‘Australians—the “aristocrats” of Asia?’

Donald Horne dedicated a full chapter of The Lucky Country to challenge Australians to take Asia more seriously.

In 1964, Australians clearly needed reminding that, rather than being just off the coast from Portsmouth, in fact, we were just off the coast of Denpasar. In the sixty years since the book’s publication, many of Horne’s ideas have been adopted. Australians regularly live, work and play in Asia. By 2000 we surpassed larger nations in Europe and America in teaching Asian Languages and Studies. Diverse Asian people now comprise a significant proportion of the Australian population. Many more Australians have a “real feel for Asia”, to borrow Horne’s words. He would likely be heartened by each of these developments. But, one of his critiques remains unresolved: Australians, he declared, played an “aristocratic role” in Asia – “rich, self-centred, frivolous, blind”. Despite our celebrated egalitarianism we imagined ourselves to be better than our neighbours.

This Annual Academy Lecture, presented by Emeritus Professor Louise Edwards FAHA FASSA FHKAH, explores the challenges the remnants of this aristocratic mentality pose for Australia at a time when Asia is increasingly wealthy, powerful and innovative. It argues that dismantling this lingering superior mindset is crucial to Australia’s future prosperity, social cohesion and capacity to contribute to addressing the global challenges ahead.

‘Australians—the “aristocrats” of Asia?’

Transcript

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Thank you, Professor Garton for the generous introduction. I too would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands—the Ngunnawal people and all Indigenous people with close connection to country. And I pay my respects to elders, past, present and emerging. And thank you all for participating in the life and work of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

‘Australia—the “aristocrats” of Asia’—the title requires some comment.

When I submitted it to the Academy Secretariat a brief discussion ensued about whether we should add ‘scare quotes’ around the term ‘aristocrats’. In the end we decided to use them because we weren’t entirely convinced people would read the irony intended or that I was quoting Donald Horne’s 1964 book, The Lucky Country. So, the quote marks signal the raised eyebrows and the ironic twist of a mouth for readers who can’t see hand signals. Not to include them might provoke accusations of snobbery and superiority—the last thing a scholarly learned academy formed under Royal Charter would want to convey. But also, the punctuation marks are a nod to the humour that distinguishes The Lucky Country. As many of you know, every page of Donald Horne’s book generates either a chuckle, a chortle or sometimes a LOL guffaw.

Clearly, Horne was a hoot.

Including the quote marks also keeps many of us comfortably in the egalitarian spirit of suburbia identified by Horne as a key feature of Australian identity. Suburbia is a mental space as much as a physical space for Horne—and its attributes are still manifest in the housing commission high-rises and hip and happening ‘gentrified’ city centres. These attributes include the enthusiasm for ideas like ‘a fair go’, ‘pragmatism’, ‘kindness to underdogs,’ and suspicion of self-promoters, flatterers and ‘smoothies’. The suburban mindset was/is one in which ordinariness rather than exceptionalism is celebrated.

Horne pointed to the many positive and negative consequences of these ideas throughout the book. He showed that context mattered, and blind spots in application were legion. A fair go didn’t apply to Indigenous Australians, let alone sheilas or reffos. And for large tracts of the 20^th century Asian migrants were deemed not ‘ordinary enough’ to blend in—so our government banned them by testing their skills in Swedish.

He also warned that Australian pragmatism sometimes slipped into copying directly, and often inappropriately, from Britain. Suspicion of ideas generated here limited innovation. It even resulted in a lack of curiosity about Australia’s land and environment. The vision of this country was refracted through a British lens, and it was often found wanting. And, Horne argued, suburban ordinariness could slip into parochialism—leaving Australians devoid of a good knowledge about Asia and the Pacific despite our geography.

He wrote, and I quote, ‘Most Australians have not gained a real ‘feel’ for the part of the world they live in..…working attitudes reveal little feeling for the texture of life in Asia and the Pacific’.[1] And, even more damning, the suburban Australian mindset could manifest in self-delusion as we imagined for ourselves an ‘aristocratic role’ in Asia—‘rich, self-centred, frivolous, blind’.

Horne was not only a hoot, he could burn like an aluminium slide in a mid-summer playground.

