What makes Australia Australia?

Thoughts from Sydney and Darwin

(Prior pieces on Australia: First impressions of Sydney, Sydney the suburban paradise, Twenty-seven hours on the Aussie dog, Alice Springs, and Final thoughts on Australia, and from last week, Perth.

I’m in a McDonald’s in Katherine, half way on my bus trip to Alice Springs. I have more to write about that, and about Alice Springs, but until I can get settled and figure it all out, here is an essay I wrote over last few days. Sorry for being a little late!)

Travel comes with lows and highs and right now I’m at a low, and have been for over a week. I’m not saying this for sympathy — I have a great life and job — but rather because I don’t want to lie to people and suggest being in another country automatically means constant happiness. Or that everything always goes as planned.

On my last few days in Perth, a beautiful but lonely city, as I was navigating another screen trying to book another round of bus trips and hotels, and failing because getting a room in small town Western Australia is close to impossible for less than five hundred a night, I decided I was done with this whole walking the world thing and needed to quit for a bit. In a moment of haste I booked a flight to Sydney, then moved my flight back home to an earlier date, but a few days later my mood lifted and I regretted that, and booked a flight to Darwin, where I am now, with the plan to head to Alice Springs by bus.

When I was a trader (on Wall Street) I used to say the easy part of the job was evaluating risk, and the difficult part was controlling your emotions. Emotional management, not risk management, was the actual key to being successful at the job, and that’s also true of what I do now.

On this trip I’ve failed at the emotional management part. I was down for a few days — lonely, a feeling magnified by being turned upside down by twelve hour time change, removed from everyone and everything I knew, in a town bereft of people — and looked forward and saw only more challenges and emptiness, and I hit the eject button, to a place I felt more at home, Sydney.

That worked for a few days, because as I wrote last year, it might be the most comfortable city in the world, assuming you can afford it. A first world city, immersed in physical beauty, with a healthy balance between work and leisure. So for a week I spent each morning at my local cafe chatting with employees (from Vietnam, Indonesia) and regulars, then went for a ten mile walk along the southern shore of cliffs, beaches, and inlets, napped, and ended the day with an exceptional meal (Australia has the world’s best Asian cuisine) and sipping ciders and reading in a pub.

That’s all well and good, but that’s not why I travel. I travel to experience the different, and most of Australia isn’t different, not to an American at least. Sydney is a fantastic town to move to, get a job in, and start a family in, but it doesn’t work for what I am doing right now, which is trying to figure out how the world works. It is different enough to feel imbalanced, to feel isolated, but not enough to be stimulated.

As I noted last year the US and Australia are strikingly similar. Not only are they so alike at a thin level — in built environment, and all the necessities of life, to a point where a first time US visitor to Australia will experience whatever the opposite of culture shock is (Culture embrace, cultural salve, culture balm), but they share a thick culture. They have roughly the same national purpose, the same animating purpose that the majority of citizens have without knowing they have it.

Both have a national dream, or a vision of success, which are minor variations of the same thing — which is to be justly rewarded for all of your hard work with a house of your own, personal safety, a plethora of free time to explore your hobbies, and a better life for your children. It is an entrepreneurial understanding of success that binds the otherwise disparate citizens together, along with a moral code descended from the Old Testament.

That house isn’t any house though, it is a suburban house, a stand alone gated home on a plot of land in a community of the like-minded with as many cars as people. It is a very individualistic concept of the good life, in the sense that while you live in a community, you have your own estate, even if it might be less than a quarter of an acre.

It is the democratization of the lordly life for the well-to-do plebes. A fenced-in home that is yours and yours alone, on a quarter-acre yard, with a two-car garage, is a trickle down version of the English manor, complete with “having a carriage (car),” for the masses.

As I’ve written many times, the English-speaking world’s love of suburbia isn’t an accident, isn’t a lifestyle forced on the masses by car-loving legislatures, but a revealed preference of the citizens. They vote for it, they flock to it, they want it, because it’s in their cultural blood.

That Australia and the US share this vision isn’t surprising, because both are the children of the United Kingdom, and both have taken their parents’ concept of felicity (a manor) and run with it, unshackling it from limited land and the despotic monarchs who controlled membership, opening up membership to all.

