In terms of general lifestyle, Australians are significantly more laid-back than their British counterparts. Sydney, in particular, exudes a more relaxed attitude than London. For starters, you may say one thing in the UK but it would mean an entirely different thing in the US, like football and soccer, for instance. The Americans are much more open than their British counterparts.
Most of them have no qualms about discussing private things, even among mere acquaintances. In Britain, the people would generally shy away from such conversations because they feel that it is rather personal or intrusive to do so.
The British are known for their dry sense of humour, while the Americans are less dry and sarcastic. One of the biggest cultural differences between Britain and America is the custom of tipping. In the UK, it is not customary because more often than not, the service charge is included in the final bill. For example, David Monre wrote in ,. The creation of the word Pome word used for English may have been an attempt at a humorous comeback. English critics have dismissed such an explanation because it relies on the premise that Australians can spell.
Another explanation is that it is an abbreviation of pomegranate, which is rhyming slang for immigrant. The English tend to be more comfortable with this explanation because it means Australians can't count syllables correctly let alone make good use of the cockney rhyming slang that they inheirited from England.
Valuing egalitarianism may have been another way for Australians to deal with the Convict taunts. Basically, valuing egalitarianism allowed Australians to say that, even though their mothers were prostitutes and their fathers were thieves, at least they treated everyone equally and didn't judge them on their background.
English critics have pointed out that it is easier to be egalitarian when you come from the base of the social pyramid. While it may be a fair call, Australians have shown a tendency to maintain their egalitarianism even when they have reached the top. For example, when cricketer Dennis Lillee first meet the Queen, rather than be formal as is custom in situations of unequal social status he expressed his egalitarian sentiments by saying:. In the mind of the great man, he was just treating the Queen as an equal.
After all, it wasn't her fault that she couldn't play cricket nor was it her fault that her subjects were shocking players as well. Oddly, some English thought Lillee had acted like an upstart buffon. In their minds, the Queen deserved respect as her birth right and it was irrelevant that she had done nothing special with her life other than walk in the shoes she had been given. For most of its urban existence, the British Isles were in a state of continuous war.
Not only were different regions of Britain fighting each other, the entire region was continually being invaded by mainland armies.
The continued rape and pillage of Britain Isles ended up producing a motley crew of cultures that the English authorities struggled to gain control over. Although the people created myths of the good king who sat at a round table and treated people with dignity, in truth English kings were in such a battle for survival that they bribed those who were loyal and universally treated the people like garbage.
About years ago, the English decided that after being invaded so many times themselves, it was a time to invade others. The indigenous people of Ireland, the Americas, Africa, and Asia soon found themselves with new colonial masters, and some English migrants wanting to make a buck on the side.
In its colonies, slavery and indentured labour proved lucrative industries. In China, England initially tried to engage in fair trade only to find that the only thing they could sell was opium. When the Qing dynasty banned opium sales. England responded by invading so it could continue selling its drug. Not only did the England's victory allow the drug market to continue, it also allowed England to gain the territory of Hong Kong as well as a string of ports on the Chinese coast. Although it had a distinct a profit element, English colonising was quite different from that of France, Holland, Portugal and Spain because instead of just taking things from the colonies, the English wanted to build schools, roads and hospitals in them as well.
Perhaps the English realised that if they made prosperous colonies, then English merchants could make even more money. An alternative explanation was that some fo the English who had been mistreated wanted to do some good instead of continue the mistreatment. Either way, English colonies generally prospered in ways the other European colonies did not. Aside from colonising, the English devoted their mind to improving medicine and industrial development.
This led to breakthroughs in infant mortality and new inventions that made many labourers obsolete. The unintended consequences of the technological developments were massive declines in infant mortality, population growth and unemployment.
With similar social conditions in France leading to the beheading of the French monarchy, British authorities knew that something had to be done other they would lose their heads as well. Ideally, population pressures could have been reduced if more English chose to migrate but it seems far too many were wedded to their homeland. The solution was to create a penal colony in Australia and force them out.
In , the disturbers of the peace and hungry children that stole bread were exported to Australia where they laid the foundations of Australian urban society. For the next 80 years, Australia was supplied with the Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English troublemakers along with soldiers to guard them.
The Convict history is something that forever binds Australia with England. Today, few Australians want to remember their history and few English want to let Australians forget it. England has shocking weather that makes people miserable. Darkness at 4pm, sleet and returning home to rising damp really isn't the type of environmental conditions that lead to a happy life. On the positive side, the English countryside is a safe where the most dangerous wildlife to be encountered is a ruminating cow.
That said, English sometimes point out that cows can be dangerous. Unlike England, Australia is a harsh land with plenty of sunshine, snakes, spiders, sharks, droughts, and bushfires. The English have long used the environment to explain why Australians are good at sport but no good in culture.
In the minds of the English, Australians spend more time outdoors playing while the English spend more time indoors creating and learning. Both Australians and English speak the same language, but they speak it in different ways. In England, pronunciation varies according to class and region, which reflects England's class conscious society and regional rivalries.
For example, soccer player David Beckam pronounces th sounds as f sounds so instead of saying "I think", he will say, "I fink. In Australia, pronunciation varies according to gender and ideology. Australian women are more likely to speak like Cate Blanchett with an accent that sounds like someone educated at Oxford University. Australian men that don't like Australia are more likely to speak like a woman or someone educated at Oxford university.
Contrary to myth, there is no regional variance in Australian English. People in Perth do not speak differently to people in Melbourne. Furthermore, there is no racial accent.
Very few children of non-English speaking migrants speak with ethnic accents. Aside from pronunciation, Australian English has been heavily influenced by American English. Most of Australia's television shows are American and American research dominates Australian universities.
Consequently, Australians often use the American spelling for words such as 'organization. For example, both the American "the couple is happy" and the British "the couple are happy" are acceptable in Australia.
Finally, Australian English is more informal than British English. Australians quickly get on to first name basis and refrain from using titles such as Mr, Mrs, Lord or Your Highness. Australians also frequently corrupt the language via the use of diminutives such as 'arvo' instead of 'afternoon' or 'uni' instead of 'university.
During its colonial era, England had an attitude to race that George Orwell would describe as all were equal but some were more equal than others. For example, at the Paris Peace Conference of , Japan proposed a racial equality clause to be included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The clause proposed:.
England opposed the clause because it was a threat to their imperial interests and notions of English superiority. Rather than admit the true reasons, the English stated that since its Australian dominion was racist, it could not vote in favour of the clause.
A majority of nations did in fact vote in favour of the clause but it was overturned because chairman, US President Woodrow Wilson, stated that support had to be unanimous.
Today, many English have become more honest and openly admitted to their racism. So much so, racism was a big part of the successful Brexit referendum. On the flip side, there are also a large number of English that continue to cite Australian racism as a way of trying to hide the racism of England. It has not been an effective technique to solve English racism as the level of racial segmentation is visually prominent aspect of English life. The UK independence party based its campign on being against migrants of colour.
It was a success. Although Australians often have a racist label applied to them, Australian society has far more racial mixing than England. The level of inclusiveness is reflected in the relative absence of racial ghettos and race-based group membership that are a prominent feature of English life. It is also reflected in the inter-cultural marriage rate. In , almost half of all marriages registered in Australia were between people from different birthplace groups.
In England, it was around one in ten. For hundreds of years, being a British citizen meant little more than being expected to recognise the authority of British rule and die for Britain if required. After World War 1 and 2, movements started growing amongst people in Britain that being a citizen should come with benefits, and one of those benefits should be a government that looks after its people.
This led to dramatic improvements in public health, education and social welfare. It also meant that having British citizens all over the world was potentially quite expensive. Aside from being expensive, an ethic that the government should be responsible to its citizens also meant that it had to treat citizens equally. In practice, this meant allowing British citizens in Pakistan, West Indies, and India to move to England and gain the same rights held by the Indigenous English.
Not all indigenous English were particularly happy with such versions of equality and they wanted something done about the migrants. The process of decolonisation affected Australia slightly differently to how it affected the motherland. In keeping with British wishes, Australia created its own citizenship in and progressively dismantled most of its legal ties to Britain over the next few decades.
Papua New Guinea was the closest thing that Australia had to a colony. In , a couple of chiefs asked for independence and Australia was more than happy to help all Papua New Guineans attain it. Art should represent the pinnacle of emotional, logical and moral thought of a nation. Similarly, it should attract a nation's finest minds to appreciate it.
In the case of British art, it seems the finest minds want to consume work that is the pinnacle of a turd. With the dominance of the literary, it might be expected that the art would inspire intelligent thought amongst journalists who work in words, but the opposite is the case. To put it more simply, iconic British art is the visual equivalent of punk rock.
Australia also has its fair share of crap artists, but a clear difference between iconic British art and iconic Australian art is the level of intelligence in the work.
The Australian artists combine a kind of European expressionism with sociological inquiry to produce works that had great feeling, but were also highly cerebral. The more intellectual approach to art has led to its rejection in England. Admittedly, Australians are not renowned as great promoters and much of the poor reception in England could also be put down to how the art was presented by Australian curators and marketers rather than just the ignorance of the British art market.
In , Britain went to a referendum to decide whether to remain part of Europe. Ironically, the "patriotic" vote of no revealed deep divisions in the identities of different segments of British society. The same identity conflicts that define Britain define most of the western world, and especially Australia, where different segments of the population have created and adopted social identities, not in opposition to cultures outside of their countries, but in opposition to cultures within them.
In short, Australia, like most of the western world, exists in a kind of social civil war. There are many reasons for why the western world is a war with itself. In Europe, much of the conflict can be traced to the inability of the European Union to satisfy the identity needs of many of its constituent members but still seeing country-based patriotism as a threat to the European Union.
At times, this leads to simplistic jingolism where people seek identity in a label without substance and by be against something rather than for anything. This psychology was seen in the British referendum where the slogan to stay in Europe had no positive myths of a European character or of a European dream.
Instead, it cloaked Europe in a British flag and chanted "Britain is stronger in Europe". Not only did the slogan to remain in Europe rely on British patriotism rather than European patriotism, it was so superficial that it didn't even specify what "stronger" referred to.
Was it military strength? Economic strength? The strength to bully smaller countries? In other words, even the pro-Europeans couldn't really articulate anything positive about Europe that would resonate more strongly than simplistic British patriotism. The remain campaign relied on British patriotism rather than European patriotism to persuade voters to stay in Europe. With superficial slogans not resonating even amongst those who created them many proponents of the union resorted to accusing their opponents of racism, which in turn provided some sense of cultural identity that the slogan or undefined notion of European superemacy did not.
In other words, they adopted an identity of an "anti-racist" that positioned themselves as superior to the "racists" in their country. Aside from the European Union not satisfying the identity needs of a large segment of its population, Europe is also struggling because significant migration has resulted in governments questioning the appropriateness of asserting a national identity that migrants are not in conformity with.
As an alternative, the governments have advocated letting go of the past to embrace the future. It is an approach that appeals to citizens that lack nostalgia for the past but offends those who do. Again, conflict has been the natural consequence.
Englishman John Aston talks of reconciling a British identity with a European identity. Although there are similarities, the identity conflicts of Australia have some significant differences with those of Europe.
The common and non-lethal golden silk orb-weaver has striped legs specialised for weaving, and is renowned for building impressive webs. But one thing I have noticed in greener suburbs is the amount of enormous spiderwebs out in the gardens. Like it? Pin it! I recently had a chat about letter boxes on our front doors and got weird looks all round!
The newspaper thing winds me up. A lot. Where are all the cats?! Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.
Learn how your comment data is processed. Hi, I'm Lisa, a British expat living in Sydney. I've travelled almost the whole Australian coastline and love sharing detailed travel and migration guides to inspire other adventurous souls to travel or move to Australia. Read more about me here! Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn.
Lisa Bull on 6th October at am.
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