Australian Legend, or Australian exceptionalism, or anything else. Australia
was a postcode of international capitalism; a postcode variously inhabited
by Unionists, Convicts, Militarists, Irishmen, Racists, and Pianists, but not
‘Australians’(McQueen 1970).
Here is a paradox. Never has Australia been closer to constituting a postcode
in a quasi-universal global society. Never has it been so palpably integrated
into a globalized world: beyond the familiar technological miracles that soak it
deep in the realities and attitudinizing of the rest of the world, one may note
that the country saw almost 7 million visitors in 2013; 422,000 foreign
students lived there; and, in 2013, 27.7 per cent of the Australian permanent
population was born elsewhere, twice the proportion in the USA. But Austra-
lian exceptionalism, it appears, is strengthening rather than fading. This
speaks of Australia possessing an enveloping climate of opinion as much as
its own physical climate. The existence of such a climate is not premised on
some homogeneity or cohesion of its components, or any consciousness of
itself at all. This volume, if it hopes to achieve anything, hopes to restore some
of that consciousness.
1.4 The Australian Moment
The issue of Australian exceptionalism obtains an added significance in the
light of Australia’s situation—not only the country’s economy’s exhilarating
performance since the turn of the twenty-first century, and, even more, in the
recently growing sense that the country hasfinally reached a climacteric.
Australia economic history may be construed as a sequence of long booms
of a duration of thirty-five to forty-five years, each followed by severe depres-
sion (McCarty 1973). Could the hour of severe depression be nigh?
Australia may be judged to have been in a long boom since 1979. In the
treize glorieusesfrom 2000, Australia glided through the‘dot com’bust and
through the Great Recession. The performance since 2007 has been especially
remarkable (see Table 1.3).
The motor behind this economic feat was the 101 per cent increase in
Australia’s terms of trade between September 2000 and September 2011, itself
driven by the explosion in China’s steel production from 128 million tons in
2000 to 701 million tons in 2011, an explosion that defied sophisticated
forecasts of the day. Had‘the lucky country’ever got luckier?
Table 1.3Growth Rate in GDP, 2007–13, Percentage change in $US GDP
Australia New Zealand Canada USA UK Euroland Japan
55 37 26.1 15.8 9.6 2.6 12.9The Australian Exception