I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this essay was written, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty has never been ceded.
It always was and always will be, Aboriginal land.
[Disclaimer: This is something I wrote last year but didn’t get around to publishing it.]
I’m a frontline worker, in that I am one of the first people immigrants to Australia meet when they move to the country. Those on student visas must attend twenty hours of English language classes a week. They sit jet-lagged 24 hours after arriving in the country in a fluorescent-lit classroom while I try to gauge their English skills. In that 24 hours, they will have inevitably trekked to the Sydney Opera House and wondered at the city’s multicultural array of faces. They will exclaim upon seeing my tall, light-haired, blue-eyed male semblance that I am the “first” Australian they’ve met.
In over a decade of teaching English language to international students I have benefited from these statistics. Be damned my comprehension of grammar and pedagogical methods, as long as I look like a Hemsworth I will remain in demand. I worked for just a week in one school before marketing swooped in and used me in a promotional photoshoot. White Australia still sells.
Once in class, invariably, there will be a lesson on culture shock. I ask the students for their honest accounts and they ask me to enlighten them on what Australian culture is, exactly. Immigrants tend to fall into expat communities and, in Sydney, see mostly non-Anglo faces on public transport commuting to school from far-flung suburbs. For months I can be their only link to the Australia they had imagined. A cricketer, or a surfer, perhaps — though I’m neither.
Australian culture, I say, is a sense of humour. I allow them to directly translate the word “irony”. For example, I add, once on a plane at the airport it was raining outside and the captain said brightly, “welcome to sunny Sydney”. Australian culture, I say, is a lot of swearing and word play. I write “Whatcha doin’ s’arvo?” on the whiteboard and ask whether they can interpret it.
Australian culture, I say, is sport. It’s the ideology of a level playing field. It’s the predilection for physical endurance over intellectual pursuits — working the body is a more honest pastime. Australians respect the rules of the game. We’re outraged at cheating, at least on the turf. The students ask what sports I like. I say I don’t really follow any. I know sport is Australian culture because I felt ostracised for a lack of ball skills and not following a team as a kid. That’s another Australian thing, I say. Being a team player.
“What is Australian cuisine?” students ask, “What’s the traditional costume, what’s the national dance?”
“When’s Australia’s independence day? Why do you love the Queen of England? Why don’t you want to be a republic?”
“Why do you have a public holiday for a lost battle fighting another country’s war?”
“What do you know about Australian history?” I ask. Students don’t know much, maybe the name Captain Cook, maybe they translate the word “colonised”. I note that in the rest of the world, in countries that had empires and in countries that fought for independence, they have a better understanding of colonisation than the average white Australian. We are some of the only beneficiaries of the practice, so why question it?
I start the lesson by outlining white Australian history, how the American revolutionary war rerouted British prisoners to a faraway land in the Southern Hemisphere. How colonists made land grabs and tried to cultivate it. How gold made the British rich. How the First World War formed an Australian identity separate to the British one. How waves of immigration first from southern and eastern Europe and then south-east Asia changed our eating habits. How we lost a prime minister at sea.
Then I write “the White Australia policy” on the board and draw a timeline of its effectiveness. I make a point that even southern Europeans weren’t “white enough”. I stress that the law prohibited Indigenous Australians from voting and being counted on the census.
I project a map of Indigenous Australia on the wall, with its mosaic of multiple nations and tell the class about the many languages and cultures that have existed on the continent for thousands of years. I play video clips of Yolngu and Arrernte and Kaurna language. Students are surprised and enrapt. A multitude of languages and cultural practices across a continent resonates with international students more than the miniscule differences between Sydney and Melbourne cafe culture. The monoculture of breakfast television and discussing investment properties across federated colonies is odd compared to the global experience of interculturality. An Indian student understands being a citizen in a country with vastly different languages, a European student can attest to culture and language traversing political borders, most students can relate to border disputes, intermarriages, and complex histories of place. The Indigenous map of Australia showcases the continent’s true geography.
Then, I show the Indigenous episode of You Can’t Ask That and the documentary The Australian Dream that not only confirms the extent of the country’s love of sport, but also its proclivity for racism.
“Are things getting better?” students ask, after being shell shocked by the casual bigotry on display. “Well,” I say, “more and more non-Indigenous people are attending Invasion Day rallies? And there are more Indigenous faces on TV and in pop culture? But you’d have to ask someone Indigenous, I guess.
“The current government would have a White Australia policy again if they could get away with it,” I add. “They keep making it harder for people from poorer countries to immigrate here, not to mention their war on refugees. Have you heard of Manus Island?”
They ask why the government doesn’t want too many people here. My political comments aren’t controversial, they already know the name Dutton from personal experience. Even so, the occasional student already wants to close the door behind them.
I ask them if they think adapting to Australian culture is important. Everyone says it is. No one says they’d ever let go of their mother tongue, though. I say, you’ll fit in here if you can play ball with a sense of humour. Follow the rules and be willing to laugh at yourself.
“Australians are nice,” students say after a few months, “but I don’t know how to make friends with one.”
“There’s a dance,” I say. “It takes a long time for Australian adults to make friends. They’re very protective of their personal space and time.
“Also, a lot of them are monolingual and don’t understand the difficulties you’re experiencing. Some think fluency means intelligence.”
“Why don’t Australians learn other languages?” they ask.
“Because everyone else is learning English,” I say.
I half-jokingly tell the class that Australians actually speak three Englishes: Australian, British and American. We don’t confuse our footpaths with the pavement or sidewalk. Actually, I say, we’re exposed to many more varieties, such as regional and subcultural dialects of Britain and the States, like AAVE (African-American Vernacular English). We’ve had no choice but to grow up on a diet of these cultures through television, cinema and music, and we can still draw on our own unique vernacular in response. That Australians are linguistically lazy is not entirely true. Vestiges of British imperialism have just limited our evolution into a deliberate multilingual country. We could have dual language signs in native Indigenous languages everywhere and include non-Latin script translations in tourist areas. We could popularise ‘Australian English’ as the descriptor of what we speak.
Ten years of teaching new migrants has required me to conceptualise what Australia is and does. I have been continuously confronted by honest first impressions, uncovering aspects of the country’s culture I never saw in plain sight. I’ve worked alongside Australian teachers with East Asian, Subcontinental and Latino backgrounds who I’ve had to defend to students of their Australianness. “Can’t you hear their accent?” I say, “They sound more Aussie than I do.”
My job has made me acutely aware of the whitewashing of Australian media. The job has normalised foreign languages and flattened exoticness. Often, I find it easier to speak with newcomers stepping into a new culture than with Australians who aren’t aware of their own.
Baby Boomers taught me about “cultural cringe”, not just as a concept but in the way they preferred the BBC over American “trash”. The cringe focussed on an absence of European culture. White Australians saw in Europe hundreds of years of Christendom and conquest, opera and architecture. I was told the white intelligentsia of the ‘60s fled to greener pastures in Britain. In Australia, they saw the facsimile of a civilization, a cheap imitation of the hegemony they still wanted in on.
I try to engage the students in a conversation about “cultural cringe”, but on the whole stereotypes about their country lie at the fault of outsiders. I envy the earnest pride in their culture. Pride says “Welcome to the party”, whereas cringe asks for a stranger’s validation.
For white Australians, the cringe sends us overseas to see for ourselves what’s out there — about sixty percent of Australians hold a valid passport. We exercise our inherited entitlement to “discover” the world, but treat it like a colourful backdrop taking away a trivial understanding of the destinations. Otherwise, the cringe makes us turn inwards and become parochial, having pride in the luck of birthplace and buying into one-upmanship between capital cities. This small-town mindset makes us apathetic towards the harsher realities of the rest of the world, like civil wars and environmental degradation, and further distances us from a global responsibility.
I try to outline these characteristic failings to the students but they have no sympathy. My students, from every single inhabited continent, see a country with freedoms and fair wages, albeit at times expensive and exploitative. They see multiculturalism, they see opportunity. For international students, Australia has good weather and a job market, and a student visa that allows them to work. Some students come just to send remittances to family, while others work hard at language tests to stay forever. Some never want to return to the dire situations back home.
The negatives are middling. The country can, at times, seem a bit boring to those from 24-hour metropolises, with our early closing hours and an outdoors-focussed lifestyle. At worst, the geographical distance from anywhere else can add to a mental state of isolation.
I try to be positive. I say I’m lucky to have been born here, a man of Anglo-Celtic descent with parents who valued education, and at a time when English became a lingua franca. I’m lucky learning languages is a hobby, not an obligation.
I like how we still have universal healthcare, paid parental leave, and four weeks of paid holidays. I like how we know how to finish jobs but not live to work. I love our creativity and irreverence with the English language.
But soon cynicism returns. I say I’m still ashamed of the racial violence inflicted on First Nations peoples, the consequent trauma, and lost opportunities to reconcile and advance real equity. I say I wish the Uluru Statement had led to constitutional reform and our republic had a First Nations head of state. I say I’m angry that racism is an ongoing issue and try to create an open forum for a discussion about it in the class. However, most students talk about it impartially, even if they think they may have experienced it. Most are still fresh off the plane from a country of millions like them, Australians are just ignorant outsiders.
At a rare social event in 2020, I chatted with a Taiwanese national on a partner visa studying to pass the IELTS test — the standardised language test favoured by the Australian government — to get permanent residency. He told me of teachers at his school who brought up Australia’s racist history in lessons any chance they got. He said, “I understand why they want to be truthful, but it doesn’t make the students feel good about their expensive, big, life decision to come here. Ignorance is everywhere. Dark histories are everywhere. Australia’s no different.”
