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April 04, 2007
There is an article by Patrick West in Spiked in which Australia is represented as the land of 'Kath and Kim'. I've only seen bits and pieces of the Kath & Kim comedy television series, but it appears from what I've seen to be about the struggles of life and relationships once material comfort ---the house, the garden, the car, holidays, shopping--- has been achieved. They are coming to grips with their tradition of understanding their own well-being in terms of possessions or economic wealth. Very contemporary.
West reworks the traditional English cultural elitist account about a nasty, uncultured suburban working class Australia. It's pretty thin in analysis and thick in value judgement. He says:
Australia is not the paradise it is portrayed to be on Neighbours. One of my Aussie colleagues is often asked why she chose to live in miserable, rainy Britain. I asked her the same question the other day. Her answer was simply: ‘Australia is nothing like Neighbours. It’s more like Kath & Kim.’ She went on to explain that the Land Down Under is not populated by the hearty, the gregarious and the welcoming, but by white trash (I don’t particularly like that phrase because no-one has the courage to use its equivalent, ‘black trash’, but you get the point). Australians are some of the most coarse, racist people on earth, as Kath & Kim rightly portrays.
According to West that is why so many Australians, especially the clever ones, move to Britain or elsewhere.They all want to get away from the rough" and "coarse" land of Kath & Kim that is full of the dark and dangerous passions that so threaten the sweetness and light of a progressive liberal culture.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, suburbia, Victor Harbor, 2007
You can hear traces of Matthew Arnold's culture and politics--- the 'vice and hideousness' of the yobbos who need to be civilised --- in West's text. It's core is Culture and Anarchy with its spectre of civilisation laying in ruins.
My quick response to West is that Australia’s diaspora is composed of professionals working in a global marketplace in jobs that are unavailable in their homeland, rather than elite intellectuals such as the old English standbys of Clive James and Germaine Greer. Secondly, there are intellectuals who continue to live in Australia. Thirdly, the more cosmopolitan lifestyle of the professional /middle class inner city culture in the capital cities is quite different from the working class suburbia represented by Kath and Kim.
Guy Rundle makes an interesting response in Spiked about the article being West's response to a cultural crisis in Britain. The left-liberal elite fear that mainstream conservative tabloid pop culture is actually winning – and that the remaining institutions of liberal elite culture (Radio 4, the Guardian, Independent etc) are being pushed to a position of utter irrelevance. Rundle says:
What is really awry in West’s piece is that he has missed the way in which the image of Australia is used within British culture and debate for purposes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the southern continent. The fashionable disdain in Britain for the suburbanism that dominates the image of Australian life is a barely disguised form of prejudice directed at working-class and mainstream culture, displaced in such a way that it can avoid charges of naked elitism.
Rundle says that more and more British liberals project their fears for their own self-preservation against the hordes on to a nightmare vision of Australia, where they imagine the hordes have been victorious.
If we come back to West's imaginary account of Australia, then we can argue that multicultural Australia has given rise to a new kind of cultural critic, one who addressed issues of ethnic, sexual and gender diversity.
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My quick response to West is that Australia’s diaspora is composed of professionals working in a global marketplace
Yeh it has changed. The Lowey Institute said that the Australia diaspora has become increasingly gold-collar, holding down positions of high responsibility and remuneration.
West's mythical diaspora is more like a Greerish view which is at best horribly dated, and at worst mythical.
One of the aspects of the modern diaspora is how comfortable they are on the world stage. I do believe that Australia still suffers from political cringe, which the great and powerful friends foreign policy is a form of. This is in contrast to the modern diaspora.
IMO the antiquated part of Australia is its politicians - not culture.