Culture and Customs of Australia
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Culture and Customs of Australia LAURIE CLANCY GREENWOOD PRESS Culture and Customs of Australia Culture and Customs of Australia LAURIE CLANCY GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clancy, Laurie, 1942– Culture and customs of Australia / Laurie Clancy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–32169–8 (alk. paper) 1. Australia—Social life and customs. I. Title. DU107.C545 2004 306'.0994 —dc22 2003027515 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2004 by Laurie Clancy All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003027515 ISBN: 0–313–32169–8 First published in 2004 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Neelam Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Chronology xv 1 The Land, People, and History 1 2 Thought and Religion 31 3 Marriage, Gender, and Children 51 4 Holidays and Leisure Activities 65 5 Cuisine and Fashion 85 6 Literature 95 7 The Media and Cinema 121 8 The Performing Arts 137 9 Painting 151 10 Architecture 171 Bibliography 185 Index 189 Preface most americans have heard of Australia, but very few could say much about it. There is a joke in the American film Dumb and Dumber where a woman says she is Austrian and one of the heroes says, “Throw another prawn on the barbie,” in homage to the Australian tourist advertisements featuring Aussie actor Paul Hogan of “Crocodile Dundee” fame. A similar mistake occurred in Japan some years ago when antifreeze was discovered in some Austrian wines and sales of Australian wines plummeted. Kangaroos, tennis players, and perhaps more recently wine, film actors, and the idea of Australia as an excellent tourist destination would sum up the extent of many Americans’ knowledge of the country. In the 1970s I spent two very pleasant years in the United States on a Harkness Fellowship. Dur- ing that period, on only one occasion did Australia make the front page of the newspaper with a big story and that was when a girder on the Westgate bridge, then being constructed in Melbourne, collapsed, and 32 men fell to their deaths. Many people I met were surprised at how fluently I spoke English. Some, on the other hand, found my accent incomprehensible. To some extent, of course, the situation has improved, but Australians, sat- urated as they are by American culture, still know far more about Americans than vice versa. Even when Australia became only one of two Forces of the Willing prepared to commit troops to the war against Saddam Hussein, its tiny contribution received very little attention from the international press, which was totally focused on Great Britain’s role. x PREFACE And yet Americans would be surprised if they understood how much their country preoccupies the consciousness of Australians, even if in deeply ambivalent ways. Ever since Prime Minister John Curtin made his famous World War II declaration that Australia would now look to the United States for protection and assistance rather than Britain, there has been a seismic change in the attitudes of Australians toward the United States. Beginning with Prime Minister Harold Holt’s famous “All the way with LBJ” in the 1960s to Prime Minister John Howard’s support of the war against Iraq, elic- iting President George W. Bush’s eulogy of him as a “man of steel,” successive Australian governments have bent over backward (with varying degrees of flexibility) to demonstrate their allegiance to the United States. The ambivalence is there among some politicians from the left side of Labor. It is to be seen in the huge marches against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s and even in the very considerable protests that accompanied the Australian government’s commitment to the invasion of Iraq. It is there to be seen also among Australian writers. In their studies of the presence of Ameri- can troops in Australia during World War II, novelists such as Xavier Herbert (Soldiers’ Women , 1961) and Dymphna Cusack and Florence James (Come in Spinner, 1951) endorsed the then widely held view of the American troops as “over-paid, over-sexed and over here.” Younger writers, however, such as Michael Wilding, Peter Carey, and Frank Moorhouse, have a much more complex view. While disapproving of Austra- lian participation in the Vietnam War, they are deeply drawn to the dynamic force of American culture, and the conflict is vividly present in the title of Moorhouse’s collection The Americans, Baby (1972), and Carey’s unusually elegiac short story “American Dreams” (1968). Australia’s isolation from the rest of the world, something many Australians don’t fully comprehend until they step onto a plane on an international flight for the first time and discover the length of the trip to the nearest destination, has had both its good points (a sense of security, a freedom from invasion) and its bad (parochialism, complacency), but it is an isolation that the new technologies are rapidly bringing to an end, or at least radically qualifying. The title of a book by one of Australia’s most distinguished historians, Geof- frey Blainey, was The Tyranny of Distance (1968), a phrase that has passed into the language, but it is a tyranny that has been largely overthrown. In the post–World War II years and especially through the 1950s the image persisted of Australia as a kind of benign Sleepy Hollow, free from the fears and dangers that beset countries to its immediate north or in Europe, for example. No invasions by foreign powers, no civil wars, no fierce battles with the original occupiers of the land (though there is now general recognition PREFACE xi that Aboriginal resistance to white aggression was considerably greater than originally thought), virtually full employment until the 1960s—all these are thought to have created a kind of benign, vacuous never-never land. But as with the Eisenhower years in the United States, the Menzies years (1949– 1966) in Australia papered over a number of divisions that would reveal themselves only later. They were, after all, the years of attempts to ban the Communist Party, the years of the Stolen Generation, with Aboriginal par- ents forcibly dispossessed of their children by official government policy, and of mass immigration with its enormous consequences. Since the 1960s and 1970s or so, in fact, Australia has been a country in a state of almost continual reinvention of itself. There has probably been no country in the world that has been so fascinated with the question of its own identity. As one academic pointed out, Ulysses on his long journey around the world did not constantly put in at each harbor and seek to assure himself of his own Greekness. Australian writers’ and intellectuals’ obsessive reex- amination of the country’s past combined with international movements and events to produce a series of crises and transformations. In 1967 Australians voted in a referendum to grant Aborigines full citizenship. This was followed eventually by High Court decisions granting land rights to Aborigines and rejecting the concept that Aborigines had no previous possession of the land because they did not, in the conventional Western sense, settle on it—the so- called terra nullius concept. Australian feminist Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1971) began a debate in Australia about the rights and roles of women in society that is still raging. Absurdly anachronistic censorship laws were abolished. The concept of New Australians gave way to the much more complex one of multicultur- alism, the idea that immigrants to Australia could become members of the mainstream society while still retaining and valuing the most important ele- ments in their own culture. The conservative Coalition’s Senate’s rejection of the Supply Bill in 1975 and the Governor-General’s subsequent dismissal of a democratically elected prime minister set in train the debate about Australia becoming a republic and culminated in the unsuccessful referendum of 1999. It is a debate and a movement that shows no signs of dying. In the late 1980s the Labor gov- ernment implemented a series of policies that would lead to quite radical changes in the economy (the floating of the dollar, the reduction or abolition of tariffs) and in education. And finally, with the turning away of the Tampa (September, 2001) and its hundreds of refugees on board, came the debate about people attempting to enter Australia unlawfully and the use of deten- tion camps. xii PREFACE It could be argued, then, that Australia is a country whose profile is chang- ing almost constantly. This book attempts, as objectively as is possible, to document these changes, as well as to look back at the country’s past, and place them in some kind of historical context. It is written primarily for an audience of non-Australians, but I hope it will be useful to the citizens of my own country as well. Acknowledgments A number of people have assisted me in the preparation of this book. I should like to thank in particular Professor Roy Boland of La Trobe University, Alun Chapman, Emeritus Professor Jack Clancy, formerly of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, John Leonard, Bridget McDonnell, Craig McGregor, Professor Stuart McIntyre of the University of Melbourne, Emeritus Profes- sor John McLaren, formerly of the Victoria University of Technology, Murray and Judy McLeod, Dr.