He was an early advocate of what we came to call in the 1990s, Asia Literacy. And, in the sixty years since the book’s publication, many of Horne’s ideas have been adopted. Australians regularly live, work and play in Asia. By 2000 we had easily surpassed Europe and America in teaching Asian Languages and Studies at primary, secondary and tertiary levels and even found ways to support ethnic community ‘Saturday’ schools… because, with the dismantling of the White Australia Policy, diverse Asian peoples came to comprise a significant proportion of the Australian population. These were the kinds of ideas Horne promoted in The Lucky Country. And I think he would be relatively pleased with our recent achievements.

He would have no doubt enjoyed reading the Academy of Humanities’ 2023 Australia’s China Knowledge Capability report and our work in 2024 Mapping Australia’s Indonesia Research Capacity.[2] And he would have celebrated the strengthening of research on Australia that occurred from the late 1970s as well. Horne considered that ‘a prolonged consideration of the Australian condition’ was largely missing from Australian intellectual life back in 1964.[3] This is no longer the case—and many of the fellows of this academy have dedicated their careers to precisely this task. And recently at least two have published books designed at prompting wider public discussion—Julianne Shulz’s 2022 The Idea of Australia and Graham Turner’s 2023 The Shrinking Nation.[4]

Inspired by the continued relevance of The Lucky Country, I want to draw on a discursive style that has become rather unfashionable in the 21^st century—that being generalising about cultures, nations, peoples—discussing their common traits relative to other groups. The Lucky Country did just that. Horne wrote in broad generalities about all manner of people living in Australia—many of whom were insulted and horrified when they read the book. Others simply didn’t have the self-awareness to recognise themselves but they had a good laugh all the same when they saw their political leaders described as ‘marketeers of mediocrity’ and university academics, who also were given scare quotes for irony. ‘Hah! Academics’—who he described in less than flattering terms as having a ‘prevailing tone … of isolation and self-pity’.[5]

Sixty years ago, Horne didn’t shy away from big picture stereotypes and caricatures. But he also knew their limitations. In the chapter titled ‘Living with Asia’ Horne warned against assuming all Asians were the same pointing to the huge diversity in cultures, languages, religions, skin colour, and histories. This was necessary in 1964 because at that time Australians were more accustomed to hearing about the ‘yellow peril’ as one big amorphous blob. Most people had never met ‘an Asiatic’—let alone a good one, bad one, fat one, thin one, funny one or boring one.

And, we have all become rather wary of using stereotypes in everyday conversations lest we say something racist, or in academic scholarship lest we say something stupid and quickly disprovable. ‘Aah, you said that Chinese eat rice, well, let me tell you about the millions of Chinese that for centuries have preferred wheat noodles and steamed buns’.

SO, even with these caveats about the dangers and limitations of stereotyping—when reading The Lucky Country I was reminded that Australian society does have some ways of being that make it identifiably Australian in an international context. Some of these are new and some have roots back in the 1960s. And engagement with Asia has been important in the creation of those new ways of being.

I came here from NZ about 40 years ago and the Australian uniqueness was very apparent to me at the time. I remember distinctly a neighbour coming to the front door to tell me, in some sort of ‘not-so-recent-migrant’ accented English, to buy a bag of ice soon because ‘the Australian man’ down the road said there will be a power cut. As a Fresh off the Plane FOP the idea that there was such a being as ‘an Australian’ that could be differentiated from the man in front of me was more interesting than the impending power cut. Who was this Australian? How did you get to be one? Why didn’t my obviously Australian neighbour, count himself as one? My head was in a spin all the way to the servo to buy the ice.

The Lucky Country would have been a good first read had I known about it back then, and it probably would have helped me to understand that some people did not feel included as ‘Australian’ even while they were looking out for their obviously inept FOP neighbour and performing that pragmatic kindness that Horne identified as being a common feature of the national personality. That man took a social risk, knocking at the door, to give me a ‘heads up’ lest my Golden Gaytime ice cream got spoiled—just as the mysterious ‘Australian’ had done for him.

And now, as the globalisation of media and TV and internet content produces vast quantities of simultaneously homogenising and diversifying narratives about the world, we are perhaps struggling collectively to see precisely ‘Who is this Australian?’ The man whose knowledge of impending power cuts has been made redundant by apps and instant messaging… but in his place I think a pretty interesting character has emerged, and this 21^st century Aussie warrants our studied attention. We are still, I believe, unique in many respects and we can and should talk more confidently about what it is to be Australian in the 21^st century, both the good bits and the dodgy bits. We should be less embarrassed about discussing Australia and Australian-ness, as having unique features, in an international frame. To do this will prevent us being duped by a dud idea, or a policy decision that white ants the things we really do value. And we can do this all while eschewing nasty nationalism or narrow parochialism.

Another of the qualities that Horne identified as being central to Australia’s suburban celebration of ordinariness is ‘fraternalism’—the spirit that in Strine is called ‘mateship’. The critiques of the ‘myths of mateship’ as an unalloyed good, are legion. And Horne himself outlined many of the problems with it as a descriptor of national character. BUT… it still exists as a ‘vibe’ here, competing within the jostle of other vibes coming in from the world via Insta and TikTok.

But how does fraternalism among ordinary Australians apply in a talk about Australia’s relations with Asia? It applies because, it conflicts with any aristocratic roles one might fancy for Australia in the Asia Pacific.

Recognising Australian society’s continued fraternalistic vibe struck me as particularly relevant when I was trying to work out why, months after I had first heard it, I found a talk given in October 2023 so troubling. The presentation was held in Brisbane hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies and the comments that I found ‘challenging’ were made by eminent Chicago University Professor, John Mearsheimer—a frequent and influential commentator on global affairs.

Professor Mearsheimer was asked a question from the audience about the implications for Australia of the rise of India and Indonesia. He replied: ‘Indonesia is not a wealthy country the way that China is today, or the way that the United States is. If Indonesia all of a sudden turns into a new China and it gets very wealthy, you Australians will worry greatly about Indonesia. Because according to my calculations there are about 10 Indonesians for every Australian, if not more, and they are right next door, but they are not wealthy, and that’s good for you. And that is why it was good for us, when China was not wealthy.’[6]

Listening to this I was looking for the ironic punctuation marks… surely, I didn’t just hear that? Surely, he doesn’t think poverty in Indonesia will make Australians feel ‘good’? But there was no irony intended, and this made me really puzzled.

Reflecting on this discomfort from the vantage point of a fresh read of Horne’s Lucky Country, I realised that Professor Mearsheimer’s comments revealed just how different Australia was from America. In relation to Asia, we really have a different mindset, and we do have much more of ‘a feel for Asia’—Horne would likely be impressed. Moreover, the fact that Professor Mearsheimer made his comments at an Australian venue suggests that he likely doesn’t realise that Australians’ attitudes to Asia differ from those of Americans; that our love of Jazz and Hip Hop or Emily Dickenson does not make us think like Americans in regard to Asia. We have developed quite a different sensibility when it comes to the region in which we are located.

Donald Horne, I think, put his finger on the qualities that some of those sensibilities derive from—a pragmatic, suburban enthusiasm for ‘people to be ordinary’.[7] We don’t mind being the same, or nearly the same as our neighbours. Our sameness isn’t seen as evidence that we lack drive—some of us just don’t want to be CEOs. And we don’t need to be exceptional relative to others to feel comfortable with ourselves. We genuinely don’t mind if our neighbours get wealthier, we really don’t. Their home renos will likely improve our property value and they will likely invite our kids over to swim in their pool or have a ride on their new scooter. They’ve got the pool, they have to clean it, but your kids get to swim in it!

Our fraternal suburbanism coupled with an astute, pragmatic form of self-interest means we want the neighbours to succeed. And just cos those neighbours might speak Javanese, Sundanese or Balinese alongside their Bahasa Indonesia, it really doesn’t matter to us. Their success can only be good for us. The beaches in Bali might become more expensive to stay at, just as Japan is a luxury holiday now, but there is no reason to think Australians will love Bali less when it too becomes a luxury, uber modern holiday destination. Many of us love going on those high-speed trains in Japan, China and well… now, Indonesia. We’d love a Whoosh train in our vast land too. We want to be ordinary people on a fast train with Indonesians, Chinese and Japanese.

To your average Aussie, aspiring to be ordinary and comfortable, to be just one of the neighbours, we’ve either all ‘been to Bali too’, as well as Hoian, Beijing, Bangkok, KL, and Angkor or we’re saving up for it. Because Gazza said it was great. And not just because the beer was cheap.

In other forums I have been really scathing about some of the antics Australians get up to in Asia—and no doubt I will do so again. But, after listening to Mearsheimer I realised that even drunken yobos from Oz are likely to have more of a ‘feel’ for Asia now than the equivalent drunken American.

The other aspect that puzzled me about the Brisbane talk was that there is lots of International Relations Theory and concrete evidence that warns of the dangers of having poor, failed and failing states as neighbours. Chaos leaks across borders — we see the impact of war and poverty driving mass migration across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, just as we saw the outflow of people from Vietnam from the late 1970s. And we currently see with people from Central America seeking better lives moving through the Mexican border to the USA.

Australians know from our personal experience of suburban fraternalism that struggling neighbours can be a problem. Anything from, ‘Those kids are out of control—hope they don’t steal the wiper blades again’ to ‘Please don’t let the house next door be rented to ice addicts.’ Having solid neighbours makes everyone’s life better. When international relations experts tell us that a strong and prosperous state make a good neighbour, it confirms our gut instincts from decades of aspiring to suburban ordinariness and fraternalism with even weird neighbours.

‘Can’t understand a word of what she says, but her roses are phenomenal.’

And the Australian-ness of this perspective in International Relations becomes even more apparent if we contrast Professor Mearsheimer’s comments with those of former DFAT Secretary, current Chancellor of UQ, and Fellow of the Academy, Peter Varghese. Only a quarter of an hour earlier in the same forum, when asked about the industrialisation of Indonesia, Chancellor Varghese said: ‘I think that building a strong partnership with Indonesia is vital for our security and indeed is also going to also be important in the longer term to our economic prosperity. Indonesia will probably be in the top five or six economies over the next couple of decades.’

Varghese is not telling us to be scared of Indonesia’s rising prosperity. Rather the opposite—it’s a huge opportunity for us. He continues by saying Australia should ‘proceed on the assumption that we want to build a close a relationship with Indonesia so that the question of an antagonistic approach simply doesn’t arise.’[8]

If you want your neighbours to invite you to their beach parties or ride on their fast train, then become their friends or even just their acquaintances. Australians have long appreciated that you don’t have to worship your neighbour’s god to enjoy a halal snack pack on the beach. And there is absolutely no point in becoming their enemies. That is, unless, of course, you adopt the idea that you want that fight so that the quantum of chaos in their country prevents their further enrichment. Keep them bogged down in militarised chaos – that will keep them poor for a bit longer.

Well, for most Australians today, we see Asia as our neighbourhood, and we want it to be prosperous so that it will be safe for them and for us too. The ‘Asian hordes’ earlier generations feared would ‘swamp’ Australia simply did not emerge and a major reason for that is because increasingly life is great and improving all across Asia—and like most people in the human race they like being at home with their family and friends in familiar surroundings.

‘Security in Asia, rather than security from Asia’ has been the core principle underpinning Australian foreign policy in recent decades and it is mirrored in daily life in Australia.  While we do still have outbreaks of racism and anyone walking around in non-white skin will tell you that this can be both personally and professionally pretty tough going—but for the most part we are doing pretty well. Of course, it could all fall to pieces if we have a war in our region that wrecks the economic basis for the growing prosperity that we and our neighbours are experiencing. No doubt there will be the odd politician seeking to profit from fringe votes by calling for internment camps for whatever ethnic or religious group is named the enemy du jour. But these opportunistic types are out of step with mainstream Australians—who aspire to be ordinary alongside everyone else. That ordinariness is not a personal or national failing; rather it is something to be enjoyed.

How does this connect to Horne’s 1964 critique that Australians imagine themselves an aristocratic role in Asia? I’ve just described a scenario where ‘ordinary’ Australians are increasingly including the peoples of Asia into the spirit of suburban fraternalism. The blind spots are becoming fewer and the selective application of mateship decreasing, or at least evolving. In Horne’s era, whiteness was a key ingredient of this sense of aristocratic status—Australians felt they were superior not just because they were richer, but because they were whiter. But, now, the objective facts of the rising wealth across Asia has disrupted the connection between whiteness and wealth. White folk aren’t the only ones with cash to splash, and middle-class lifestyles are found in people walking around with almond eyes too—who’da thunk it? Australians hailing from all around the world, know this from personal experience both here and in their travels in Asia and are not really bothered by it—good for them, we say. Eat more Queensland beef, chow down on more yabbies, and sweet and sour that NT barra in your night markets. Go for your life.

