The truth is that Australians tend to be natural pagans. As the writer David Malouf points out, we don't even think of ourselves as hedonists because that would be too self-conscious. Australian culture is for the most part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well. It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social revolution conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more complex, shook off its sense of derivative Englishness and its fear of American domination and learned to trust its own talents. But a reasonable equipoise, a relaxed uprightness of cultural carriage, is with us only some of the time.
Jingoism still disfigures the lowbrow end of our journalism.
We no longer feel we have to explain ourselves to anyone but ourselves. But on some levels it is, alas, true. One sees it, for instance, in the bristling posture of denial that the Australian government recently took against U.N. criticism of its flouting of the human rights of Aborigines. Australians still tend to be worried about what outsiders think, keep asking and then get furious if the answer is even fractionally less than flattering. The Real Australia Americans know a lot about the place, most of it wrong.