The constrained focus of the work entails that it is not hunting for some
national spirit that would holistically explain all. And wisely so: such a quarry
may not exist. What could be more idiosyncratic than Australia’s intensity of
labour market regulation? And what could be‘more Australian’than sport?
Yet Australian sport eludes Australia’s mass of labour legislation and union-
ization, and (unlike in the USA) is an oasis of industrial peace (Chapter 11).
Nevertheless, the present work inevitably confronts the nature of Australian
society, and in doing so it may resemble theflood of books that appeared
in the 1960s (Horne, Pringle, Boyd, Phillips, McGregor, Coleman...). But the
present book is not a revival of that literature.
The 1960s literature was distinctly‘newist’; whether cautiously hailing what
seemed to be coming around the corner, or impatiently hastening its advent,
the whole literature had the air of a‘modern’Australia purposefully interring a
traditional one. The present work, in contrast, is gripped not by a sense of
the new but by the repetition of the same old story. But, it might be retorted,
surely traditional Australia has, in fact, expired? A country in which in 1911
over 42.5 per cent of the population resided in rural areas has become one in
which barely 11 per cent does; one where the sentimental memorializations of
pre-war rustical Australia—preserved in the post-war period by Russel Ward—
have mutated into a cold hatred of that terrain (Conrad 2003). One in which, in
1901, just 4.6 per cent of its inhabitants were born outside of Australia or the
British Isles becomes one where 21.5 per cent have been. A country that, at time
of Federation, was three-quarters Protestant becomes, by 2006, one where one
third is. One, where two generations ago 70 per cent of the Catholic population
voted Labor, is now one where 70 per cent of the ten most Catholic seats in New
South Wales (NSW) are won by anti-Labor parties.^15 The progeny of yesterday’s
‘Seven Dwarves’are now the futile officialdom of various policyfiascos,^16 or
are reduced to playing Polonius to Hamlet’s antic disposition. Most fundamen-
tally, characteristic Australianness just isn’t what it used to be. The‘broad’
Australian accent ebbs from a third of the population to barely one tenth. The
masculine, nonchalant, blunt, Wild Colonial Boy (Digger, Crocodile Dundee)
has been supplanted (at least in the minds of some—see Greer 2013) by the
mealy-mouthed and meekly‘compliant’—or the crudely criminal.^17 Russel
Ward cherished the fact that Australia only experienced itsfirst kidnaping in
1960; from the vantage point of 2015 that fact bespeaks how far traditional
Australia has receded. Are these not transformations? Or is it more remarkable
that so little has changed in the face of them?
(^15) See http://www.abc.net.au/news/nsw-election-2015/guide/census/#Religion (accessed 20
November 2015). 16
17 See, for example, the Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program 2014.
Paul Hogan (2015): Australia‘is not as unique as it was. There was a spirit here that has
disappeared, a bit of larrikin spirt, a bit of pioneer spirit.’
The Australian Exception