Fernando Gros

Australian Days

Golf courses are fas­cin­at­ing places for honest con­ver­sa­tion. There’s some­thing about the space, the length of time required or a round and occa­sional waits that encour­ages folks to be less reserved. I recall one fas­cin­at­ing con­ver­sa­tion with a friend from New Zea­l­and, while walk­ing down the 13th hole of our course in Delhi. He opened up by saying , “you’re not like a typ­ical Aus­tralian.” I thought I knew where he was going, having fre­quently been con­fron­ted, in one way or another, with my lack of being fully “Australian.”

Wear­ily I asked, “what do you mean.” He replied, “well, you don’t have a chip on your shoulder.” He went on to explain that most Australian’s can’t help but bang on about how good Aus­tralia is, and by exten­sion, put down other coun­tries. It was a fas­cin­at­ing insight into the way that other nation­al­it­ies see Australians.

In fact, I’ve had a number of such exper­i­ences (some down­right com­ical) as people let rip about Aus­trali­ans, having assumed that either because of my inter­na­tion­al­ised accent, or hard to place looks, I wasn’t an Aus­tralian. Without doubt, there is a gulf between how Aus­trali­ans think they are per­ceived and how they are are actu­ally perceived.

That said, my own sense of Aus­tralian iden­tity, diluted as it was when I lived there is even more dis­sip­ated. It’s now ten years (give or take a week) since I left Aus­tralia and in that time, I’ve changed, Aus­tralia has changed and the world has changed.

The para­dox of national iden­tity is best expressed in my daugh­ter — born in the UK, lived most of her life in India and now settled in Hong Kong (and fast becom­ing fluent in Man­darin). She is, tech­nic­ally an Aus­tralian by virtue of her parent’s nation­al­ity, but she feels no con­nec­tion to the coun­try, beyond seeing it as a place for family hol­i­days. More than any­thing else, that’s a real­ity that expresses our life right now.

Everytime we go back to Aus­tralia it feels more for­eign. It’s not just the dis­con­nec­tion from pop­u­lar cul­ture (which does feel ever more insu­lated and paro­chial), but some­thing else. At the risk of offend­ing many, some­thing about Aus­tralian cul­ture has become more “Amer­ican” and it isn’t just the massive over-development of road­ways and giant shop­ping malls. There’s the rampant flag-waving, the “we know better” men­tal­ity and, yes, the ugly tour­ist yelling at the locals for not under­stand­ing the Aus­tralian way of doing things.

I like to think the recent change of gov­ern­ment marks a real­isa­tion, in the Aus­tralian pop­u­la­tion, of the cul­tural prob­lems. Cer­tainly the change in advert­ising cam­paigns for Aus­tralian tour­ism, from the folksy, pop­u­list and down­right offens­ive cam­paign of a few years ago, to the cur­rent rest­ful, diverse and invit­ing cam­paign must point to something.

No-one knows for sure where the cur­rent eco­nomic crisis will lead us, but there’s a good chance we will come out of it with the Pacific region being more power­ful than it was. This is good news for Aus­tralia, but only up to a point. Twenty years ago com­pan­ies could afford to set up their regional offices in Aus­tralia and treat it as a lead market for Asia — that window is closed now.

Per­haps Australia’s future is to be in Asia the way Den­mark or Norway are in Europe? Cer­tainly, as a player in edu­ca­tion, design and high qual­ity man­u­fac­tur­ing (three areas the recent Howard gov­ern­ment crim­in­ally denied support).

As for me, I struggle to ima­gine set­tling back into life in Aus­tralia. There are things I loved about living there, but much of the Sydney of my youth just doesn’t exist any more — it’s been paved over, knocked down, or par­ti­tioned by road-works and “redevel­op­ment.” People brag about the “great life­style” and “laid back cul­ture,” but then, almost in the same breath, fret about busy­n­ess, stress, crazy com­mutes, crowds, for­eign­ers and a litany of other complaints.

Is the lucky county run­ning a little low on contentment?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 8:08 pm. It is filed under Daily Life, Expatriate, Globalisation, Theology and Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.