So why then do I think that an aristocratic sensibility in relation to Asia and the Pacific still exists?

It remains with us because, it operates as ‘aristocracy-by-association’—some of us think we are better because we have powerful friends. In his chapter ‘Between Britain and America’ Horne declared ‘Australia has remained a province of Britain…and… is… now also a province of the USA’.[9] The key aspect of that sense of ‘provincialism’ is that we have a habit of outsourcing major decisions. And, our ‘aristocratic thinking’—‘aristocracy-by-association’—becomes a problem for our relations with Asia because it makes us look weak and inept.

For many observers from Asia, when they are occasionally drawn to look down the map to the island continent, a puzzle emerges, ‘Why don’t Australians have a stronger sense of themselves as designers of their own destiny?’

And as for our provincial overseers, the UK and USA, the idea that we harbour ‘aristocratic sensibilities’ in relation to Asia ‘by association’ with them must appear as cute at best and laughable at worst. I have visions of conversations in London running ‘Don’t they remember the two big wars?’ The carnage at Gallipoli in the first one, and in the other, Churchill holding Australian Diggers back in Europe and North Africa leaving Australia undefended. ‘Slow learners, eh wot?’ In Washington, I can imagine maps of the region connecting dots between Darwin and US submarine bases in the Philippines, South Korea and Japan with a 10-dash line marking their blockades of our trade routes up through the South China Sea.

We need to ditch the ‘aristocrats-by-association’ mentality to be taken seriously as a grown-up country by the movers and shakers in Asia, one that really recognises and celebrates our cultural uniqueness in our Asia Pacific neighbourhood. Such a process would probably improve our street-cred in London and Washington too—let’s prove wrong those who laugh at us as suffering ‘battered child syndrome’ at the hands of the US and UK.

Almost exactly a year after the Mearsheimer-Varghese discussion, in October this year, while visiting Australia, José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Laureate and President of our near north neighbour, Timor Leste, superbly outlined the importance of interconnectedness and its link to security. He explains that when people are secure ‘the welfare of others does not threaten their own. The opposite is true: when others are similarly nourished and secure, what manifests is collective peace and trust. They thrive together.’[10] It sounds very much like the consequences that would and have emerged from Peter Varghese’s approach as well.

But, contrast this with the view from Chicago. John Mearsheimer’s definition of security is one in which everyone else must be subjugated so that the US can feel secure. There is no mutual wellbeing in this view of security. Lest you think I exaggerate, let me quote him directly: ‘I think that American primacy matters, because the survival of the United States is the most important goal that it can have, … the best way to survive in the international system is to be the most powerful state on the planet. Because if you are really powerful nobody can beat you in a fight and threaten your survival….. What exactly does it mean in the American case? We want to be a regional hegemon in the western hemisphere, and we want to be the only great power in the western hemisphere and dominate it. And no. 2 we want to make sure there is no other country on the planet that dominates its region of the world the way we do. And if you can take care of those two goals then you are in excellent shape, … I principally care about the United States being extremely powerful, because again, that is the best way to survive.’[11]

This view of international relations is not one that Australia can apply to itself—at least in the foreseeable future, we will not be the most powerful country in the world so we can’t count on forcing everyone into subjugation for our survival, let alone our prosperity. We’ve seen in recent modern history that we can’t count on our allies to prioritise our national interest either—they rightly have their own interests and sometimes they differ from ours. We need to draw on the pragmatism that Horne described as being part of the suburban ordinariness of Australians and chart our own future.

We have rejected the idea that having more guns around Australian homes is the best way to feel safe. We know that more of us will be better off the fewer ‘weapons of mass shootings’ are out there—even though, if I personally have a bazooka in my boot, I will be able to stop your little monsters from graffitiing my front fence. But Australians recognise that there is collective welfare to be nourished and that it is OK to be ordinary rather than exceptional— if your fence is graffitied, it’s likely the neighbour three doors down had theirs done too—you’re in this together. So sure, sometimes our fences get graffitied—but that kid will grow up one day and you don’t have to threaten them with a bazooka to help them mature. Better to get them into a footy club or an art class. Hell’s teeth, they might even become the fencing contractor that you call, when the old fence is finally cactus.

