‘Our’ Australian Dream
It feels appropriate in the week of RUOK, and with the recent release of the powerful and confronting The Australian Dream documentary, to take a moment to adopt a birds eye view.
If we were to take a broader snapshot of our collective national social "health", is the great Australian dream alive and well?
The other night I was fortunate enough to enjoy an example of just one of the very small things that makes living in our beautiful country special. I went to watch the new documentary The Australian Dream with a good mate! Afterwards we took the time to enjoy a burger and beer together while dissecting the movie and discussing the different ways it challenged us to reflect on our own personal "Australian" narratives.
For those who are yet to see the movie, do yourself a favour - get off your backside and do so. It tells the story of Adam Goodes' experience in calling out casual and structural discrimination in our society. Adam's particular plight involved racism specifically, but in reality the documentary is broader than racism. It effectively identifies the common challenges facing any minority group in Australia. It canvasses the issues of access and equity faced by any minority group and therefore the social disparities that are increasingly creating a dissonance in our communities.
Without being a harbinger of doom, that will continue if we, as a collective, allow such structural and cultural disparities to remain unaddressed. Hence why a collective pause to create dialogues around heartfelt "RUOKs" is all the more important. However, while undoubtedly disquieting, for me this was not a story of only hopelessness or pessimism. To my mind it subliminally evoked the very essence of a positive example of what the Australian Dream means to me:
AGENCY
(or
Australia's
Great
Egalitarian
Notion of
Civil
Yearning).
Allow me to explain.
As a child-migrant to Australia life wasn't ‘easy’ per se. But it was fulfilling. And meaningful. I grew up with an enduring respect and love for the notion of the "Australian dream". It is a respect that is intangible, perhaps almost spiritual. Certainly emotional. It goes far deeper and beyond what has perhaps become for some the more day to day material benchmarks of “success” in terms of home ownership or what SUV you drive. Rather, as a young and impressionable new arrival to Australia all those years ago, I observed and learnt how Australians appeared to be a just folk who "reward people for the integrity of their actions because it was assumed to be a reflection of the quality of their character". Therein lies the secret that I feel is the Australian dream. Like so many aspirant migrants, my parents came to Australia from a less advantaged country with dreams in their pockets and little else. Their main motivation was to provide educational opportunities for their children, in our case four rowdy and at times rambunctious boys! Hardly ironic then that some three decades later I find myself so passionately immersed in the field of education. In those early years my parents intermittently faced social isolation, battled financial headwinds and inevitable cultural challenges. Yet their focus and endeavour seemed often assuaged and reinforced by, at least from the perspective of an optimistic youngster, a pervasive heady sense of unbounded possibility born from agency. Hindsight and the passage of time may have romanticised and softened my recollections of the 1980s, but as a young migrant, these appeared to be historically significant milestones marked by leadership shown through bold political and social structural reforms, sporting successes and musical genius. It was as if it this infectious energy infused every aspect of Australian life. Perhaps naively and idealistically, it felt like there was a sense of common purpose that provided our social fabric with the sustenance and courage to not only face but stare down the inevitable growing pains associated with a relatively young country acknowledging its past, emerging out of isolation and coming into its own on the global platform. That innocent and wide eyed enthusiasm of youth undoubtedly shaped my personal conceptualisation of this Australian Dream today. With my imagination captured by the youthfully optimistic characterisation, mateship, egalitarianism, and the fair go, no wonder the Australian Dream holds such a magical appeal.
And yet.
I find myself wondering whether the Australian Dream has been usurped by something else. Has the heady rush of the cavalier "she'll be right" attitude been slowly replaced by an insatiable individualistic drive towards something else? At times I feel those supposedly Australian virtues have been diminished into bingo buzzwords words. Perhaps time, age and experience has meant those ideals have begun to lose their lustre? After all, as Hugh McKay aptly points out in Australia Reimagined, we don't have a monopoly over these attributes. Other cultures and countries hold similar ideals just as dearly as we do. And for me these now cliched throwaway lines fail to accurately give the real essence of the feeling of comfort that exists when stepping aboard a Qantas plane for the first time in a decade, or being greeted with a broad "g'day" when walking into a country pub or city cafe and being able to immediately connect with each other on some presumed and difficult to describe common understanding that we are grounded in an egalitarianism that has no time for inauthentic pretence. For me, the Aussie dream is self deprecating, dry but resilient and confident, with a radar that is quick to call time on any BS and rewards those with the temerity to stand up against the odds even if it means speaking truth to power. Hell, especially if it means thumbing our noses at the establishment! To my mind, this unique dynamic provides opportunity for voice and expression, a level playing field, a delightfully free agency, and it is this that characterises my version of the "Australian Dream". It is unsurprising then that that little boy still inside me was so proud to have come "full circle" so to speak when being fortunate enough to participate in a leadership program under the auspices of John Bertrand and finding myself standing next to the great man himself. Surely if there was ever an example of the Australian spirit personified it was in what that team achieved by winning the America's cup in 1983, bringing to an end to the 132 year, longest unbroken reign of sporting supremacy in the world. Talk about staring down adversity by embracing the possibilities to take on opportunities that enabled a group of Aussies to achieve their best! And how did it galvanise a nation!
