Category: Australia

Fear. An entirely intelligible response to a hegemonic culture with substantial overlap with your own: fear that your culture will be assimilated into the hegemon, that the country will become unrecognisable to you, that the virtues you are familiar with and have come to cherish will be eroded. That you will cease being you, and […]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/cory-bernadi-leads-coalition-push-to-change-18c-race-hate-laws/7796356 I think it puts me in a strange uncomfortable place. On the one hand, I am a libertarian in many things; I am more libertarian, certainly, than my fellow Australian latte-sippers (as opposed to American latte-sippers). And my position is that Bernardi’s dilution is right: there is a difference of threshold between “intimidate, humiliate, […]

I am not a visual person. And though my attachment to this image is quite predictable—me being such a homebody and desperately attached to a sense of home, it’s only grown on me gradually. The view of the central railway station of Melbourne, across the beautiful brown Yarra river (its brownness mitigated by night), from […]

So. Mate. Maaaaate. Youse wanna hang out in a ciddy where youse’ll get the bestest idear of some dinky-di Aussie culture, mate? Tough question, because of our parochialism, and because our culture has been shifting noticeably over the last fifty years. For the old Australia, a regional city. Tamworth, New South Wales, because they play […]

https://au.news.yahoo.com/video/watch/32478931/federal-politicians-attend-church-service-ahead-of-parliament-swearing-in/#page1 The question has gotten much more airplay around the Red Mass (including the West Wing episode The Red Mass). And Catholicism isn’t anywhere near as close to a State religion in the US, as Anglicanism would have been in Australia before Federation. Ulysses Elias’ answer points out the wording in the Australian constitution. A […]

http://mashable.com/2016/08/05/same-sex-parents-slam-census/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link#FPWYDDaXDiq5 Inertia. Census questions are a slow moving beast, and getting them updated is extremely difficult. The question on volunteerism in this year’s census was a request from Peter Costello, three censuses ago. The Australian Bureau of Statistics could not afford to spend the money to get rid of it. There is plenty of cowboy […]

https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-reason-for-the-Australian-census-breakdown-on-August-9-2016 Hilarity abounds about #censusfail, the crash of the online census on August 9 2016: Census in Australia. And I will admit that, like millions of Australians that were under the impression we had to complete the census on that night (so the whole country hit the same server at 8 PM), I had a […]

Take everything that Tracey Bryan said as read. Even if she does live in Brissie. Why, yes. I like being an Australian citizen. Let me count the whys. I like that I get to be an Australian citizen, and not a British subject. I am happy that my country finally cut itself from the apron […]

Quite a variety of answers here. I’ve gotten that from Americans, usually followed by some bizarre mélange of Bostonian English and Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins as they tried to impersonate me. As we say here: “Yeah… no.” Slightly miffed, but more at the other’s unfamiliarity with Australians than at the comparison. Normally. In […]