Australians don’t believe that you’ve got to have the biggest guns to deter or take out the would-be shooter at your shopping centre, nightclub, school, or university. The US domestic fixation with guns and continued tolerance for mass shootings mirrors their culture in international relations. It is a psyche built on mass insecurity and paranoia—not mutual wellbeing. It requires perpetuating narratives of ‘bad guys out there everywhere’ rather than ‘weird guys with really nice roses’. ‘Is he reaching for his weed wand or his handgun?’ This is a thought that never crosses the minds of Australians as they go about their ordinary lives.

Ramos-Horta’s model of real security shows that mutual support, and mutual welfare are the foundations of safety and the best way to survive and prosper. That kind of thinking connects well with Australia’s fraternalistic, neighbourly sensibility. We don’t have or want metal detectors in our schools and workplaces to prevent guns coming in; we don’t have signs in our shopping centres saying ‘This is a gun free mall’. Equally, ordinary Australians do not see our security as dependent upon revelling in our neighbours’ hardship or worse, crippling their economies to keep them weak.

For Ramos-Horta to deliver such a speech in Australia is generous and it’s also a salutary lesson for us in how to do neighbourly bridge building. Only two decades ago, in 2004, ASIS agents used the cover of an Aid Program to spy on Timorese officials while negotiations were in train that would impact who got how much of the spoils of gas and oil reserves in the Timor Gap. Not the Australian government’s finest moment—and clearly another example of selective application of those lauded traits of neighbourly fraternalism and kindness to the underdog. They clearly did not apply to the people of Timor-Leste in the minds of our national decision makers back then. But, my guess is that if we had asked the ordinary Australian on the streets of their suburbs about this spying on East Timor and using an Aid program to do so, they would have been deeply unhappy. Our leaders were massively out of touch with the national vibe.

While very few Australians think that increasing the number of guns in our streets will make us safer, we are now told with some regularity that we must increase the number of bombs housed in or circulating through our ports and cities to make ourselves safer. Why on earth would an arms build-up make us safer? Unless we invest tons and tons and tons more money—and suck the industrial capacity of most of the world’s ship, jet, tank, sub, or bomb factories we are never going to achieve the level of security in which we can beat everyone in a fight, let alone even one or two other countries in our neighbourhood.

And, is it just possible that we are still just parochial enough to think that ‘It is OK if we have a few more bombs and subs, because we are the “good guys with the guns” so surely there’s no harm’? In fact, it is pretty clear that not everyone thinks we are the ‘good guys’—they don’t assume the Aussie arms race is benign, rather they see it as alarming. It looks like Australia is being prepared to be used in a fight by the US. And it makes the neighbours think ‘Well, we better weapon up too.’

There is the residual pong of what Horne described as ‘aristocrat’ here–‘self-centred, frivolous and blind’. And because we still have some way to go in convincing people that Australians are not all ‘dumb, drunk and racist’, it is possible that some people might just add ‘naïve, thoughtless and careless’, to that list as well. But now with even bigger bombs—and bombs that we might not even have control over when or if they will be deployed. Building productive relationships with myriad Asian nations is an important project for protecting our national security and prosperity—and it wouldn’t carry a $360 billion price tag; and we would see good results before 2040, or is it 2050 now?

Horne described Australia as garnering respect in Asia for our material prosperity and many Asians, he wrote, ‘can acknowledge that it was achieved without exploiting a subject people.’[12] On this point, I think Horne missed the mark by quite some distance. Rather, as I heard a Chinese person say on a visit to Australia, quite matter of fact-ly, and really didn’t intend an insult, ‘We Chinese have to work hard and innovate because we can’t just get rich by grabbing other people’s land and resources.’ Ouch. Horne would have enjoyed that barb, I reckon.

