Most of Australia's residents live on the coast.
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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.
Australia still had a largely colonial mentality when I was born, in 1938. Only vestiges of it survive today. The most important of these relics is, of course, its monarchy. It is a bizarre fact that no Australian can be the head of state of Australia. That role is reserved for the King or Queen of England, by definition a foreigner, and not even an elected foreigner: the office of the Australian head of state remains purely hereditary, open only to a small clan of Anglo-German squillionaires known as the Windsor family. This appreciably narrows the field of talent.
According to the Australian constitution--a document written for us by the English at the turn of the century--it is ultimately the English monarch who rules Australia through an unelected viceroy, the Governor-General. This official may be Australian or may not. He may, on behalf of the Queen, cancel any law enacted by the Australian government or even throw out the government and call for new elections. Or he may not. In practice he almost never does. The last and only time he did was in 1975, when the G-G, Sir John Kerr, fired the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam. This caused shock and resentment. Millions of Australians felt that Whitlam, their hero, the great reformer of government policy in the domains of race, immigration, foreign policy and the arts, had been stolen from them. There are still plenty of people around who regard this as not far from a coup d'etat.