Australia in the world
When traveling you soon realise your place in the world. And if you don’t quite work out your place you realise the place of other things. Things get put into a larger context.
One of these things many young Australians reconsider is Australia itself. It’s not quite as famous and as well-known as we were led to believe. In the Australian media we always hear of Australians doing this and that around the world, mostly sportspeople or entertainers and even occasionally someone who actually contributes to the world. This of course counts for very little to people outside of Australia.
We love our sport and are proud of how well we do. Unfortunately, most of the world doesn’t play cricket, rugby league, rugby union, or, funnily enough Australian Rules Football, so we have few to boast to. There are four types of ‘football’ played in Australia, and only one of them – soccer – is a world game, and it just so happens that that’s the one that’s least popular and has the most under-developed league.
They call this ‘AFL’
You run into people overseas (such as a group of otherwise intelligent Danish medical students) and they will quite earnestly ask you “Does Australia make films? Are there any Australian stars?”. Whilst they didn’t recognise any of the films I named, they had no idea the Australians I mentioned were Australian *. The obvious solution is for all Australians leaving our shores be prominently tattooed with our flag, or at least forfeit their Australian passport when they cease to have an Australian accent.
Australians often relish foreigner’s lack of knowledge about Down Under. We invent interesting stories about our wildlife, comedy shows will often have voxpop’s overseas (particularly America) showing how little they know. Australia, whilst a proud nation, has always been a little unsure of itself – a little lacking in self esteem. Our country is on the wrong side of the world, it’s mostly barren and we don’t have a long history or richly developed culture. What little the world did know of us, such as the “Crocodile Dundee” film character, we preferred to live down – don’t you realise Australia is much more sophisticated than that!?
And then Steve Irwin came along, oh the horror.
Australian identity is a hard thing to nail down. Even our national flag has been a topic of debate. Our Flag, bless it, is an ex-British naval flag with a few stars sewn on – hardly native. But then again, most Australians aren’t native anyway, so what’s the point. What about a kangaroo? Something new that encompasses White/Black Australian identity? What about all the diggers that have died fighting “for the flag”? Moving right along.
To do my bit, this humble site now has a new category, ‘oz’ that have little snippets of Australian fun-facts, stats as well as colour-ins for the kids.
- Including adopted Australians
More stuff in: oz
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Beach this, Golden that Driest (inhabited) Continent in the World