That shut me up. After a pause I agreed that maybe drilling Australia’s racism into the students is just a performance of white guilt. Maybe it’s a part of the same flagellating cringe that leads the culture nowhere.
Still, this country’s dark history is often celebrated. Our designated national holiday was moved to the day the British invaded. In capital cities the apathetic see it as a Summer public holiday for a house party, while a growing number of others protest in the streets. There is a disconnect between the Australian culture I want to celebrate and the celebrations sanctioned by the government. The Australian flag handed out to new citizens on that day subtly indoctrinates newcomers into white Australian history — the Union Jack still on the canton — but it’s not their fault if it represents something else to them. In class, I don’t want to do my country a disservice by reinforcing the idea that a white guy like me is the only brand ambassador. But being a white guy dwelling on shame is more disingenuous.
Australian culture should be celebrated. Over the past two decades, young Australians have made strides turning Australiana into something so kitsch it’s cool, if not fashionable. After the galvanisation of the Sydney Olympics and the rise of a global middle class through the internet, we no longer felt left so far behind our peers in the ‘West’. With the advent of video sharing platforms, Australians could produce grassroots culture and international attention came without playing to it. Cultural cringe morphed into a celebration of our quirks, and social media opened up a dialogue between generations and ethnic backgrounds.
Today, lively debates centre on what people in different states call things like swimwear, fried potato snacks, and convenience stores. YouTube channels describe the way Australians abbreviate common nouns, and international vloggers react to our favourite snack food. Articles on Australian accents get clicks, and people have a general understanding of the mostly class-based broad, general and cultivated accents, not forgetting the Adelaide one. Then, there’s the lesser studied idiolects of immigrant children and dialects of Indigenous communities. Indeed, celebration of culture runs from the superficial to the academic, but until recently has been limited mostly by the notion that ‘Australian’ equals an Anglo-Celtic heritage. In reality, Australia’s population grows a third more from immigration than births on soil per year.
My hope is that we can teach Australian culture from multiple angles, including history, social and media studies, and linguistics. Australian English can confound newcomers, but it’s how we identify each other. A 2016 ANU study found that Aussies liked and trusted people more, no matter the accent, if they used Australian vernacular. We need to be taught that colloquial language is not monolithic nor regulated, that it has been fed by new generations and waves of immigration. The dialect of Boomers differed from the patois of Banjo Paterson, and my “yeah, nah” generation shrugs at expressions like “Don’t come the raw prawn with me”. And if the school syllabus continues to devalue foreign language learning, we could at least learn some basics of the Indigenous language of the land we grew up on.
For the last half century, wealthy Australians have travelled extensively abroad marvelling at heterogeneous civilisations, lamenting a lack back home. Only those who engage with the cultures below the white settler shellacking are rewarded with the same depth they see in the rest of the world.
Imagine seeing our own backyard as an assortment of unique regions to visit and not just a great expanse that’s “out back”. Imagine learning a new greeting in every Aboriginal and Torres Strait country. Imagine how far we could go with Reconciliation Action Plans. Imagine Australia with a treaty, a country that could reach far back into its history and attempt to right the wrongs with more than just lip service. Imagine a mainstream culture that included ongoing stories of the Indigenous and new migrant experience in Australia, and that educating ourselves on all aspects of our culture was paramount.
I fear that if we’re still debating when our national holiday should be, institutions are not on the same page in their desire to act on even cursory and literal signs of acknowledgment. That not-for-profit organisation Reconciliation Australia’s major financial supporters include BHP, Rio Tinto and News Corporation Ltd just shows the ethical complexities Indigenous Australia faces in gaining substantial traction beyond grassroots campaigning for change.
Australian culture needs more investment. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the international education industry contributed $40.4 billion to the Australian economy, and was the country’s largest service-based export, and fourth overall. Universities alone could lose $19 billion in revenue from international student tuition fees by 2023 with the extreme reduction of overseas arrivals. While this reveals an over-reliance on international students in the university business model, it also exposes how little the federal government concerns itself with the tertiary education sector, even as a major employer and contributor to the GDP. When this industry dependent on open international borders starts to recover, Australia will be in damage control. Not only with its callous reputation towards non-citizens as disposable cash cows, but how we’ve relied on foreign cattle to prop up jobs, research and courses in the education sector.
I’m a frontline worker in an industry that has persisted, despite the politicisation of immigrants to sway the opinions of Australians who think the country’s full. New settlers have been the story of the country for two hundred and thirty years, but there’s an invitation for all arrivals to dig deeper into the Indigenous history that was here before them. It took my job to realise I can’t talk about Australian culture, or my Australianness, without it. Our shared culture could be about acknowledgment and celebration, without the cringe or shame. That way Australia can say “Welcome to the party”, too.