn’t heard of them because they don’t work in his
narrow world of the London media.

What is really awry in West’s piece is that he has
missed the way in which the image of Australia is used
within British culture and debate for purposes that
have nothing whatsoever to do with the southern
continent. The fashionable disdain in Britain for the
suburbanism that dominates the image of Australian
life is a barely disguised form of prejudice directed
at working-class and mainstream culture, displaced in
such a way that it can avoid charges of naked elitism.

There’s no doubt that Australia has a different set of
class relations to Britain – and that is partly
because Australia has a far smaller cultural elite (or
core of knowledge/cultural producers, to put it more
technically) and larger suburbs of detached houses
with gardens and a cultural life largely based around
mainstream (and mostly American) films, TV and music.
In terms of comfort for basic wage-earners, Australia
is one of the most congenial societies yet devised,
though it is at the same time frustrating and
unsatisfying for those who want a more cosmopolitan
lifestyle. Hence the grousing from the professional
diaspora who have either permanently relocated to
London or are in the first flush of enthusiasm for
London life (usually put paid to by a couple years of
London rents, rain and trains).

Yet even a cursory glance around everyday British
culture – from Big Brother to the half-hour lobotomy
of Emmerdale or Gillian McKeith’s poo TV, to Soho on a
Saturday night – should show that Britain is hardly
lacking in cheerful assertive vulgarity. So why does
the Australian version get such a kicking, especially
from the left or ‘progressive’ direction?

The answer, of course, is because it’s safe to bash
Australia. No one from the liberal or left-leaning
fraternity can come out and say – as Simon Heffer or
Theodore Dalrymple have done – that the British
working classes are a slatternly disgrace. So instead
such disdain is displaced on to a white settler
country which does have – mainly in rural areas – all
the residual racism common to white settler countries.

And then such disdain is presented as a critical and
progressive attitude. So in West’s article we find
that the kind of thing once patronisingly said about
blacks – that they have a joyful sense of rhythm – can
now be transferred on to white Australians (or Kiwis
or South Africans or the Irish) who are praised for
their naive childlike drunkenness that we jaded
metropolitans have long since lost.

This easy chauvinism serves another purpose, too. It
assuages the all-pervasive anxiety amongst the
left-liberal elite that mainstream culture is actually
winning – that Jade Goody, Garry Bushell and Girls
Aloud are setting the pace today, and that the
remaining institutions of liberal elite culture (Radio
4, the Guardian, David-fucking-Hare) are being pushed
to a position of utter irrelevance reminiscent of,
well, Australia. More and more British liberals
project their fears for their own self-preservation
against the hordes on to a nightmare vision of
Australia, where they imagine the hordes have been
victorious.

The point is that Australia is ahead, not behind, the
curve the UK is on – it is dealing with the problems
that any society faces when it has started to satisfy
the basic needs of a large section of the population.

Kath and Kim is neither a clown show nor a proletarian
minstrel turn. It is a slightly rueful self-reflection
on the difficulties you face when you have got
everything you think you wanted – the house, the
garden, the holidays, the shopping centres – and now
you’re wondering what else you can do. Not
understanding that, Mr West, leaves you looking, well,
a bit of a galah.

Guy Rundle is European editor of the Australian
magazine Arena.

Source:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2965/



___________________________________________________________
What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your email
personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship.
http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk