Australia suffers many vivid cultural inversions, in the mode of celebrating Christmas in the middle of summer.
To some people ‘beach xmas’, is a Midsommar horror of the Upsidedown.
A Stranger Thing is how theatrical talent, is adversely ratioed to music talent.
Australian cinema and movie acting talent is arguably stronger and more vital than anywhere in the world. Ben Mendelsohn, Abbie Cornish, Baykali Ganambarr, Joel Edgerton, Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchet, Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie, Toni Collette, Naomi Watts, Eric Bana, Guy Pierce, Rose Byrne, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving. Heath Ledger. Chris Hemsworth.
Just use Australians for all cinema and TV… they’re just better.
Movements in the music arts that actually drive trends have yet to emerge from Australia if they ever do (as emerging movements in music lessen over time as the whole music market becomes more and more corporatised.)
There are obviously brilliant musicians and singers from Australia (disclaimer: I know one or two….come at me bro….) yet the culture there follows rather than drives trends on the global level. Q.E.D. The great music artists that come from Australia are following already established trends eminating from other English speaking domains. There are very perculiar and even culturally elitist reasons for this not relevant to the talent of individual artists in Australia, rather relating to how wider cultural movements develop in which artists are then free to express thier talents within.
Similar perochial reasons as to why Jimi Hendrix had to repatriate himself to the UK to initiate his solo career. A perfect moment emphasising this, David Bowies use of Aborigibal people in his 1983 Let’s Dance promo. The USA has the folk music of the former slave people, i.e. the blues through which appropriation of native american / first nations people becomes reappropriated.
Australian mainstream culture is at a greater divide to its Aboriginal culture without the additional subcultures to emerge through. Echos of first nations music are evidenced through blues, funk, rock and disco such as in the rhythms of Hendrix Voodoo Child, the ‘iroquai’ in Jason Kay’s Jam funk exposition the crass ‘Villiage People’, Adam’s Ants.
Thus an aboriginal man towing a tv down a highway as if the mainstream culture is a stalled vehicle for him, is a perfect visual anecdote to express the greater fractures of disparity. (Insert arguements for Nick cave exemptions here)
Aussy success in the arts does seem to weigh very heavily in the theatrical domain.
Historically the brilliance of Australian cinema seems rooted in two areas the ‘hauntingly ravaged’ (i.e. Mad Max, The Nightingale) and the ‘comedically facile faux pas’ (Muriel’s Wedding, Crocodile Dundee). Likewise popular television imported from down under falls into similar polarised categories: the stark isolationist drama of Prisoners of cell block H to the breezy superficial soap of ‘Home and Away’. We love Aussies either goofing off or suffering terribly, Australian art seems to be born this way. No doubt reflecting the value of both toughness and humour to survival on the continent.
In instances where Australian music acts have succeeded globally the endeavours are similarly polarised. Either ‘beds are burning’ or comically ‘Buying bread from a man in Brussels who was six-foot-four and full of muscle’. Successful Australian music acts are kitsch as an Xmas beach party. Kitschmas.
The Kitsch Factor.
The west has exceeded in the theatre of news media, acting like there is nothing much to report about the draconian over-reaction to the Covid situation in Aus. They just smile and offer us a vegemite sandwich. It seems that the other side of the world is just far enough away to conveniently ignore. Recognising the construction of Covid ‘concentration camps’ and the police’s authoritarian, brutish treatment of the citizenry, is too worryingly close for comfort.
Germaine Greer has been pilliaried in recent times (for believing what she always believed.) That some men would literally pull their own cocks off, if it was the only thing they could use to beat woman over the head with. Greer would be an interesting voice to hear on current matters, as both a social libertarian and femminist Australian. A fierce intellect lauded, applauded, bullied and ignored. Cautious to raise voice in the current malay in the way that other Feminist intellectuals such as classical liberal Dr. Naomi Wolf have against soviet style citizen ‘dirty rascal’ passports.
Boris Johnson has come up short measuring himself against his idol Churchill (coming across as a Fisher Price version, a Toys R’ Us Trump.) He postures militarily along side a dementia ridden Joe Biden.
President Biden wonders…’if its war with China can it be before a short nap with warm milk ?’.
If the civilised world ignors the draconian treatment of the average citizen down under, maybe Australia should petition to withdraw their acting talent. Cue the seriously suppressed anger among ex-patriots of the Kangaroo continent. The Planet Earth; a blind eyeball, hurtling through the cosmos unable to percieve its own backside. Perhaps the term Kangaroo court derives from Aus ? Shoddy justice served bush style ? Perhaps the CCP led by Xi Jinping is winning the hearts, minds and wallets of the appropriate political forces. As Helen Dale lawyer & author noted, ‘Australians are not merely the descendants of prisoners exiled by the British Crown circa 1900, they are also the descendants of the jailers’. The west shows little concern about Aussie cousins, a characteristically familiar lack of care. Like extracting cheap factory export goods from chinese labour slaves. Perhaps Chinese style authoritarianism along with social credit scores and lockdowns will be the next and best remembered cheaply produced import.
In 2002, former British Royal Navy submarine commander Gavin Menzies, published a book. The book controversially claimed that a Chinese Admiral named 'Zheng He' landed on the continent of Australia in the 1400's three hundred years before 'Captain Cook'.
Zheng He
- Gavin Menzies BookOpens in a new tab
The book sold over a million copies.
If history requires reassessment, so does the present.
Australia’s dominant culture [like Canada and the USA], is derived from European migration; prior to, and through the industrial revolution. A truly modern industrialised nation. Australia is geographically further away from England than the other great nations who derive their language, political and legal systems from the British Crown.
Vast regions of the country are named in such a way as to be constant reminders of the British Empire from where they are sourced. Victoria (Queen), Darwin (Charles), New South Wales (Prince of Wales).
If ‘Zeng’ really did land in Australia in 1421 he was exactly 600 years pre-emptive to a UK-USA-AUS (AUKUS) 2021 Joint Navy plan to keep the Chinese military at bay. Ironically Donald Trump prior to his political career, attributed the acquisition of his wealth and success to an Ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu naming his book ‘Art of the deal’ after the Tzu ‘Art of War’ manifesto.
These ironies seem to have been largely overlooked by a rabid 24 hour news cycle driven by a manic lust for conspiracy theories and Bond villains. Jeffrey Epstein Island, Russian agents, political body counts, mysterious civilisation smashing viruses, Brexit. Its almost as if the final season of Game of Thrones was so unsatisfactory, the world decided to compete.
The rest of the world should've thought harder about using China's people as manufacturing labour slaves for decades.
The free west must not forget the Aussy underbelly. Only flat earthers would religate Australia to being ‘heads or tails’ in a planetary coin toss for freedom.
If its a choice between raising up the Chinese worker or reducing the rest of the egalitarian world to the C.C.P. level the Australian governments current draconian treatment of its populace must not be ignored by cousins in the free west. Just as the adverage Chinese must never again been taken for granted by the west addicted to cheap goods produced by undervalued workers. The Chinese worker is the comrade brother and comrade sister of the westerner yet their destiny is a greater one than to exploited to the west, by their own elite dictator bros.
Like Sparticus or Conan the Barbarian at the mill wheel, slavery made strong arms. The Chinese communists have a saying. “Strangle them with their own boot laces’ (really) We don’t have our own laces though because they are made elsewhere.
At least we know the answer to why ‘Everybody needs good neighbours’. And when ‘Neighbours become good friends’ ?
Good neighbours live far, far away, on the other side of the world conveniently positioned to receive the loving gift of nuclear submarines to be first in line for a fist fight with Conan the Draconian.
We care.
Here’s a nuclear submarine.
Happy Kitschmas.
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear that thunder ? You better run, you better take cover…