Guest blog - 'Australians' (by Ewan)

Note from Joe: A couple of weeks ago we met up for beers in Sydney with Laura's cousin, Ewan and his girlfriend Domitille (see top).

Considerable alcohol consumption enabled me to persuade Ewan, who is British but grew up in Australia, to do our first Guest Blog so sharing his insider insights into 'Australians'.

It makes for interesting reading. Many thanks to Ewan:


The problem of being a guest blogger for Joe and Laura on the topic of "Australians" is I'm not really so Australian myself. Even if I were, I'm unsure I could capture what "Australians" are. My name's Ewan. I'm Laura's little cousin, who got deported from Milton Keynes to Sydney at age eight. Age eighteen I repatriated myself for uni in London. Four years and a degree later some mind numbing database entry (or "paralegalling" as it's called when you do database entry for a law firm) back in Sydney seemed the way to go. Domitille (whose boyfriend I am) agreed to come, and is working here too. We were lucky enough to catch Joe and Laura last weekend for a few drinks, and I swear I would've blogged this sooner if I could've. But I needed to have a think about what to write on "Australians". This Monday's lunch break, sitting on a bench at Circular Quay, with the Harbour Bridge to the left, the Opera House to the right, is the first chance to do it.

So let's take these place names for a start. Technically, it's the "Sydney Habour Bridge" and the "Sydney Opera House". Both names have an elegant simplicity. No goofing about with woosy adjectives like "golden gate" or "royal". It's a bloody bridge, on Sydney harbour. Australians do this with most things. The postal service is called "Australia Post", the big energy company is called "Energy Australia" and the phone company used to be "Telecom Australia". Call a spade a spade. When it was privatised, the phone company rebranded to "Telstra", which you might think was different, till you realise that when real Aus-tral-i-ans say the word, it sounds more like "STRAAAlian", mate. STRAAAlians keep things simple, unless it can be shorter, which is more simple. Hence Tel. + Stra. Circular quay, the central ferry wharf where I'm sitting, used to be called Semi-circular quay (because it was shaped like a semi circle, I expect). But they could shorten it. So they did.

Of course, go back to the colonial days and you see very different names. Lord Sydney was the U.K. home secretary when the first fleet of convicts arrived. Lord Melbourne was the Prime Minister when that city was founded. Sydney's main road, George street, was named after our mad King, and beside it Pitt street carries the younger statesman's name. Opposite "Sydney Town Hall" (guess what that is) stands the QVB (Queen Victoria Building), just as on one side of dollar coins are kangaroos and the other Queen Elizabeth II's image. Nowadays, you can also point to TV. When Neighbours was still Britain's favourite show, The Bill was Australia's. The number of Brits working in Sydney matches easily the number of Aussies in Shepherd's Bush, possibly even London as a whole. "It's just like walking around London," said Domitille a few weeks ago, near St James's road and Hyde Park. "That's probably what they intended," I joked back, at which a loud snigger came from a girl beside us at the traffic lights. You might think the Australians were just like the British, but to suggest that and you'd be a flaming galah on a fruit loop breakfast.

Tony Robinson (a.k.a. Blackadder's Baldrick) recently did a doco on "Britain's real monarch". Historians have found church documents suggesting King Edward IV had been born out of wedlock during the Hundred years war, meaning the rightful heir was George, Duke of Clarence. A few dozen generations on, and a north England Earl loses all his money at the races. He moves to Australia, where his descendant, Mike Hastings, lives as a farmer in rural NSW. When Tony turned up at his door, asking him how he felt about this, the rightful heir to the English throne chuckled darkly that he'd voted for a republic at the 1999 referendum. Struth, ay? Too right the Straaalians aren't British, not even the British Australians. So what about the Australian British?

Well, take Foster's beer for a start, which Downunder is drunk by no one. Straaalians drink VB (Victoria Bitter), 4X (if you're in Queensland) or maybe a new (Toohey's New). Nobody's heard of Rolf Harris, and that inimitable exemplar of Australasian linguistic prolificacy – Germaine sodding Greer – said she'd never go back to the country whose identity she pawns onto every Newnight Review, until there's "meaningful reconciliation with the Aboriginal people". There hasn't been, but she's coming back anyway, perhaps because she finally pissed everyone off enough in ol' Blighty with one of her latest eloquencies; when race riots broke out in south Sydney, last year she wrote that if "Australia had been colonised by any other nation but the British, it would be less racist.."

Stereotypes aren't good at selling themselves (we all know we drink Fosters because it's cheap, not Aussie) but what about the ones that people buy freely? There's definitely a Steve Irwin or two around. The day before joining my best mate from primary school for a camping trip, he'd harpooned a 2 metre sting ray twice (the second time was for Steve, I'm told). But did you know that the Prime Minister for the last twelve years has been a bald hobbit with glasses, called Johnnie, who lived with his Mum till he was 31? Rupert Murdoch is probably a more potent symbol of Australian political power, but he's got an American passport now, and ain't the Sun as Bri'ish as roast bayf? You might be surprised to know that Westminster village and the Commission for Racial Equality aren't the only ones who wring their hands over what (in their case) British "identity" ought to be. The Muslim Council of Australia (appropriately named) had a conference over the weekend on how to improve community relations and preconceptions. In contrast to a government who believe in "integrating" aside the issues, a spokeslady quipped that to improve Muslims' image, the government could install a Muslim character on Neighbours. Come this morning and Sky News, in the fair and balanced manner that made Murdoch's name, instead of reporting the conference had a phone poll on the question "Do you think Muslims are victims of misinformation in the community?" Nah mate, said 72% of people text messaging Sky.

Lunchtime's over now, and I'm back home after work. But taking inspiration from Sky I decided to do some polling myself. To set the context, I work with four Australians (two have lived in London, one in Hong Kong before) one Irish, one German and a Canadian. Asking the question, "give us three words about Australians" the Irish and German gave me "you can't generalise". Probing further I was told "patriotic" – I agreed with that, though I reckon that's easier when your sportspeople keep winning things (except the one dayers after the Ashes!). Then I was told that the immigration service on-hold music is actually interviews with new citizens going "Yeah I'm dead set stoked to be Australian, it's tops!" and such things. Fair dinkum! When I asked the Australians, I just about got three words: "relaxed" and "easy going". I'm not sure what the difference in meaning is, but it makes the point. The Canadian came up with "lazy", "alcoholic" and "skin-cancer", but that people are "also friendly". To be fair, she does catering at night time functions (thus alcoholics) and her workmates always chuck sickies (i.e. lazy) to go the beach (causing skin-cancer). It depends on who's doing the describing, and who we're comparing to, so I can't give my own three words unfortunately. However, Domitille and I did both agree on this: we think Australia is a wonderful place to live in, so don't stay too long or you might fall in love with it. But perhaps, if you never came to stay, you'd never see how truly beautiful the world can be. Where there are parakeets instead of pigeons, where cockatoos fly screeching across the cityscape like it were still bush, where the beaches are as endless as the distances to anywhere else. That's Australia, and as for Straaalians, like Joe and Laura, just come and say g'day.

Ewan McGaughey