Australia
Us Aussies > Let's Visit Australia > Convicts to ConscriptsAustralia Confronting the Future > Australia and the Implications of Multiculturalism
Us Aussies
(Published in Sale, Victoria, by Hayzon Pty Ltd, through Fusion Australia, 1987)
[Mal Garvin]
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INTRODUCTION - The Australian Enigma
FOR MANY YEARS this country was called Terra Incognita - the Unknown Land
A Land of Contrasts
In the northern hemisphere, Australia is seen as the world’s last mystery. For many, we are the new frontier – the final hope to escape the pollution
FOR MANY YEARS this country was called Terra Incognita - the Unknown Land
A Land of Contrasts
In the northern hemisphere, Australia is seen as the world’s last mystery. For many, we are the new frontier – the final hope to escape the pollution
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and hassles of the world.
To them we look rich and free and friendly, with a relaxed, undemanding lifestyle.
As the British author Anthony Burgess said, "This great empty, continent, must surely become the new world. The country breathes promise and it’s a wonderful place for bringing up deep brown, bare-toed children."
To them we look rich and free and friendly, with a relaxed, undemanding lifestyle.
As the British author Anthony Burgess said, "This great empty, continent, must surely become the new world. The country breathes promise and it’s a wonderful place for bringing up deep brown, bare-toed children."
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we are still a bit of a mystery to ourselves. A land of enigmas and contradictions, trying to find some cohesion and a way to explain the paradoxes.
We are a nation where the baddies, like Ned Kelly, have become the goodies. We are the people who tell ourselves that heaven’s in the bush, but mostly choose to live in sprawling suburbs. We buy 4-wheel drives to explore the mysterious heart of our country but only seven per cent of these vehicles ever leave the highways.
We are a nation where the baddies, like Ned Kelly, have become the goodies. We are the people who tell ourselves that heaven’s in the bush, but mostly choose to live in sprawling suburbs. We buy 4-wheel drives to explore the mysterious heart of our country but only seven per cent of these vehicles ever leave the highways.
Australian males say the family is the most important thing in their lives, but this week 1100 families will break up.
Australia is still the land of the absent father, and is rapidly becoming the land of the working mother!
A sample of any hundred people from Cairns, to Hobart to Geraldton, to Sydney, to Melbourne will reveal attitudes to authority, to politicians, to home-ownership and the like, that are strikingly similar.
First generation Australians, whatever their parentage, speak with a striking similarity from one corner of the country to another.
We appear to be cynical about religion, but eighty seven percent of us sheepishly admit to researchers that we believe in God.
We do a lot of snide talking about sex, but feel uncomfortable with intimacy.
We celebrate the individualist, but find it very difficult personally, to resist the pressure to conform.Let's Visit Australia
(Published in Great Britain, by Burke Publishing Company Limited, 1983)
[John C. Caldwell]
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Let's Visit Australia
The continent of Australia lies entirely south of the equator. Because of its position on the globe, Australia is often called the Land Down Under. There are many unusual facts about this country. It is one of the world's largest in area but among the smallest in population, and four-fifths of this population are crowded into a few cities. It is the only country to occupy a whole continent. Australia is the smallest continent in area, but it is the oldest.
. . .The continent of Australia lies entirely south of the equator. Because of its position on the globe, Australia is often called the Land Down Under. There are many unusual facts about this country. It is one of the world's largest in area but among the smallest in population, and four-fifths of this population are crowded into a few cities. It is the only country to occupy a whole continent. Australia is the smallest continent in area, but it is the oldest.
Australia is the home of the kangaroo - or , rather, kangaroos. There are about forty different members of this group of animals.
The kangaroos are found only in Australia (except for tree-climbing species, found also in New Guinea).
There are some very small members of this family, but the "big red" and the "great grey" kangaroos may stand higher than a man.
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Kangaroos are members of an ancient group of animals known as the marsupials. This word comes from a Latin word meaning "pouch". Members of this mammal family carry their young in a pouch.
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. . . Australia was the last continent to be discovered by
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Europeans and the last to be settled by them.
Because of its geological age, it has varieties of animals and birds that have either long since disappeared or never developed on other parts of the earth.
. . . It is the one of the few countries which, instead of being overcrowded, had sought new citizens to fill its great empty spaces.
