Our Ghosts May Be Heard

Every year, myself and a couple of mates get together for our annual road trip.  It's an institution of indulgence - we eat too much, drink too much, make too much noise and laugh out loud.  This year, we headed off to country Victoria to take in some fishing and sample the night life.  It was while standing in a local pub on a Saturday night, listening to a surprisingly good band, that we noticed something strange - a creeping sense that while our presence was being tolerated, we weren't exactly welcomed here.  There was a tension in the stares from the thick-necked blokes hovering around the bar.  We were familiar with this scene though.  So, rather than push our luck, we simply grabbed a late night hotdog and took the party back to the caravan park ... no doubt to the annoyance of our neighbours.

Our experience equates to the diet coke of intolerance - being starred at hardly rates as oppression.  However, it does highlight that very real antagonism to "other" that exists in the (anglo) Australian culture.  An antagonism that has been writ large in the story of the alleged abuse of some French tourists on a bus in my home town of Melbourne.

Anglo-Australian culture is rooted in  identity crisis.  We arrived as foreigners in a foreign and hostile land.  From the very beginning we were at odds with our surroundings. Scared and isolated, we fought hard to maintain our Anglo identity in spite of the reality of our place in the world.  We classified our indigenous people as fauna.  We sent boys off to die in brutal wars that did not directly impact us.  We introduced policies to keep ourselves white.  We refused to engage with our Asian neighbours.  For years, we did all these things to retain a perverse Anglo heritage and position.  

Like the frontier sentry on the eve of battle, we developed a neurotic intolerance to anything we are not, anything that would threaten our position as a great European outpost, anything that would contaminate and cast uncertainty on our self-image.  We told ourselves: we are not Asian, we are not aboriginal, we are not Muslim ... and we clearly aren't French either.  These things are "the other" and we were united, like wide-eyed pioneers huddled around the camp fire, by our fear and resentment of them.  It's Us or Them - only one can prevail.

While, no doubt, our sense of identity has matured as a nation, the ghosts of our fear and isolation can still be heard.  They can be heard in our histrionics about turning the boats around.  They can be heard in the words of the whitest man in the country seeking to define who is an "authentic" aboriginal, as opposed to one raised in captivity presumably.  They can be heard in a bus load of thugs yelling, "Speak English or die!" They can be heard in institutionalised discrimination against single mothers.  It's Us or Them, they whisper.

Perhaps I am being unfair to the Australia psyche.  Maybe fear of "the other" is a human condition - there's plenty of psychological research to suggest this is the case.  But should we accept this status?  Surely, it is incumbent upon us as a society - if not a species - to evolve?  But just as you can't pick yourself up by your shoe laces, we can't move forward as a society without leadership from those who define our social narrative.  And here, of course, lays our essential failing: that we tolerate, and thereby tacitly endorse, a narrative of conflict, threat and anxiety.

Even in the commentary from some of those raging against the actions of those troglodytes on that bus, we see the philosophy of divisiveness and vilification.  Take for example the profoundly stupid words of The Age crime reporter, John Silvester: 

I cannot recall hearing anyone I know under 25 making a racist or homophobic comment. I know plenty twice that age who still think The Black and White Minstrel Show was cutting-edge culture.

John Silvester (above) - social commentator par excellence

Apart from being delusional, unhelpful and possibly the dumbest thing I've heard outside an Adam Sandler film, here we again see the media setting up divisions where none existed and none are necessary. It's Us or Them ... and They are everywhere we turn.  

Make no mistake, our yobs on that bus were not alone... [fades to static]