🐘🐘 Humpleupagus 🐘🐘 on Nostr: Australia is not a country, it's a cult If Australia sank into the sea tomorrow the ...

Australia is not a country, it's a cult

If Australia sank into the sea tomorrow the world wouldn’t notice, so little does it contribute to the world. It adds nothing except an oversized contribution to climate change thanks to its mining industry (and its dogged backwardsness when it comes to making any concessions to the reality of global warming), and its obsession with cars. The only genuinely important cultural element it has, belongs to the state’s aboriginal people, yet they have done their best to destroy that – they still do, partially due to the aforementioned refusal to do anything to curtail mining. If something happens in Australia (unlikely), does it make a sound? I guess we will never know, because nothing of any importance has ever happened there.

If the rest of the world sank into the sea tomorrow, Australia wouldn’t notice, so little do they care about anything outside of their borders. They have this bizarre dogmatic certainty that they live in the best place in the world, despite having so little knowledge of anywhere else. Talk about things from outside, and their eyes glaze over. They have no frame of reference for it, and they don’t want one.

Living there is like living in Plato’s cave. They watch the shadows and think that this is life, and not just a weak reflection of it. Trying to tell them otherwise turns you into the little boy in the story of the emperor with no clothes. They sit there, smug in their isolation while the world goes straight over their heads. It’s not a country, it’s a cult.

Their general population is so remarkably backwards – this is the country which pays third-world neighbours to put their asylum seekers in remote island camps and in which red-neck bogans go around with stickers saying ‘fuck off we are full’ in a continent the size of Europe with only twenty five million - and it’s progressives are so mindlessly earnest, censorious and incapable of critical thought as to beyond a parody, that you wonder how their politics can be so boring and of so little consequence.

Any news from the outside world which does make it into public consciousness is treated like some sort of TV show – it is not happening here, so it is no more real than any other soap opera. Even when they do go abroad, they seem to believe that the rest of the world is some kind of theatre set for their entertainment, and they have no interest in actually understanding the place or meeting its people. They are there to tick off their pre-written list of things you are supposed to do so that they can tell everyone back home they have done it. I knew people who had lived a year or more in other countries and seemed to know nothing of the culture in their temporary home.

There is no culture in Australia. Nick Cave, AC/DC (and only half of them), Kylie Minogoue, Neighbours. That is the sum total of their cultural achievements, and lets be honest, most of that is shit. I used to think that this was because (aboriginal society aside) it is such a new country, but I came to realise that they don’t want a culture. They don’t know what a culture is, and with their aversion to anything from outside, when confronted with one they don’t like it. If culture was bannable they would ban it. This is a place where the cool kids listen to early 90s Drum and Base, and have only just discovered Garage (which they mispronounce as Garaage”).