This isn’t a new insight, as Tocqueville wrote almost two hundred years ago when visiting the new US, “The American is the Englishman left to himself.” That is, free to be what they want to be. I would refine that to say, the American (and Australian) is the Englishman finally allowed, by democracy and geography, to flourish.

That the children had a new slate to build on certainly matters as well. The bulk of development happened after the widespread adoption of the car, and that as much as anything, has determined how the US and Australia built themselves.

As I wrote last year,

The irony is that the UK itself has far fewer suburbs than its children, a result of a lack of space, a more rigid class system, and a calcified landscape whose development preceded the availability of the car.

The mass-produced car was revolutionary because it made these mini-manors accessible to everyone, providing them with their own version of the English concept of success. It allowed the English-speaking masses to achieve their lordly aspirations by creating modern suburbs that strike the perfect balance: sprawling enough for individual yards, yet clustered enough to maintain economic efficiency.

There are differences of course, most surface level, but some stubbornly constitutive, driven primarily by geography. If you populate disparate lands with the same people the topography won’t entirely disappear, much as flowing water carves out different paths based on the surrounding geology. Geography isn’t destiny, but it is a current that continually nudges a culture.

All the differences between Australia and the US are a result of geography, with the US having received the world’s geographical trophy, with Australia closer to the bottom than top. I could go on endlessly about how naturally gifted the US is, with an embarrassment of geographical riches, but Australia has little of that, other than picturesque scenery and enough valuable rocks to fund its first world lifestyle.

While not a surprising insight, I keep emphasizing how empty Australia is because it is hard to comprehend exactly how empty it is until you come here, and spend twenty seven hours on a bus crossing only half of its width and the only communities you pass through are titular — names attached to an outpost without citizens.

Australia is massive, but it is also isolated, largely inhospitable, and harsh, with only a sliver of resplendent landscape, primarily along the coastline¹. Consequently despite being roughly the same physical size as the US, it has one tenth the people, which explains the greatest difference — a physical sparseness that manifests as, depending on your temperament, either a relaxed gentility, an admirable self-reliance, and a stubborn ruggedness, or a crude, hollowed-out, emptiness.

The other major difference is also about geography. Both US and Australia have embraced being nations of immigrants and over the course of their short histories have had fairly liberal entrance policies, especially over the last several decades, which has made Australia more South Asian, and US more Latino. Filling your country up with Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesians versus Mexicans and Central Americans has a dramatic impact, beyond what type of family-run restaurant do you find in every town.

(PS: It’s an interesting question to ask if “the lord’s life” as the inherited concept of success makes the English-speaking world more open to immigration than other cultures. It’s easy to be here in Australia, where almost all the service workers are Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Filipinos, on three-year work visas, and wonder if immigration isn’t really about bringing in a servant class for everyone. Of importing inexpensive help for the newly minted middle class lords². )

There is a singular difference though which isn’t just about geography, but is about people, and that is the Aboriginals, who while they make up only about four percent of Australia’s population, have had an outsized impact on its history, culture, and its sense of self.

While the Aboriginal population is minimal in the SE coast where the majority of Australians live, they are a significant percentage of the Outback, especially in all the fringe communities in the middle of a nowhere gifted with the precious minerals and explosive gases that fund Australia’s lavish lifestyle.

While the open West plays a large role in US mythology, the Outback here is significantly more important. It is central to Australia’s concept of itself, and more precisely what makes it special.

The Outback, and the Aboriginal population, is what makes Australia Australia, and without it you are left with a poorer, emptier, hotter US.

All of the above is basically a thousand word explanation for why I made my second change of plans, and flew to Darwin with the plan to eventually hop on a bus to Alice Springs, after famously saying last year, it is a shithole, and while I’m glad I saw it, I had no interest in returning.

I’ve liked Darwin, which like Perth and Townsville, is a port town that ships out those valuable rocks and LNG to Asia, but also cattle raised in the interior, and consequently it has the feel of a Texas town, a rough and tumble redneck town, with Rodeos, 4x4 trucks, and Stetsons and boots, although in Australia paired with footie jerseys and shorts, rather than button-ups and jeans.

