When you dig up a list of ‘best’ or ‘greatest’ or ‘most successful Australians’ or any other swooning prefix intended, at once, to celebrate great achievement and make you feel awful about the non-greatness of yours- you find a curious thing. Or, at least you would, if authors and publishers weren’t so on guard; protecting against the kind of points this piece will raise.
My mother, in the facetious and snide view and tone her gene pool kissed me with, often mentions- ‘our Rus’, ‘our Mel’, ‘our Dave Dobyn’. Well, yeah, the last one is a known NZ icon. But had he been any less Kiwi or any more Aussie, we’d have had him.
By that same token what you don’t hear is ‘our Steve’, ‘our Ian’, ‘our Ricky’, ‘our Grant’, ‘our Margeret’, or ‘our Greg’. If you’re searching for surnames on those there people, let me get you there a little faster; Smith, Thorpe, Ponting, Grant, Court and Norman. Those names are immortal. Doubtless we do have ‘our Don Bradman’. But then, ‘even his friends say he isn’t human’.
This is my issue. This is why I, now, feel compelled to the soap-box. For the complexity of the unspoken doctrine of what is and isn’t ‘Australian’, claiming cultural icons- or successful celebrities, is undoubtedly ‘Australian’.
I know this is a running ‘feud-joke’ (also the title my upcoming comedy-metal album, check with your retailers) with New Zealand. For example, this knee slapper:
What do you call a successful New Zealander?
An Australian.
Pretty much…
I am not a humourless Australian. In fact I think that we take ourselves with little seriousness, can laugh at ourselves and chew a joke out of everything is; on good days, very charming and on bad days, a saving grace for this steaming pile of country. In what should be an admissible defence in court these days, people who know me will tell you that.
What I care about is the implications. Australia is a bastion of culture and creativity, we just don’t put it on front street. And we should. The emphasis here is on our sporting prowess, not that it shouldn’t be. When the USA has someone good at a sport they didn’t invent they sing it from the rooftops. But they don’t walk around claiming Jim Carrey or William Shatner as their own.
Why do we then? Does it fall under that old tattoo-motivator, Aussie pride? Is it blind nationalism, or really blind nationalism? Is it a defensive move or insecurity that motivates us? Is it that well-worn need to be one of the big boys? Or clinging to the only suburban dream that keeps you smiling, that basic projection that one of ours conquered the world and so we can too?
I, you, us, them will probably never know. But it seems anyone licked by Australia in whatever way becomes a big ingredient in the soup.
Take Collette Dinnigan. I watched her story on Australian Story this evening. She did well, dug her heels in and made the most of it. All quintessential Australian qualities. But is she Australian, the product of a South African and an Irishman, raised in New Zealand who came here and became successful.
Does that make her an Australian, or just an Australian because of her triumph. Would she remain South African or New Zealander had she not made something of herself. Her friends kept saying things like; ‘for an Aussie girl to come to Paris and do this’. Is she an Aussie girl just because she went to Paris and did that?
I do not mean to call into question how any of these people identify themselves. I do not mean to delegitimise Collette Dinnigans own personal identification.
What I mean to call out is our tendency to latch on to people once they have come through it. We should, both the culture and the government, be providing an easier and more forgiving it through which to come. Not simply hedging our bets until one of ours, or one who could reasonably be considered so by whichever thread, makes it big and thus makes themselves valid to the Australian brain. Validity comes well before a seat at Fallon, Kimmel or Conan’s desk- we just need to know that and, in that quote bred into our bones, back ourselves.
NP.
P.S.
There is at least one successful New Zealander.
And He Owns My Team.
And at least one successful Australian.
And He Lives 34 Blocks From Me, When He Is Not Being Super Great, The Best, Successful or Famous.
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