Leaving Australia, a confounding and complex country

Australian television producers have in recent times hit upon a sure-fire formula to guarantee big ratings.

Costume designers are instructed to dress the women in above-the-knee skirts. Make-up artists affix Dennis Lillee-style moustaches – or “mos” – to their male leads. Props departments scour second-hand car yards in search of mint condition Ford Falcons and Holdens from the 1970s.

The fashion is for retrospective drama, whether it focuses on the “Puberty Blues” of teenagers coming of age in beachside suburbs, the publishing wars between media barons like Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer, or the birth of World Series cricket, the cradle of so much Australian sporting iconography. Why, even the cult series Prisoner Cell Block H has been revived!

A swathe of recent news stories, which have made headlines around the world, would also suggest that Australia itself has returned to the unreconstructed Seventies.

There was the Liberal party supporter who designed a spoof menu for a fund-raising dinner with its “Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs and a Big Red Box”.

There was the disrespectful line of questioning that the then-prime minister endured from a Perth shock jock, who asked whether her partner was gay.

The Australian defence forces were hit by yet another sexual scandal, this time involving high-ranking military personnel who sent emails containing videos denigrating women.

Nor should we forget Eddie McGuire, a Melbourne celebrity who has made a career out of his chirpy Aussie blokiness. He joked that an Aboriginal footballer, who only a few days before had been racially vilified by a young football fan, should publicise the new King Kong stage show.

The axing this week of Julia Gillard, a female politician who shattered a ceiling made of particularly resilient glass, has raised a broader question: was Australia ready for a female prime minister? In my view, that question can ultimately be dealt with in one word: yes.

But you would not think it from the headlines of the past month. Unquestionably, Australia is often crassly stereotyped in the international media. Recently, however, it has been more a case of the country typecasting itself.

In many ways, then, my posting here has ended as it started. Back in September 2006, the national conversation centred on Steve “the Crocodile Hunter” Irwin, who within days of my arrival was killed by a stingray. In my final weeks, the discussion has focused on lesser-known figures, like that Perth shock jock Howard Sattler.

But the question has essentially remained the same: who gets to define and personify Australia?

My answer, of a country whose population has swelled to 22 million people while I have been here, would be everyone. For this is a land that defies neat encapsulation or lazy caricature.

Modern Australia is seen in the defence personnel who allegedly sent those venal emails, but also in the stirring words of their commander Lt Gen David Morrison, the head of the Australian army: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”

Eddie McGuire, that self-styled Australian everyman, is undoubtedly representative – but so, too, was his radio sidekick on the morning that he vilified the indigenous footballer, Adam Goodes, who refused to go along with the joke.

Howard Sattler may have a significant following, but he no longer has a job.

Australia is reflected it in the columns of right-wing commentators, who tend to play down the uglier aspects of national life, and also those on the left, who are prone to excessive national self-recrimination.

You see its contradictions in offices and factories with polyglot workforces that look happily multicultural, but whose Asian workers might have got their jobs by disguising their surnames. You see it at the country’s sports grounds, where a spirit of irreverent fun is often countered by the mind-numbingly officiousness of administrators and stewards.

You witness it in the childishness of Canberra’s parliamentary Question Time but also in the touching – and often teary – response from the chamber when departing MPs give their valedictory responses.

You see it at Australia’s offshore detention centres, where young Australians implement an intentionally harsh policy with compassionate hearts. Earlier this month, I witnessed this for myself in Nauru, where the asylum seekers held in indefinite detention saw both sides of the country they embarked on such perilous journeys to reach.

On the boat people question, my sense is that Canberra politicians have an exaggerated sense of the xenophobia and racism within portions of the Australia electorate that drives their tough policies. For the most part, they also let those sentiments fester unchallenged.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the western suburbs of Sydney. It is the most politically influential part of the country and one supposedly seething with hostility towards boat people.

Usually when I have asked voters to list their concerns, however, they cite cost of living concerns and traffic congestion long before they mention asylum seekers. When I read commentary suggesting that border protection is the dominant issue in the minds of “ordinary Australians”, it does not ring true.

One of the failings of politics in Australia in recent years is that politicians on both sides have allowed voters to conflate the asylum seeker problem with everyday worries. Some politicians, who demagogue this issue, actively encourage their scapegoating, even though 90% of boat people turn out to be bona fide refugees.

As if to emphasise the nation’s split personality on the question of welcoming foreigners to its shores, Scott Morrison, the conservative opposition’s tough-talking immigration spokesman, used to head up Tourism Australia.

Read the rest of the article on BBC News HERE: