I’m going to be making some monumental generalisations here, so bear with me and don’t argue.
A year ago I was having dinner with a (female) friend on Valentine’s Day in Coogee, which is a beach suburb of Sydney, when a couple sat down at the table next to us clutching a ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ balloon. He was a fair bit older than her, in his mid forties probably, and she Scandinavian and in her twenties. He started to chat to us and discovered we were friends through our respective kids, who at the time were going out together, which he thought that was really interesting. He told us he had split up with his wife and had walked out leaving her and the kid and the house, and he was now living in a hotel. His new (we assumed) girlfriend was smiley and sweet and didn’t seem to mind too much that her boyfriend, on Valentine’s Day, was spending most of the evening talking to two middle-aged women.
Then my friend happened to say something like, ‘It must be tough leaving your son behind like that’, and without warning he burst into tears. It only lasted half a minute, and he then recovered and carried on as if nothing had happened.
I tell this story because to me it perfectly personifies the archetypal Australian male.
The archetypal Australian male is bluff, friendly, casual, wry, sometimes sly, extravert, secretive, and at the drop of a hat, deeply emotional. He generally prefers the company of men to women, which possibly has its roots in his upbringing, in those pioneering days when men worked together and relied on one another for their survival. I suppose I am referring mostly here to country men. City men I suspect are much the same the world over.
While preferring the company of men to women the Australian male loves women, in fact he loves them sometimes to excess, and preferably more than one at a time. This possibly comes from watching the behaviour of the animals on his farm at ‘joining’ time, as they call it. With rams for instance there is a ratio of 1.5% of males to 98.5% female, which means that if you have a flock of 150 ewes – actually they seem to call them ‘mobs’ here rather than flocks – you need two rams to service them, which makes it by my estimation 75 ewes per ram. I’m not saying farmers are emulating their animals to the letter, or rather to the number, but in my admittedly limited experience – and in the experience of many women I know – the Australian male does not seem to think it odd, or in any way reprehensible, to have more than one woman at a time, and if she doesn’t like it, well ….
There is also a strong streak of sentimentality in the Australian male, and possibly in the female too. I was listening to the radio one recent afternoon and they were going on and on about an interview they had had earlier in the day with a farmer, talking about the drought. How moving it was, they said, the pride he had in his land and in his country; his positive attitude, his good humour, his poetry.
I eventually heard the interview. The farmer was bluff, friendly, casual and wry, and yes, he did become quite poetic, especially when describing the effect a bad drought has on the earth. Droughts he said were necessary for the well-being of the soil: when the drought causes the earth to crack, and form fissures, this means that the rain when it does fall penetrates right through to nourish the soil well below the surface. Actually I may have got the details a bit wrong – and I have to say my farmer friend debunked this theory completely – but what obviously impressed the people in the studio was his almost matter fact attitude of acceptance, his good-humoured determination to see the best in everything and his overwhelming love for his land.
And then people started calling in, listeners who had heard the interview, and I heard more than one of them saying – It makes me proud to be Australian.
Australian are proud to be Australians, and not afraid to say as much. I don’t think a Brit could ever say he was proud to be British without sounding as if he was taking the piss.
Aussie pride shows itself in different ways. Australians celebrate tradition far more than we do. Anzac Day, which falls on April 25th every year and is a bank holiday, and which commemorates the part played by Australians and New Zealanders in the various wars, and Gallipoli in World War 1 in particular (hence the date), is a much bigger event now than it ever was, particularly among young people, many of whom make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli itself. There are ceremonies held at dawn in every city and major town in the country. Then there’s Australia Day, on January 26th, which celebrates the arrival of the First Fleet into Port Jackson (aka Sydney Harbour) in 1788. They also have a day off to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday in June. And then there’s Mother’s Day, which is a much bigger deal there than it is here. Not to mention Reconciliation – or ‘Sorry’ – Day, which this year fell on May 26th and was especially significant because it marked forty years since the aboriginal people were eventually allowed (thanks to a referendum held among white people) to vote in elections and thereby to be regarded as citizens of the country they had lived in for 60,000 years.