The brutality of Britain’s colonisation of Australia did not go unnoticed in Asia and how we come to terms with that history impacts how we are perceived in the region and the world today. It is not that all governments and people in Asia are benign or benevolent to all people’s living in their borders, or even that they think they are—far from it. Many Asian migrants to Australia are here precisely because other people in their home countries treated them terribly. But if Australians adopt a superior tone in the region based on ignoring our history and ‘aristocracy-by-association’ then that will be certainly read as evidence of continued insincerity.

For those who think that the world is too economically intertwined to go to war and that Australia can thrive and trade despite US-China hostilities, we should consider Professor Mearsheimer’s view that, ‘security concerns always trump prosperity concerns, security competition always trumps economic competition.’[13] It seems that the overarching idea of US security, via a bazooka in every boot, includes a willingness to risk their economic self-interest. But my guess is that they will be much happier to risk someone else’s economy before their own—let’s ask the Germans how things are going up there of late.

Let’s not kid ourselves that Australia will continue to prosper in the event of war with China, if we just diversify, derisk, delink, decouple from the Chinese economy. ‘There is always India,’ we hear people say. Dreams of huge ‘beef sales to India’, they’re just not going to cut it – and not just because the cow is sacred to Hindus. The Chinese economy is so huge and so integral to every national economy in the world today that anything that jeopardises China’s trade will drag everyone else down too. Attempts to ‘re-impoverish China’ or ‘stall their growth’ through wars of any sort will see everyone struggling mightily—there won’t be huge quantities of Aussie barley, beef, lobsters and abalone heading up to Bangkok while they are in a recession. It will be like the Great Depression of the 1930s but with swagmen of many different colours and religions moving globally and in vast, vast numbers. People smugglers will have a field day and even if we do get our submarines in time, they won’t be patrolling around our shorelines to ‘stop the boats’.

The best way for us to build our security and prosperity in Asia and to help our neighbours achieve the same is to support diplomacy. Let DFAT do its magic and keep war far away from our region—let’s not send anyone into the abyss of militarised conflict on the pretence that we are ‘preserving our way of life’—our way of life is precisely to have a chat about the graffiti with the neighbours over the fence or at the local primary school fete. We’re actually pretty good at it.

Luckily, we still have a pretty responsive political and administrative system here in Australia. The politicians and public servants are not yet completely divorced from the lives of the rest of us with our desire for ordinary lives alongside a bunch of ordinary neighbours. The reason we still have a pretty good universal health care system, a pretty good education system, a pretty good superannuation system, any Disability Insurance scheme at all, Long Service Leave and a minimum wage is that we demand these of our politicians. People in Australia don’t work for tips. We expect services from governments and we expect regulations to protect us from bully bosses or con artists—and we hate it when governments become either the bullies or the cons. And ‘pretty good’ service, while not exceptional, is something to work from.

We know some people will rip the system off—the cheats and the bludgers—sure they exist. But overall most people won’t. We don’t need public lynchings or scapegoating to make us feel like the system is working. As the thundering popular rage generated by the Robodebt overreach tells us, if you are going to point fingers at cheats, you better point them at the right person. Our pragmatism tells us that we should look for everyday evidence of how things are chugging along. We want to know that when our weird neighbour rocks up to the Emergency Department, having fallen off her ladder into the roses while clearing her gutters for the upcoming fire season, that she got treated well and treated fairly—no questions asked. That reassures us that next week, when one of our family, one of our friends, one of our less weird neighbours needs the same care and attention, that they will get it too—no questions asked.

The Australian sense of collective wellbeing is highly pragmatic, but it is also a feeling, a vibe. Ordinary Australians do not want to trip over homeless people sleeping rough on their dog walks, or their park runs, it does not make us feel more powerful, more successful or safe. It makes us feel lousy. We want the government to sort that stuff out. We expect our government to do stuff rather than shrink itself away in some ideologically-driven vision of ‘small government’ that effectively involves shifting our tax dollars to the hands of global corporate mega-businesses.

That is not to say everything is Bonza Down Under. Far from it.

But we certainly don’t wish impoverishment or chaos on our neighbours—domestic or international.

