You write:
>cross? no, rob. I was musing on your definition of the australian national
>character in the middle of thinking about the censorship laws. the musing
>was this: if I'm not easy to get along with, does that mean I'm not a true
>australian? (...yep, it's my reflexive 'national definitions exclude things'
>line. boring I know.)
Well, as it happens, you are - so I guess, if I were in the business of defining anything, you'd qualify as true-blue.
But I wasn't, really. Holland is characterised by very tidy front-rooms and the house-proud house-wives who spend most of each day keeping the kids out of there. That's a fact, from my experience. So it's worth mentioning in some contexts. But most Dutch women aren't housewives (not in the traditional sense, anyway), and most no longer live in houses with bay-windowed front rooms at street level. I don't reckon these two assertions are mutually incompatible at all.
Rather than defining Oz national character, I was describing its manifestation as a society from the point of view of one who was once a wog and has now been pretty well assimilated (and there are a lot of us, aren't there, Ange?).
There are Australians with whom it is difficult for me to get on (90% currently reside in the #!* cabinet), but I find living in Australian society not unlike wallowing in a luke-warm bath. People are easier on each other here than anywhere else I've ever been. They don't care about much that isn't very obviously manifesting in the moment, they are practical, unpretentious and uncomplaining (except about sport), they help you if they're asked, and they don't mind if you don't feel like joining in with what they're doing. If one is not allowed to make generalisations like this (expressed as relativities of course - Oz is more like this than anywhere else I know), one hits trouble whenever the word 'culture' comes up.
Oz doesn't quite care enough to get aggro about things (although you do have to get aggro a couple of times to prove your gender credentials as an 18yo boy). I was fresh out of Northern England (where brother was still cheerfully hospitalising brother on the topic of miners' pay and conditions) when an unelected top-hatted drunken royalist kicked out an elected government here in '75. When Bob Hawke suggested we not pour into the streets to put things right, we all went 'yair - fair enough' and sank back into the sofa. I couldn't believe it!
The leftie in me despairs at this - but by geez it makes for a seductively safe'n'comfy ambience. And I can't pretend I don't love Ozzie for this far more often than I feel moved to whinge at it (in vain, of course).
>and, will censorship mean a lessening of conflict or a heightening of it, as
>in: I suspect that any charges laid under such laws will entail opposition
>unless the 'criminals' are so marginalised, of course?
Well, we're absolutely obsessed with paedophilia, so such cases would be akin to the sort of spectacle with which Foucault kicks off his *Discipline and Punish* - public blood-letting before baying dingoes. For the most part, though, Ozzies are being very practical again. Most complaints are to do with how stupid and pointless the exercise is in its purely technical dimension - an offence against the fatalistic handyman each of us is expected to be, man and woman alike.
We tend to subscribe to the 'if you've got nuthin' ta hide' view, and we'll let important precedents pass us by with minimal public disturbance - just coz we don't like something, doesn't mean we have make trouble. We are pretty easy to rule, I reckon.
>more importantly, aren't you a communications lecturer or somesuch? what do
>you make of the new laws?
I'm a hard-wired pessimist and conspiracy theorist - the left'll do that to ya. This is the thin edge of the wedge, I reckon. It may have started as a political sop to a decisive sector of the electorate (wowserism lives here still), but I see politically motivated censorship (like blaming the unemployed, reaming workers, backing daft wars, and framing feminism as a bevy of over-educated man-hating dykes) recovering a common-sense every-day mainstream status.
Only now that I see all we've lost over the last decade and a half do I realise how much we'd gained over the decade and a half before that.
Sigh. Rob.