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!