Conclusion

In 1964 Horne wrote near the start of the chapter ‘Between Britain and America’: ‘Australians talk of Asia as if they were still living in Europe’.[14] We could perhaps now, 60 years later modify that line to ‘Australians are being encouraged to talk of Asia as if they were living in North America.’ It seems that some of us are being flattered by ‘smoothies’ and lured to return to a 1960s mindset of seeing Asia from afar. Some might be incentivised by promises of power or treasure. Others might even be being blinded by a vision of a geography boasting that the sun never sets on the empire of US military bases—all 750 of them across 80 countries; 313 of them in East Asia—that’s our neck of the woods. Some of us might be tempted by the tug of aristocracy-by-association—that somehow we are better than Asia because we’re friends with the world’s biggest submarine makers—or is that submarine designers? But to them, I say, ‘Mate, are you sure they aren’t pulling a swiftie on you? They’ve got form.’

We don’t have to be aristocrats or doormats, we don’t have to be a deputy sheriff or a sub-imperial power delivering someone else’s national interests or hosting someone else’s weaponry – goodness knows they might just use you to pick a fight with the very neighbours with whom you have just spent decades building fraternal neighbourliness.

We are not mini-Americans—and despite all the episodes of the Simpsons or South Park that we have watched, and despite the fact that some of our kids use fake American accents when they play with their Barbie dolls. Those are the comic accents of our recreational world—they are not our real life. At the core of Australia is recognition of the benefits of collective wellbeing, not just individual wellbeing. I’m better off when you’re better off. We know, individualism spurs pointless and often destructive competition and is often premised on confected notions of scarcity in systems where there is enough to share—as long as the top 1% don’t gobble up 90%.

And we expect more of our government than we do of philanthropists. We expect our local, state and national leaders to ‘hold the hose’ alongside us. If you have to resort to charity to feed, house and clothe people, Australians see that a failure of government policy—not a reason to pat ourselves on the back for ‘generously giving’ or even to pat our wallet and slyly say ‘I’m alright, Jack.’

We have our own culture and it’s time to be more confident about that culture and the many possibilities it presents for better engagement with the world, and particularly the region that is likely to shape any of the good things that might emerge from the current dramatic shifts in the world order. We have lots to offer the world in terms of public policy, public wellbeing and mechanisms for social integration—let’s share them.

Donald Horne wrote in a distinctly Australian tone—and were he alive today he would encourage us to cultivate more of an Australian voice in all aspects of life, and certainly in our relationships with our regional neighbours. It’s time to tackle more of the challenges that Horne set us to be more confident of our abilities, to be more creative in our thinking. He wrote in the close of his book that what Asia wants from Australia ‘is for Australia to get off its high horse, be one of the crowd, express confidence in its own style. They want to cease being insulted.’

And he followed that advice with the reminder that ‘To do this—to be one of the mob, to accept one’s environment and to get on with the job, to be friendly with one’s neighbours—these are notable Australian characteristics, part of the Australian genius.’[15] These comments, I believe, hold true today in 2024 as they did in 1964 when Horne penned them.

Footnotes:

[1] Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (Penguin, 2024), p. 91. [2] Australian Academy of Humanities, Australia’s China Knowledge Capability, 2023. Available online: https://humanities.org.au/our-work/projects/australias-china-knowledge-capability/; ACOLA, Mapping Australia’s Indonesia Research Capacity (forthcoming, 2024). [3] Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 225. [4] Julianne Shultz, The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of a Nation (Allen and Unwin, 2022); Graham Turner, The Shrinking Nation: How we got here and what can be done about it (UQP, 2023). [5] Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 219. [6] Centre for Independent Studies, ‘In Depth Q&A: Mearsheimer and Varghese disagree on US Grand Strategy, Ukraine, Russia and China,’ 43 mins. Available online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxSCe5U6qyY. [7] Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 24. [8] Centre for Independent Studies, ‘In Depth Q&A,’ 28 mins. [9] Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 100. [10] José Ramos-Horta, ‘The real meaning of security,’ The Saturday Paper no. 522 (October 19-25, 2024), p. 7. [11] Centre for Independent Studies, ‘In Depth Q&A,’ 40 mins. [12] Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 244. [13] Centre for Independent Studies, ‘In Depth Q&A: Mearsheimer and Varghese disagree on US Grand Strategy, Ukraine, Russia and China,’ 20 mins & 36 mins. Available online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxSCe5U6qyY. [14] Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 91. [15] Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 243.

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