2
Australian Exceptionalism
A Personal View
Geoffrey Blainey
Australia is marvelled at because of its unique fauna andflora, and its unusual
‘natural history’. Australia is also exceptional in its human history. Few other
countries have had so many important episodes or events that, by world
standards, are exceptional.
Most Australians familiar with their country’s history might well protest:
what precisely has been exceptional? In fact Australia has been unusual in the
length of its recorded human history and in the magnitude of the most
influential event of that history—the rising of the seas, which drowned a
huge area of inhabited land, completely changed the map, and isolated all
Australians from the outside world. (Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999, pp. 103,
331 – 2). Australia is exceptional because it experienced perhaps the most
insoluble confrontation of cultures and economies so far recorded in human
history; because of the tug it exercised on the world’s economy in the mid-
1850s, when its population was tiny; because it is one of the oldest, continu-
ous democracies in the world; and because its people achieved, in the modern
phase of their history, the highest standard of living in the world, only to
quickly lose that claim when it experienced, perhaps through overconfidence,
one of the gravestfinancial crashes known in the nineteenth century.
After the Second World War, Australia commenced an unprecedented
switch, in its commerce and its people, from a nation of European ancestry
to, prospectively, a European–Asian nation. An earlier exceptional trend,
persisting for more than a century and a half, was the degree to which males
outnumbered females. Also unusual were the geographical influences: the
long isolation of Aboriginal Australia from the outside world; the remoteness
of modern Australia, in time and distance, from the European homeland that