Yet a warning to the wise. Is that understanding, that supposedly common ground and respect for each other's agency, being eroded in parts and superseded in others by conflicting tensions, be they profit, power or populism? Is the 21st century polarising dynamic of us vs them, black or white, left or right impacting on the "ties that bind us" by accentuating the differences that divide us?
In the Goodes' movie Nathan Buckley succinctly points out that "we all respond if we haven't been heard, seen or acknowledged" and Andrew Bolt states the obvious when claiming "every action has a reaction". It goes without saying then that such responses and reactions will rarely be positive if the basis of the interaction is discriminatory, unbalanced or unempathetic. Considered at a macro level, an SBS article earlier this year warns:
the “he who is not with me is against me” paradigm deal is a gamble that has been made on our behalf without our consent and we are the collateral. We do not deign to have unity in spite of our differences. Society doesn’t exist, let alone function, if individuals do not step up and take responsibility for their part within said ‘society’. Society, as we have grown to expect it to be, is not a given just because there may be a mass of humans congregating on a land mass".
The use of politics of fear, misinformation and the justification of questionable decisions through the prism of the "end justifies the means" has led us down a slippery slope in terms of the quality of our social fabric. Our increasingly volatile, polarised, disrespectfully juvenile political jostling and positioning for sound bites at the expense of meaningful reform continues to devalue our democracy, the sanctity of our most important institutions and hard fought tenets such as rule of law and due process. Decades of education, health and other social service budget cuts in terms of real value have been justified under the guise of conservative financial management and the free market. An almost bloody minded singular focus on growth as the single most important indicator of success at cost has also ensured the concentration of capital towards profit generating ventures over and above any long term return on investment in social infrastructure. The consecutive privatisation of essential government services has eroded the structural social safety nets arguably enjoyed by previous generations and the gaps widen in our social thread. Many Australians have begun to loose faith in our democracy as Hugh MacKay points out below.
Should we not pause then to reassess how we are contributing to our communities, to each other's agency and free spirit? Was it presumably not the very knowledge of the availability of the 'soft landing of this social fabric' that helped provide migrants such as my parents and I with the opportunity to first acclimatise and then contribute to the Australian diaspora. Whether these changes have occurred due to happenstance, neglect, design or simply as a function of an increasingly interconnected and fluidly complex globalised landscape is beyond the remit of this particular reflection. Rather let us use opportunities like RUOK week and the release of seminal movies such as Stan Grant's An Australian Dream to review, reset and re-commit to our own personal visions of our way of life. My personal version of Australia's Great Egalitarian Notion of Civil Yearning (AGENCY) is that each and every one of us are entitled to engage on level playing fields that afford the opportunity to "have a crack" without fear of reprisals or trepidation. In doing so we can ensure our daily interactions add value to the essence of who we are as a community, as a people and as a country. Our actions, decisions and interactions should enhance not detract, empower not subjugate, respect not devalue, enlighten instead of withhold.
As an educator these have been an underpinning and defining values that shape my approach towards the students I have been fortunate to guide along their journeys. Because as Arthur Moses SC said at his recent National Press Club address:
"Australia is a great nation where respect for human rights and liberty underpins our way of life and opportunities in life. These rights have been hard-won but are easily eroded. Complacency – and good intentions – can be as dangerous as ill-intent."
So on the last day of the week, let's each take time to interact with a neighbour, friend, colleague or perhaps even a stranger. And in those interactions, let's share the many unique descriptions of our own individual versions of the great "Australian Dream".
