Robert Hughes reflects on his native land: Australia.
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Books, of course, circulate everywhere, whereas paintings and buildings do not. Consequently major architects like Glenn Murcutt and Philip Cox are little known outside Australia. This is a pity, and even worse is the general ignorance of Australian contemporary painting. At a time when serious pictorial talent is so thin on the ground in the U.S., it seems bizarre that artists as excellent as John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Tim Storrier and Mike Parr aren't the world figures they deserve to be. The only Australian art that attracts much overseas attention is contemporary Aboriginal art, which varies enormously in quality.
The clarity of Australian cultural achievement is often muddied by our most irksome cultural shortcoming: a peevishly insecure hatred of "tall poppies," people distinguished by their achievements in any area except, of course, sport. Australia has never honored its artists, intellectuals, writers and musicians as fully as its sports figures; there is always an undertow of resentment, of the lowbrows' residual suspicion that the highbrow is conning them. Everyone bitches about this, nobody does anything about it; it is hardwired into us, a proof of "toughness."
Underknown culturally, Australia is also politically obscure. Why? Because we're so well behaved. We are not the mouse that roared. Historically, we have rarely even contemplated roaring. As former Prime Minister Paul Keating has pointed out, Australia has always been short of the defining value systems that are gained through conflict. We have never had a civil war or a revolution. We have never been invaded — though we nearly were during World War II, by the Japanese. We are piteously short of good political scandals and low on graft. Nobody has ever called us a Great Satan or even a little one. We tend to like Americans more than most nations do, although we do not have the least desire to be like them.
We are absolutely not a threat to anyone. But this does us no good in the media. It is why you do not read about Australia in U.S. newspapers. Practically nothing in Australia is considered worth reporting. In all the 30 years I have lived in New York City, I doubt that I have seen as many front-page stories about my country in the New York Times as you'd get about Israel in a month. Why would you want to know about us? We don't rock your boat or export much you're interested in, except for our admirable wines, a steady supply of sports figures and a few actors like Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman.
Historically Australia felt little resentment about its colonial control by Britain and its sovereign. Its population was heavy with Irishmen and Irishwomen, but the resentments their ancestors had brought with them soon mellowed into ineffectuality in the antipodean sun, not much more than folk costume, once the chains of convictry were abolished. As a colony, we were content peaceably to fulfill our natural destiny, which was to supply Britain with cheap wheat and wool and (when required) with cannon fodder for wars against the Boer or the Hun.
In these, we had little or no perceptible stake of our own. Britain, with grim enthusiasm, condemned us to assist in the creation of dead colonial heroes. In World War I, Australia lost 59,258 young men out of a total of 330,000 sent abroad. Both as a proportion of troops killed or missing and as a proportion of national population, this was the highest figure for any Allied state. It left us in the 1920s as a psychically devastated nation of widows, spinsters and orphans. This enormous death toll was rationalized as a cleansing, an erasure of the inherited stain of convictry. Winston Churchill, who sent our grandfathers to die on the implacable slopes of Gallipoli, was by no means the only Englishman to think they came from "tainted" stock.