Convicts to Conscripts
Highlights of Australian History
(Published by McMillan, Melbourne, 1978)
[John Driscoll, Gail Reid]
THE CONVICTS
Who were the Convicts?
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John Duffy was one of many people who were transported for poaching. The following story tells how this came about.
Country Life and Poaching
During the 1700s and 1800s in Britain, conditions for poorer farmers and workers in country areas changed for the worse.
There were many reasons for this change. Businessmen who lived in the cities were able to charge low prices because they owned big farms.
Poorer farmers could not compete with these low prices and were forced into debt.
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New machines, which replaced workers on farms, were invented. One of these was Jethro Tull’s seed drill which enabled more seed to be planted.
The enclosure movement, which forced small farmers to sell their land, made larger farms for rich people.
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Poor conditions and lack of money forced many country people to steal game (animals, birds and fish) from other people’s property. This was called poaching.
The punishment for poaching was severe. It was the rich people who made the laws and it was their lands that the poachers stole from. Death or (later on) transportation was the punishment for poaching.
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These were some of the reasons why people in the manufacturing towns in England committed crimes. In many cases, it was in order to stay alive.
Confronting the Future
Australia and the world: the next hundred years
(Published in Ringwood, Victoria, by Penguin books Australia, 1976)
[Charles Birch]
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This is a book about the world at the crossroads; a world which will either seek to perpetuate the values of the past,
drift, or seek a totally new orientation to the future. Much of this book is about Australia at the crossroads of possible worlds of the future.
That needs an explanation. Australia is in many ways remote from the world, huge in space, small in population.
For many people in the world it is that lucky country that has never had a war within its boundaries, has never had any major national disaster,
whose inhabitants spend their time basking in the sun and eating steaks. For other reasons, which I explain towards the end of Chapter 1,
I believe that Australia could be a mirror to the world. It is not that now; but things are changing.
The possibility of change is perhaps greater in Australia than anywhere else. Furthermore, it is impossible for Australia,
and for that matter other countries, to survive and flourish except as they find their future in a global perspective.
This I try to establish in Chapter 2. What is lacking in human affairs is a global vision.
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It is just possible that the clues for living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are not going to come from the great nations that have ruled the earth in our time,
but from the outposts and frontiers of the new world which have the advantage of still being in search of their identity and their role in the world.
I do not want to write just for Australians. I believe that Australia might be seen by the rest of the world as a possible image of the future,
even a beacon of hope for those who suffer because they are poor and for those who suffer because they are rich.
16 The Future Now
In the affluent world the future has already arrived. The promises of industrialization, economic growth and a civilization directed to material improvement is turning an age of abundance into an age of scarcity, inflation, unemployment, with the threat of war and loss of any meaning of life. A way of life that served mankind up to the twentieth century now promises to destroy him and his earth.
Research Scientist Dr Timothy Flannery believes that our population is already straining the environment beyond a sustainable level.
He says that Perth and Adelaide face critical water shortages, our fisheries are declining and the quality of our air in Sydney and Melbourne on some days is declining to levels seen in Tokyo.
He suggests that our immigration intake cannot be justified in view of the current environmental impact.In the affluent world the future has already arrived. The promises of industrialization, economic growth and a civilization directed to material improvement is turning an age of abundance into an age of scarcity, inflation, unemployment, with the threat of war and loss of any meaning of life. A way of life that served mankind up to the twentieth century now promises to destroy him and his earth.
I suggest that population growth in itself is not purely the root cause of environmental degradation. Affluent western lifestyle contributes significantly to the rapid usage of natural resources and environmental damage. Charles Birch in his book “Confronting the Future – Australia and the World” says the following
The proper object of economic activity is to have enough bread, not infinite bread, not a world turned into bread, not even vast store houses full of bread.
The infinite hunger of man, his moral and spiritual hunger, is not to be satisfied, is indeed exacerbated, by the current demonic madness of producing more and more things for more and more people.
Afflicted with an infinite itch, modern man is scratching in the wrong place, and his frenetic clawing is drawing blood from the life-sustaining circulatory systems of his spaceship, the biosphere.
Gandhi simply said “If the rich would live more simply the poor could simply live”. Population growth is a problem but a greater problem is our wilful choice to deny that our own lifestyles consist of anything but necessities. Part of the answer to reduce environmental degradation is to change our lifestyle by living a simpler life, which requires a greater level of self-denial but this is not something that we necessarily want to hear is it!?