Australia the forgotten

I want to write this one with as much objectivity as possible, because the only way to convince people of the veracity of anything is to not show any anger over it, since anger is often the opposite of truth.

It’s been almost four years since I felt any passion for Australia the country – both the place and the idea. It last happened specifically when we lost 1-0 to Italy to be eliminated from the 2006 soccer World Cup, a result that made me livid. At that stage I had spent almost a year in Bolivia, and though I had never once spoken about Australia in all those ten months and didn’t particularly miss it, in the back of my mind it was a place that I called home, the country whose name used to give me joy. In my mind Australia was a place that still held a little bit of purity compared to the rest, the country where all of the social issues that dragged the human race down had fit into the puzzle a bit better than they had elsewhere (and if that idyllic setting had happened because of distance, coincidence, and murder of the first Australians rather than by design, well so be it). That sense of social semi-perfection proved somewhat false beginning from 2006: the so-called locals beat up a bunch of so-called foreign Aussies on the beaches of Sydney and suddenly the gentle nationalism became nasty and the flags started to be brandished about.

But my malaise has nothing to do with that stuff. I simply came home after my final three weeks spent with a special woman in Bolivia, realised that I was at square one again after having gone so far only two weeks earlier, found out that my instincts for the Spanish language and for South America amounted to jack shit here, and became angry. I was competing against people whose knowledge was inferior to mine but who were better at putting themselves out there as it related to operating in Australia, and in any case what I knew did not relate to anything since I did not understand how to do it the Australian way. Fourteen months later I went back to Bolivia for one more fling with the country, wrote a bunch of angry stuff against Australia, and came home again in February 2008. When I arrived home that second time I had moved beyond the anger, which ironically was an even worse state of affairs, since anger at least is engagement. I had moved into the postmodern phase of my relationship with Australia, no longer theorising or analysing it. I simply accepted in peace that my relationship with Australia was dead.

Did Australia have an identity, or was it simply a generic good place where people arrived to make money, live well and forget the troubles of their past? I gave country living a go in Albury-Wodonga and discovered the Australian identity that I had previously doubted existed, but it was simplistic and I found myself even more isolated: I was too urbane for the country, too poised and sophisticated, yet nowhere near sophisticated enough for the city of Melbourne that I returned to. There is no balance in Planet 2000: you either have to grab the money or support Fidel fucking Castro with the hippies; wear a yellow jacket while talking about cars or wear a suit and tie while talking about your career; for entertainment you have to either go to the pub for a Toohey’s wearing a singlet or go to a cultural festival where they play salsa music and you drink $30 beers from Belgium.

My time working with the kids in the United States suddenly came into focus: the black and hispanic kids generally thought I was the coolest or at least the most sympathetic of the staff; to the white kids I was always the lamest. As difficult as their baggage could be to deal with, I could at least occasionally find some emotional resonance and moments of connection with the minorities that I seldom found with the affluent suburban kids whose favour should have been so much more straightforward and to most of the staff it was. I have to ask, as stupid as this is, me, without a drop of mixed blood in my veins: do I not catch the vibe of how to communicate with Anglo-Saxon people? Why do they like rock and techno music? Why don’t I?

I do not want to contribute to the greater good of the Australian nation. I feel unwanted by the country and its people, my own people. But I know that in England and America it would be no different. I don’t know what to do. There are solutions, but with two brothers and two parents living in Australia those solutions are hardly going to be pretty.