International
Australia: The Consequential Country
“The land down under” has always been a colloquialism dripping with inconsequentiality, and reaches back to a time when the tyranny of distance brought with it the felony of neglect.
It provides a fitting title for Bill Bryson’s best-selling book on Australia, a portrait, sweeping in its broad brush strokes, which focuses on what the author perceived to be this country’s sheer irrelevance.
Before making the long journey to Australia, Bryson sauntered the short distance to his local library where he conducted a fruitless search of the New York Times index for 1997. Australia merited just 20 mentions. Albania, by contrast, got 150.
If anything, 1997 turned out to be a glut year. Over the following 12 months just six stories were considered ripe for publication. Ending his travelogue, Bryson left readers with a departing thought that was as melodramatic as it was melancholic: “Life would go on in Australia,” he opined, “and I would hear almost nothing of it.”
Published on the eve of the Sydney Olympics, Bryson’s conclusion sounded implausible then, and seems absolutely ludicrous now.
No longer can it be said that Australia suffers in any way from a national form of relevance deprivation syndrome. Quite the opposite. Few peaceful nations with a population of 22 million or under receive such close attention. As the economic locus of the world shifts from the Atlantic to the Indian and Pacific oceans, that trend is set to continue, and accelerate. Australia is a major component of that story.