And from my favourite sports writer. You will note that he is using irony to combat the apparent stereotypical view that Australians have of whinging, toffee nosed, stuck up arrogant poms.
Aussie rules resurface as the empire strikes back
By Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer (The Times)
NOW that we have an Australian Editor, things are very different at The Times. For example, once the first edition goes, senior staff gather in his office for a belated six o’clock swill. You are expected to down about a dozen tinnies in half an hour. Throwing up, although warmly recommended, is by no means de rigueur.
There’ll be changes of content in the paper. We’ll have a Sheep Dip Correspondent starting soon, for example. The property pages will be brought into line (Knightsbridge flat, own dunny). The Sheilas’ Page is changing: recipes for meat-pie floater and Vegemite sandwich will be alternated with articles on Australian foreplay (Oi, Sheila — you awake?). The culture pages will take a new slant. A picture of a ballet dancer, for example, will be captioned: “Bloke with no strides”. After long discussion, it has been decided that the house style for male urination is “siphon the python”; the more recherché “shake hands with the wife’s best friend” has been rejected.
Court and Social is to be renamed “Stuck-Up Poms Page” (and I reckon that’s a tautology, mate). The sports department is now called the No Poofters Pages. The new Wine Correspondent selects drinks with an eye to the throwing-up market. The Times is sponsoring a concert: Rolf Harris will play The Four Seasons arranged for didgeridoo quartet.
And if I haven’t got round to the corks-on-the-hat jokes, it’s only because I have run out of time. Monty Python, Barry Mackenzie, Foster’s ads, it’s all there. And I must say, in all humility — there will more on humility later, diggers — that as a ridiculous compilation of worn-out jokes about out-of-date national stereotypes, I have done a bloody decent job here.
But not as good as the Daily Telegraph of Sydney. Back to the absurd storm-in-a-teacup that is Lugergate, an incident in which an England World Cup rugby player was on the field by mistake for 34 seconds. The English, I read, “showed lack of respect for the tournament official and the whole thing just smacks of arrogance. But then the English have always been an arrogant race.”
This is just one of the tastier examples of the Insult Campaign going on in Australia. The insults are aimed at the England rugby team, but it all goes much deeper. It is nothing less than an assault on national stereotypes.
It seems that the Australian psyche is unable to cope with any measure of English achievement without bringing in the notion of English arrogance, as if the Australian national consciousness could not exist without the arrogant English to react against. That England has a half-decent rugby team has woken the sleeping — or perhaps I mean lightly dozing — sense of persecution in Australia.
The unabashed, self-righteous hostility of it all quite takes your breath away. I enjoy a good bit of banter with my Australian friends, particularly on the subject of sport, but I can’t see the point of taking it to the level of hysteria that has been reached by the Australian press. And the tournament has three weeks to go. The newspapers are not entirely to blame. They are merely reflecting the feelings of their readers. That, broadly speaking, is what newspapers do. If the Australian public was disgusted by the venom flowing from its newspapers, the newspapers would be unbought, unread.
And I feel like seizing the entire Australian public by the lapels and screaming into its face: “For God’s sake snap out of it! You’re supposed to be a nation that’s come of age! Why the hell are you still bothering with this colonial chippiness?” The jokes about corks on hats are out of date. The Cultural Cringe no longer stings in a country that has produced Patrick White and Peter Carey. But the oldest joke of them all — the one about the well-balanced Australian with a chip on both shoulders — is alive and flourishing like a coolabah tree.
A word about arrogance. The English have no arrogance where Australia is concerned — not when it comes to sport. Rather, the English attitude is one of grovelling subservience, awestruck admiration and hero-worshipping imitation.
What has just about every English sport taken as a template for self-improvement? Australia. The Australian system. If the Australians do it, it must be good. The Australians have a cricket academy. Well, we must have one. Who to run it? Rodney Marsh — the Australian who (a) once drank 56 tinnies between Australia and London (I may be doing the fellow an injustice, it’s possible that he consumed more) and (b) once called the English bowlers “ pie-throwers”.
English rugby has borrowed hugely from Australian rugby, in particular its cross-fertilisation with rugby league, especially when it comes to defence. British swimming will be the happening story of the next Olympic Games because it has appointed an Australian, Bill Sweetenham, as performance director. That’s not arrogance, it is humility of the very highest order. It represents the real nature of the English attitude to Australia in sport. The idea of English arrogance in sport is about as out of date as the six o’clock swill.
So why persevere with it? Australia is a modern nation, Sydney is one of the world’s great cosmopolitan cities and yet, given the slightest danger of English sporting success, there is an atavistic lurch back into chippiness. You ask Mike Brearley, the England cricket captain who became a hate object after winning the Ashes in Australia.
What Australia requires in this sporting life is for good old golden-hearted, straightforward, decent, ordinary, tough, rough-hewn, good-natured and thoroughly heterosexual Aussies to be confronted by snooty, arrogant, over-refined (the sort Des Esseintes would find over-fastidious), over- educated, cosseted, namby-pamby, devious, nasty, cheating, seldom-bathing Pommie poofters.
I think there is an interesting lesson for Australia to learn here. We English have grown out of our resentment of the Romans and the Normans, our rulers and conquerors of the past. Englishness is defined by many complex things, but none of these is a need to be affronted by past oppressors. So long as the Australians cherish the stereotype of the arrogant Pom, Australia will remain an adolescent as a nation.
And I say this as an Englishman who, like all English people who have been there, loves Australia to distraction, delights in the country’s continuing self-invention, envies youth and vigour and ambition and room to breathe. But this obsession with Poms. My dear, so vieux jeu. I mean, grow up, will you? Now to get my bag packed, for I leave for Australia next week. I shall be overjoyed to see the place again. I don’t know how many tinnies I am to drink on the plane; I await the Editor’s instruction.
[ 10-31-2003, 05:49 AM: Message edited by: Donut ]