During my four days walking around, there were times I would forget where I was, and given the weather, fauna, and built infrastructure — the low slung commercial district, the waterfront parks, the busy roads lined by box-stores and strip malls — and think I was in Galveston, or Sarasota FL, or Wilmington NC.

Then all of a sudden you turn a corner and spot fifteen aboriginals sprawled on blankets underneath a tree, and realize you are definitely not in the US — people who still look like what they are very recently descended from, people who successfully lived and thrived with only stone-aged technology for sixty-five thousand years, but dressed up in modern clothes — footie outfits, Tupac shirts, Michael Jordan jerseys, Raiders hats, button-up western shirts, flip-flops, or no shoes at all.

They occupy all the liminal shaded spaces (under park trees, in walkways, bus stops, public parks), lounging. On their blankets, with bags around them, drinking or otherwise doing nothing. Maybe yelling at each other, some passed out, most just sitting though, looking forward, without much movement.

I understand this might be rude to say, rude to write about, but I mean this with no disrespect, but they are impossible to ignore because of how striking in appearance they are, contrary to how we think of modern man. They appear as ghosts from our very distant past, emerging whole from another time. Dark wide open faces, with spindly arms and legs, toothpick thin, and big barreled torsos, and then wild wiry hair, either shockingly white, or dark, sometimes stuffed into a baseball cap, or under a wool beanie regardless of the heat.

I understand some of you will be put off by such a blunt description, will find it “othering”, but the Aboriginals are very much an other, and to pretend they are not is denial. Being the other does not necessarily mean being inferior, or lesser, but different, and as I wrote last time I was in Alice Springs, I am genuinely fond of aboriginals and their culture. They are sweet, thoughtful people, who I find to be generous and forthcoming, and I don’t mean that in a condescending way, as if they are people who need our help and our sympathy. They have agency, like every person does.

I travel to try and understand how the world works, and human history is one of cultural conflict, of varying ways of being human coming into contact with each other, and one “winning” from that, and another “losing.” Aboriginals definitely lost, every technologically inferior group has regardless of how successful they were prior to contact, and two hundred or so years later Australia is still dealing with that, trying to figure out how to navigate building a country composed of such different groups, one dominant and the majority, the other a clear minority, but who have lived here at least three hundred times longer. That longevity, which in historical terms is about as permanent as you can get, has to count for something, assuming you are working in a thoughtful moral system.

Consequently, while I am not in denial about the problems in the Aboriginal community, I’ve got a lot of empathy for the position it finds itself in, and understand and support most of their claims, which I will write more about next week.

But they, and the question of cultural conflict, is why I returned to this “insignificant” part of Australia, why I am returning to Alice Springs next week, why I will take another twenty-four hour bus trip across nothing — because the Aboriginals, and the Outback they live in, is what makes Australia Australia.

You can come to Australia and happily spend a month sipping pints in Paddington, going for nature walks, and sunning on the beach. There is nothing wrong with that and I look forward to doing it many more times in my life, including at the end of this trip, but doing only that won’t teach you much about what makes this country unique.

For that, you have to go to Alice Springs, even if it is a shithole.

1. Which, however small, is still larger than England — which is why I'd bet on Australia over England long term. Geography, resources, and immigration give it the edge.

2. Editors note (that is, me following up): I have amended the text to remove the following,

“Despite trying to stay out of local political debates, I’ve found myself defending the US versus attacks by Australians on the left, specifically over immigration, where I point out the US has a far more liberal policy than Australia, and contrary to them, generally provides pathways to citizenship for its imported servant class. We allow our servants to become lords themselves.”

A few readers have pointed out that was wrong, and there is a well defined easy to navigate pathway to citizenship for immigrants in Australia. My apologies. I am generally very impressed with the immigration system here, which is one of the most rational of the developed nations.

I will add my frustration here with the politics comes from criticisms of current US policy when Australia has a more rigorous highly policed immigration system. If you violate the rules here, you are quickly dealt with. Anyone landing on the shores without proper paper work in Australia is quickly deported to an island.