Sorry

I want my money back.  I moved to Australia for sunshine and clear skies, beaches and barbies and bare skin.  To live in city which even in winter stretches and yawns under clear blue skies.  But this week I look out of my window what I do see?  Come back el Nino, all is forgiven.  It’s raining again.

I know we should be glad the drought is over and “it takes a flood to kill a dry spell” but really, enough is enough.  This has been the wettest summer in New South Wales for sixteen years and the coldest February in fourteen.  Sydney’s not had it too bad but large areas north of here are under a metre of water for the third time this year.  That’s a lot of bad carpet that needs replacing.

There are few things I like less than being wet or cold and it’s rare that a grey sky will find me far from a fireplace but last Thursday I dutifully headed out through the pouring rain to stand in Martin Place.  This is the closest thing Sydney has to a main square.  It’s more of a paved street really, albeit lined with the city’s few historic buildings, but it’s where you tend to go if you have a forty-foot Christmas tree to light or a large demonstration to suppress.  On Thursday it held an enormous cinema screen surrounded by speakers the size of telephone boxes (remember them?).and about five thousand people.

I couldn’t actually see the screen but I didn’t need to.  The hushed silence that fell over the crowd as the speakers crackled to life was enough.  It’s not often you get a sense of being at an historic occasion and the only other time I can quote was being in Berlin when the wall came down.  Clearly, our new Prime Minister’s apology to the stolen generations was not as earth-shattering as that great event, but I can tell you a similar sense of magic was in the air.

Here are the facts: between 1920 and 1972 up to thirty per cent of aboriginal children were taken away from their parents and imprisoned in institutions where they were taught to be domestic servants to white people.  They were chosen based on the colour of their skin, the idea being that any child not completely black would benefit from being separated from the aboriginal way of life.  1972 is a not a long time ago and there are a lot of people alive today who were taken away from their homes as children and entered into an environment of violence and abuse.  They still no have idea what happened to their families.

Twelve years ago an enquiry was commissioned by a Labour government into this atrocity and the resulting “Bringing Them Home” report made it clear an official apology to the native people of Australia was a vital starting point in any reconciliation.  But by the time the report was delivered a Liberal government was in place and the Prime Minister of the time (John Howard) steadfastly refused to apologise.  He had done nothing wrong and nor had the people he represented.  100,000 people took to the streets to persuade him to think otherwise but he wouldn’t budge.  Ten years later, in November just gone, we got another Labour government and this month, within one week of parliament reconvening, PM Rudd laid out a strongly worded Sorry.

Not everyone approves of the apology but in a quite remarkable feat Mr Rudd delivered a speech which everyone agreed was a masterpiece of dignity.  There were tears in the eyes of the people around me in Martin Place.  We cheered loudly every time the live broadcast from Canberra used the word “sorry” and we stood with our heads bowed when we heard the details of what had been done in the name of building Australia.  By the end of the speech there was an incredible buzz in the air, an aura of excitement that a new era was beginning.  I can honestly say I have never felt prouder to live in this amazing country.  And that has to be worth a bit of rain.

Anti-Intellectualism in Australia

This week I forgot I was in Australia.  The problem started at a barbie when I confessed to a Scottish friend that I never read non-fiction.  He insisted on lending me a treatise entitled “Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern” which politeness dictated I at least attempt to read.

I’d forgotten what intellectual texts are like.  How slowly you have to read to understand the complex sentence structures (clever parentheses) and pronouns where you’re not quite sure to what they refer.  So after an hour or a half there I was google-eyed with a headache when I switched on the radio for some light relief.  Except I’d forgotten it was tuned to Radio National, the closest thing here to Radio 4.  

There was a broadcast on from the BBC, a conversation between Will Self and the editor of The Paris Review on the subject of George Orwell and what a faker he was.  Interesting enough to cook to so I listened all the way through.  Then, the next day, The Guardian Weekly arrived with the bad weather and I spent the morning on the sofa looking out at the rain reading about the difference between Islam and islamism.  

So all in all you can’t really blame me for forgetting what country I was in.  It wasn’t the weather that was so un-Australian, it was all the long words.

Germaine Greer is so reviled in this country (she left + she criticises it = she is evil) that only her barmiest comments are ever reported.  Until I got here I quite liked her though and I do remember her complaining loudly about the “anti-intellectualism” of the place.  Never was she more accurate.  Not “lack of intellectualism” you note, but positive “anti-intellectualism”.

There is a commonly held belief in the rest of the world that Australians are outspoken.  This is bunkum.  Australians will only tell you what they think if what they think is positive, so you have to learn to read their expressions very carefully.  One of the expressions I’m learning to read is the one which follows the use of any foreign, multisyllabic or erudite vocabulary.  It’s a bit like the expression a cat  would wear if it had been bitten by a mouse.  Surprised, a bit unsure of itself, just waiting to prove how sharp its own teeth can be.  So a conversation might go like this:

Naïve foreigner:  I’m not sure, if we observe the status quo we might learn something.

Most listening aussies: Mm, yes, mm.

Aussie brave:  I prefer AC/DC myself.

You see, it’s not that they don’t know what status quo means.  It’s just that you deserve to have the mickey taken out of you for using a latin term.  And, importantly, Acker Dacker are a true-blue Aussie group and you’re a dag for thinking some trumped-up use of the language will ever be better than honest-to-God Aussie rock AND you’re a foreign ponce for telling me that I might need to learn something.  Got it?  Mate?

This rejection of intelligent discourse is all-pervasive.  Time and again I hear European colleagues at the bank being told to “make it simpler”.  Bearing in mind half of them work in financial services strategy this is a challenge.  They might have the most fantastic insight into the purchasing, sorry buying, habits of Gen Y but if they can’t present it in short headlines it won’t get heard.

And talking of headlines, you want to know how I suddenly remembered what country I’m in?  Well, tonight I flipped past The Biggest Loser Australia, Australian Who Do You Think You Are, So You Think You Can Dance Australia and Australian Idol to watch the television news.  And this is what’s happening in the world.  There was an explosion in a chicken shop in Sydney; it’s raining; deodorant doesn’t give you cancer.  And now, sport.  

Pass me that Guardian Weekly!