Dear Sir,
This being my first visit to Australia, I humbly submit that I am in no way an authority on the Australian way of life or the Australian psyche. However, the following was a very thought-provoking potential expose of both, as posited to me by one of the locals over a cold beer in a lovely old Irish pub in Essendon, Melbourne.
Essentially his story went as follows: “Way back in the mists of time, when the first of those unfortunate enough to be shipped off to the antipodes began to realize their unenviable plight, it finally began to dawn upon them that there was an up-side to the whole situation. They were living in the opposite of the ‘rat race’, in the sense that they were far enough away that, if anyone in the ivory towers (head office) had urgent instructions, it took six months (plus) for the news to reach Botany Bay (branch office) in Australia - and by the time the instructions actually got there, it was obvious that the emergency had long since passed.
Now, being so far away, we (the Australians) had to become self-sufficient, in a manner of speaking. So, with the passing of time, we made do with what we had, and improvised where we had to.
As time went by, with the onset of better communications, travel, transport, ‘real time’, etc., the world effectively became a lot closer to our proverbial door-step. But we Ozzies realised that we still, by and large, had control of our situation and freedom from interference, due to the fact that ourselves and the rest of the world were /are in different time zones. Realistically, this meant that, if we played our cards right, our historic family, economic and cultural cousins effectively live on a different planet. In other words, while we are awake, the ‘rest of the world’ is asleep, AND, only when we go to sleep do the rest awaken. This means, by and large, we don’t even have to talk to them - their ‘real time’ becomes ‘down time’.
The level of technical expertise we need must only be as good as the systems we have devised to survive - these are relatively basic and only as complex as they need to be. And so, the level of graft (work) need only be as hard as it has to be to keep our way of life intact (carefully crafted by us, for reasonably comfortably survival).
In fact, when the interlopers (those who come from lands whose grasp we shrugged off in our heroic past) come (‘immigrate’) to our country to set up home and work in our Oz industry, try to show how smart-ass they are by bringing us up to date (try to tell US what to do), by changing the way we run our industry and our economy, we put up a common front.
To be frank, our ‘common front’ is our sense of humour. ‘They’ say, ‘the Ozzies are nice people, they just have such a strange sense of humour ! ’. What they don’t realize is that our ‘sense of humour’ is part of our cultural defensive armour. When ‘they’ are not around, we have a good laugh.
They’ say we are lazy. They are totally misreading the situation. You see, we’re light years ahead of them. When the first of us arrived in ye Olde Botany Bay, we realised we were on to a good thing. We got word back to those we knew and loved in the old country. Our system was so well-devised, all one had to do was steal a loaf of bread in full sight of ‘ye olde chain gang’, and, ‘Bob’s your Uncle’ - all good - ‘off to ye olde Botany Bay with ye, scoundrel !’.
Since then we have perfected our way of life in the sense that our education systems and work place culture are geared to ensure that our well-oiled -but not necessarily most efficient and perfect- systems provide sufficient largesse to allow for a reasonably comfortable journey through life AND we have more time to indulge in a our favorite activity, which is sport. And, of course, irony of ironies, we go to the ‘rat race’ and generally beat them in THEIR real time.
“Which is why we are generally a happy, smug, and, dare I say, ‘arrogant’, lot !”, finished off the venerable gentleman, as he walked off into the Melbourne night, with a naughty grin smudged across his face.
Sandy Johnston
Rivonia
..from Melbourne, Australia
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