“There is scarce a Commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.”
Thomas Hobbes
“He’s always in trouble / for just being born.”
Bob Dylan, “Neighbourhood Bully”
Possessed by a spurt of patriotic fervour, I thought of writing up a short piece on the Australian situation, and its relevance for other settler colonial states.
If celebrating Australia Day is not yet revolutionary — at this point it is merely some controversial fodder for culture warriors — it soon will be. An earnest celebration of the colonial origins of this country runs against those fashionable currents in the academy, sentiments even infecting some treacherous contingents of the online dissident right.
But unlike those parochial progressives, I did grow up in Hong Kong and Shanghai, witnessing firsthand how the arrival of the Saxon turned pacific rocks into Pearls of the Orient.
Earlier today, my thoroughly cosmopolitan/Americanised father asked me if saying “Happy Australia Day” was a faux pas.
I may be the descendant of wogs and chinamen, raised abroad with the accent of a Yankee, but I’m glad this country was colonised by Europeans. Anglo-Celtic shitkickers in particular.
That is the key proposition of this article.
It is a nation that very much punches above its weight on the global stage, empowered by the Queen’s English and respected for its swagman’s swagger.
Admittedly, I don’t write much about Australia, as the political situation is deadlocked by tired climate-change-debates and culture wars straight out of the 1990s.
The lucky country was spared from the ethnic tensions of the United States (by the design of its founders), or the ideological schisms of Europe, or the demographic pressures of the South African settler-states.1
More recently, a Faustian trade deal with the Chinese spared us the GFC, isolating the Australian elite from populist pressures swelling up from the populace elsewhere in the west. A containment action courtesy of Tony “Stop The Boats” Abbott deradicalised immigration hawks. The tough points-based immigration system remains the envy of nationalists across the world.
By 2023, however, the “right-wing” Coalition has been replicating the decline of the British Tory Party in slow-motion, losing its upperclass constituency without appreciable gains in other areas. The utterly uncharismatic opposition leader Peter Dutton is too preoccupied with plotting to ban Kanye West from the country to reflect on his party’s slow death. Outside of the pages of Quadrant Magazine, there isn’t much of a nationally palatable right-wing.
To appraise this situation, American observers would do well to keep in mind that the platonic ideal of an Aussie Ocker, ripped from the frames of a Mad Max or a Crocodile Dundee, is essentially a pop-cultural myth.
“Since the 1960s, Australia's urbanization rate has consistently been above 80 percent, and in 2020 it has reached its highest ever rate at 86.2 percent.”
The amenities are first-world. The people are easygoing. But on the flip side, it is a Europe without its historically-sanctified aristocracy, America without her righteous fanaticism. A nation well past the point where tall-poppy-syndrome has killed the heroic in the hearts of men, and citizens can’t be roused to defend their historic liberties.
Urban living and a myriad of cultural mutations made Aussies soft and authoritarian. The offensive lockdowns are in the past now, but a great IM-1776 piece on the situation captured this managerial malaise.
“Due to its abundant resource and mineral wealth, the country did not suffer an economic recession in the last thirty years, thus setting it apart from the trajectories of other Western states heavily impacted by both recession and financial crisis. Instead, the country emerged as a seemingly successful ‘Oceanian Third Way’ of governance somewhere between Singaporean Law and Order on the one hand, and Western individualism and Anglo-European legal and political traditions on the other.
For a European immigrant like myself, Australia stood out as having surpassed most European states in terms of living standards, with remarkably clean, well-kept, and secure inner cities, a striking contrast to contemporary European capitals like London or Paris with their increases in crime, homelessness, and veritable immigrant ghettos, particularly since the 2015 refugee crisis. By contrast, immigration into Australia has been tightly regulated…
Successful immigrants pursuing the legal pathway used to be able to expect decent wages and a well-governed country with low tax rates particularly for those used to oppressive continental European standards. Despite the country’s exploding real estate prices due to skilled immigration and East Asian and particularly Chinese investment in real estate, securing a middle-class lifestyle had until recently been attainable due to comparatively high wages and a strong tradition of unions and labor rights. Sociologically, the big Australian cities are still largely composed of property-owning real estate millionaires, a middle-class aristocracy of sorts which despite decreasing living standards globally compares favorably to their Western peers. This relative socioeconomic comfort overdetermines political attitudes: For most Australians, government has worked reasonably well, and there has been no reason to question government policy. Prevalent European and American experiences of decades of decline and demoralisation is mostly unknown to Australians.”2
So anyway, without the decades of obvious decline afflicting the rest of the west, Australia’s national politics are decidedly more boring and conservative — a real throwback to pre-GFC politicking. The culture war of the day involves Australia Day, the January public holiday commemorating the arrival of Europeans onto the continent.
