Here is 'The Britishness of Australia', my article in the just issued Winter 2016-17 edition of the Salisbury Review:
There is nothing more traditional than an
agricultural show in an Australian town, and
nothing more British than a horse showing
event. It’s a 3-ply-wool jacket and always the right
handkerchief in the right pocket, even if the day’s
a scorcher and birds are dropping from the sky. The
accents of the competitors are broad Australian but
the saddles are handmade English leather; the boots,
the jodhpurs, the breeches all imported from Old
Blighty. Even the riding ponies have their origins in
England, with bloodlines that can be traced back to
the original homeland. You might call it ‘Hot Britain’,
although these days things have become a little more
complicated in the Land of Oz.
The Britishness of Australia is unmistakable – the
national language, driving on the left, the self-
deprecating humour, cricket, football fanaticism
(albeit a different code of the game), fish and chips,
enthusiasm for the amber liquid and seaside piers, not
to mention the names of streets, suburbs and cities. One
of my regular haunts is Kensington Gardens – only
it is in the leafy eastern suburbs of Adelaide rather
than adjacent to London’s Hyde Park. Naturally, we
have our own Hyde Park, a well-heeled suburb to
the immediate south of the central business district.
Adelaide itself is named after the queen consort of King
William IV, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, and our main
thoroughfare is – you guessed it – King William Street.
We could continue, but you get the idea.
The un-Britishness of Australia is its astonishing physicality. The country is 31.5 times larger than the
United Kingdom or, to put it the other way around, the
UK is 3 percent of the size of Australia. Nevertheless,
the UK’s population of 64 million far surpasses
Australia’s 23 million, and the vast majority of those
live in the provincial capitals of Perth, Adelaide,
Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Life in rural
Australia is something of a mystery for city dwellers.
It certainly was for me before I began my first ever job:
History teacher in Streaky Bay, a small township on the
western side of South Australia, 450 miles from home,
a greater distance than between London and Edinburgh.
The ten-hour bus journey, overnight so there was no
chance of a sleep between disembarking and walking
to work after a weekend in the Big Smoke, delivered
me to what I felt–as a young man–was the end of the
world. In February 1981, when I first arrived in Streaky
Bay, the town didn’t even have access to television.
I viewed the place in much the same way a Briton
coming to Sydney or Adelaide at that time might have
seen Australia – ‘a country where they turn back time’,
as Al Stewart sang in his 1976 song Year of the Cat.
Nothing that happened in the town, a tryst between a
fisherman’s wife and a farmer, or a teacher romance,
eluded prying eyes. Streaky Bay people, with the neatly
turned out war memorial and prominent Australian
flag, got worked up about winning a gold medal in the
Tidy Towns Competition (Eyre Peninsula Division).
They were, I used to believe, a mixture of community
minded and insular, with the balance tilting towards the latter. Thirty-five years later and I am prepared to
reverse my opinion.
I saw the people of Streaky Bay as a throwback to
the attitudes that predominated in Australia during
the 1950s and early 1960s: yes, it was possible to
become accepted as a local but only if one adopted the
customary way of seeing and doing things. I felt as if
the conservative parents in Streaky Bay saw me as an
interloper: an inexperienced know-it-all from the city
introducing dangerous ideas to their children. I might
have been more paranoid than them. Leaving the town
for the last time (with my possessions loaded up in my
father’s car), a local drove past me in his utility. He was
making some kind of gesture. Was it hostile? I pushed
on towards the highway turn-off. Out of my rear vision,
however, I noticed him make a sharp U-turn and come
speeding after me. A police siren would have been less
concerning. The next instant he was overtaking my
car and basically forcing me off the side of the road.
How sheepish I felt when he handed over a carton of
beer and told me his son loved my History classes and
wished I were staying another year.
Back in 1981, only one migrant family, an Italian one,
lived in Streaky Bay, a place with 1,200 people. The
little town was behind the times. Starting in the early
1950s, it was not only British migrants that came to
Australia but people from all over Europe, especially
Greece and Italy. In 1968, the Division of Assimilation
within the Department of Immigration was renamed
the Division of Integration. New Australians were
encouraged to integrate into Australian life while at
the same time retaining their customs, cuisine, music,
sport, beliefs, art and religion.
The shift from assimilation to a more flexible
system of integration was one thing, but the Whitlam
Labor government (1972-75) went a step further
and introduced the policy of multiculturalism. The
then Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, spoke
about Australia building a ‘multi-language, multi-
cultural participatory democracy’ that would ‘accept
differences...loves colourful diversity’ and inspire
‘mutual respect between all’. The idea was that migrants
could preserve their own culture while accepting the
right of others to do the same thing, as long as people
were loyal to Australia and followed Australian law.
The term ‘multiculturalism’ has become so pervasive
in public discourse that those who argue it is the engine
of sectarianism and the portent of civilisational suicide
find themselves denounced by the modern-day left as
xenophobic fascists.
The irony, perhaps, is that advocates of the
multicultural concept are often unaware of the
original, and I would contend more appropriate, use
of the term ‘culture’. Matthew Arnold, in Culture and
Anarchy (1868), speaks of culture in the broadest
terms of Western civilisation – Hellenism, Hebraism,
Christianity and so on – not as a mere ‘tribe’ in the
politically-correct sense of (say) ‘gay culture’ or
‘Lebanese culture’. When Australia was established
as a dominion on January 1, 1901, it was as a project
of Western civilisation, albeit one with a distinct
Anglo-Saxon sensibility. The Magna Carta, the English
Civil War, the Glorious Revolution and the founding
of the Commonwealth of Australia were all part of
a continuum. British Westminster-style democracy
and the independence of the judiciary are written into
the country’s DNA and the increase of non-British
migrants to Australia over recent decades should not
alter that.
Whether Australians are now more likely to have
wine rather than beer with their evening meal or buy a
kebab instead of fish and chips ought not to affect the
underlying civilisational fundamentals. In that sense,
at least, the retention of the Union Jack on the flag, as
a symbol of our heritage, makes perfect sense. Which
brings us to the contention of Dr Benjamin Jones, post-
modernist scholar at Western Sydney University, that
Australia must disavow the British ensign since we are
now ‘a thriving multicultural nation’ existing in a post-
colonial paradigm. For Jones, and left-wing academics
of his ilk, Australia is a confederation of contemporary
tribes in which reminders of our hegomonistic British
legacy need to be challenged and progressively
eradicated. Some of those reminders include Australia
Day (commemoration of 1788 British settlement at
Botany Bay), our constitutional monarchy, Anzac
Day (military involvement in the First World War and
beyond) and, of course, the flag.
The Left-wing power élite in Australia wants
to replace genuine diversity of opinion with the
‘diversity’ of ethnic-based special interests, Islamic
particularism, Indigenous separatism, LGBT hysteria,
Green fanaticism, third-wave feminism and so on ad
infinitum. All of these latter-day tribes like to believe
they are community-minded and the furthest thing
from insular, and yet each resides within its own
inward-looking echo chamber. The only thing these
identity groups share is an antipathy towards traditional
Australia – and that includes traditional Australians.
Tomorrow doesn’t belong to us because we are not
part of the PC Brigade’s brave new sectarianism. Well,
bugger them, as my dad would say, running up a giant
Aussie flag at the front of the house.
