Are there any overriding collective characteristics that transcend time and can define a society and a nation? How real, how embedded in history, how influential can those characteristics be? To put it schematically, are most Australians a lot that believe more or less in having a fair go for all? Are most Greeks very individualistic? Are most Germans pretty disciplined? Are Southern Europeans or Latin Americans more ‘fun’ oriented people?
These questions are fundamental questions of self identification, that have to be addressed carefully if we are to avoid perpetuating national stereotypes. Important historians, sociologists and other thinkers, who trace the development of societies and nations through time, are of the opinion that yes, there are defining characteristics that shape the parameters of collective and individual lives in various nations.
Attempting to address key aspects of the Australian national character now…
Historian John Hirst, for example, in his book The Australians, by tracing both tradition and change in what he calls the Australian character throughout time, on topics as diverse as sport, war, mateship, humour, suburbia and other key issues, concludes that regardless of how Australians reflect upon themselves, or of how others see them, and how this differs, they do possess national characteristics.
After the Bali terrorist attack in 2002, he writes in the introduction of his book, there was a shortage of everything the doctors needed at the local hospital, including pain killers. Graeme Southwick, the Australian doctor responsible for the ‘Australian’ ward, Hirst writes, asked patients to assess their own pain level and time and again the patients responded by saying they were alright and that he better give the pain killers to the person next to them who was suffering more.
Hirst also reminds his readers of the makeshift hospitals of ‘Weary’ Dunlop on the Burma railway. The Australian captives of the Japanese acted differently from the English, the Dutch and the Americans, he says, and cites relevant examples from the historian and filmmaker Gavan Daws’ book Prisoners of the Japanese, where the author concludes that “the Australians kept trying to construct little male-bonded welfare states”.
Andrew Leigh, a former economics professor at the Australian National University and a Federal Shadow Assistant Treasurer, in his book Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia also refers to Daws’ study of prisoners of war in order to support the notion of a national Australian character.
He quotes Daws again, who writes about the captured soldiers in World War II: “The Americans were the great individualists of the camps, the capitalists,
the cowboys, the gangsters. The British hang on to their class structure like bulldogs for grim death. The Australians kept trying to construct little male bonded welfare states. [Unlike Americans] Australians could not imagine doing men to death by charging interest on something as basic as rice. That was blood-sucking; it was murder. Within little tribes of Australian enlisted men, rice went back and forth all the time, but this was not trading in commodities futures, it was Australian tribalism.”
If one of the key elements in culture is the embodiment, in beliefs and customs, of actions that help people survive in their particular environment, as people like Australian scientist and environmentalist Tim Flannery have put it, then geography, history and the human struggle and need to survive might help cultivate certain national characteristics. Helping each other in a vast, ‘hostile’ and sparsely populated continent might account for the creation of a more collective mentality, mateship for example, that led to the existence of ‘little male bonded welfare states’ in the camps of the Australian prisoners of war during World War II.
The question is whether or not these historically and sociologically explained national attributes can survive in reality and not only in the memory of the people and the myth makers of this land. In an interconnected and at the same time highly fragmented and privatised world of the globalised era, the question of whether or not, or to what extent, national characteristics can be retained remains unanswered.