First of all, it’s a very volkisch holiday, implicitly celebrating the meeting of European blood and the Oceanian soil girt-by-sea, creating civilisation. This racialist celebration stands in sharp contrast to the commemoration of civic, political happenings that defined other nations, such as the American Declaration of Independence honoured in July.
(That said, Australia’s subsequent 1901 Federation, in large part driven by the desire for a coordinated, white-nationalist immigration policy, would likely be condemned for similarly anti-racist reasons.)
Aboriginals and anti-colonial activists recognise “invasion day” instead, that is, the invasion of a non-existent nation. The emphasis on the “aboriginality” of a nation created by those who conquered the disunited and nomadic natives, is basically used to lump European settlers in with future immigrants drawn to a modern, affluent, welfarist society, delegitimising their foundational role.
This settlers-versus-immigrants semantic debate should be familiar to American immigration restrictionists warring valiantly against decades of “a-nation-of-immigrants” propaganda that all settler-state citizens are now forever subjected to. (Thanks Emma Lazarus! Thanks JFK!)
In celebrating Australia Day as such, the idea that Europeans created Australia as we know it is grandfathered in. The nation’s purpose as a bastion of western civilisation in the East is enshrined. Alongside it, the politically incorrect idea that Europeans created almost everything of value in this country.
The cultural alternative is an elaborate game of chicken involving one of the most indolent human subspecies on the planet, who have barely contributed anything to the ledger of human accomplishments. Even the dot paintings were invented by a white guy!
Every other group on the continent is forced to pay an insincere, lip-service tribute to a vanquished people. There is nothing more absurd than to witness a group of Chinese immigrants performing land acknowledgements before the banal speechifying of the day!3 Scratch that, what's more ludicrous is the descendants of those on the First Fleet joining in in calling it “invasion day.” Verily, the suicidal side of the WASP is on full display. It turns my stomach every time.
A marginal Australia day parade was shelved by the premier of Victoria(basically Australia’s California), an action first attributed to his draconian lockdown regime, the longest in the world. But the parade was cancelled again this year.
Complimenting this trend comes the federal government’s push for an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament — the ruling Labor Party’s vaguely defined desire for a separately elected, constitutionally sanctioned advisory group with the right to advise the nation on native issues.
What is being challenged is essentially the morality of the founding of the country, and the brutal frontier struggles that led to all that we currently enjoy. And a nation that regrets being born can hardly muster up the will to survive onto the next millennium, at least without being enslaved to some utopian liberal-democratic-communistic creed, subtly contrived to serve the interests of others.
The political integration of the Aboriginals into the newly civically-defined Australian state of the 1960s started the nation down a road that decentred the real founding stock. This evolving historical self-conception was meant to mirror their forthcoming loss of political power.
(Fortunately, unlike the infinitely destructive African Americans, Australian Aboriginals generally lack the raw manpower, energy or the cultural caché needed to imitate those colour revolutions seen abroad.)
Sometimes, the centre-right slips up, falling afoul of the modern morality-police. Gaffe-prone former PM Scott Morrison made headlines with his both-sides equivalencies.
“You know, when those 12 ships turned up in Sydney, all those years ago, it wasn't a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either.”
It is inarguable that the first wave of culture-bearers had a foul time on the Fatal Shore. No apologies necessary!
More recently, a young Liberal party candidate Timothy Dragan went off on what most people internally acknowledge to be true.
“There’s no such thing as traditional Australians… Because Australia is a post-colonial concept.
“We won this land fair and square. {A treaty would be} like telling Britain to give the land back to the Vikings, and the Vikings to give it back to the Romans. And same with Romania — to give Transylvania back to the Hungarians. I mean, come on man, it’s bollocks. It’s absolute bollocks.”
“Everything that you find now, all these institutions, even this government thing they got, it’s European – it’s not bloody Aboriginal… If we’re going to go by what’s Aboriginal, we might as well abolish everything, get our camping chairs and live in the desert.”
I’m glad that this country was colonised by Europeans, and everybody else benefiting from the amenities of civilisation should be as well.
I can’t imagine a Conservative-faction, let alone a settler-state, surviving without internalising that mantra.
And this applies to America, New Zealand, South Africa, South America… hell, even Canada! A nation regretting its birth agonies can’t, and should never continue to exist.
Get that foundational principle down, and she’ll be right.
Ask Rhodesia how a minuscule Anglophone population overwhelmed by Africans turns out for civilisation. Incidentally, that population was precisely the reason why Cecil Rhodes’ namesake was never afforded the independence of other British quasi-dominions.
https://im1776.com/2021/12/14/the-australia-prison-experiment/
Ask Tibet how the CCP does colonialism. Or the rest of Asia. An Aussie at the barbecue earlier today told me that before he arrived in Korea, “we were arrogant enough to think we were racist.”