Aussies' identity is forged by Empty Island Syndrome

IS there such a thing as a national identity?

Flinders map

IS there such a thing as a national identity?

The English are said to be reserved and propelled by class. Americans are brash and are wedded to the free market economy. The French are defined by their stylish living and by a quality that is difficult to translate into English: insouciance. Australians too can be classified in simple and some might say jingoistic terms: we are laid back with a love of the outdoors and a fervent belief in a fair go for all.

I could add other bits and pieces, such as connections to mateship and egalitarianism, but you get the idea. Or at least this is the way we see ourselves.

The perspective of Australia and the Australians from London is different (brash and unpolished), as it is from New York (where's Australia?) and Jakarta (rich, white, complacent).

Other nations, even the US, have centuries and a critical mass of population to forge a national identity. I suspect this is more difficult for Australia: 23 million people rattling around a big, empty continent means that we don't often get the opportunity to bump into each other.

This is vastly different to Europe. The Netherlands, for example, has 17 million people crammed into an area half the size of Tasmania. The Dutch are exposed to their countrymen's thinking, mores and values

every day. The quarter-of-a-million people who live in far north Queensland do not as a rule bump into people who live on the coast south of Perth.

A small population scattered across a sparsely settled continent has, I think, moderated if not shaped the Australian identity. We have lazily relied upon romantic, but now hopelessly outdated, notions of swagmen, jumbucks and Snowy River brumbies to forge an Australian identity.

Even language that is said to be quintessentially Australian is, to my way of thinking, a construct. In my 50-plus years of living in this nation I have never heard anyone use the term "bonza" in anything other than an ironic context.

So what is today's Australian identity? And importantly, is there any connection between the Australian identity now and that at the beginning of the 19th century, or indeed at the end of the 21st century? Is there anything that connects us today with the motley band of crew, convicts and settlers who hoisted the Union flag on January 26, 1788? Other than the fact that we live in the same space and under the same stars?

I think there is one quality that has defined Australians for more than 200 years and that will continue to define the residents of this continent (if indeed we are still called Australians) in centuries to come.

And that quality is this. It is the idea, the burning notion, that we, the residents of the Australian continent -- that ancient splinter of Gondwanaland -- are but a small nation in charge of a large and largely empty continent.

I am not an expert on indigenous culture, but I would be surprised if it did not contain inherent references to a small tribe lost amid the enormousness of the continent.

Australians, I think, are united across space and time, including centuries, by the abiding notion that we are modest in number and we live on a big and empty island. Indeed Empty Island Syndrome delivered our early and lingering cultural cringe and deference to Britain, the US and Europe.

This same thinking delivered our fear of invasion from the French in the 18th century, from the Russians in the 19th century and from the Germans in the 20th century.

Oddly it was the Japanese who actually delivered an externally based attack in 1942. And within two decades of the Darwin bombings we were again fearful of what was known as the Domino Effect: the idea that if Vietnam fell to the Communists they would surely tumble all the way to Australia.

Today an invasion aversion still defines elements of Australian thinking, so that from Cape York to Cape Leeuwin we are concerned about boatpeople. And, do you know, in an increasingly crowded world I suspect we Australians will remain concerned about this issue for much of the 21st century.

Other aspects of our "Australian culture and identity" are changeable between decades and between generations. "And somehow I rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy/Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go." This line from Banjo Paterson's 1889 iconic Australian poem no longer strikes the chord it once did. It was a city clerk's lament about being trapped in a city office with a stingy ray of sunlight. If city clerks daydream today it is not about the bush; it's probably about a Jetstar flight to Bali.

The bush may have defined the Australian identity a century ago, but today it is the city and its accoutrements that dominate.

Suburban divas Kath & Kim, for example, are modern day incarnations of the 1930s radio play Dad & Dave, country yokels who purportedly reflected quintessentially Australian values of the era. Today we are city folk more connected in some ways to London, Los Angeles and New York than to Wagga, Ballarat and Toowoomba.

We are more likely now to drink wine than beer and latte than tea. The pavlova has yielded to baklava just as the lamington has been subjugated by biscotti.

The beach is a recent manifestation of Australian identity, but it is also a powerful symbol of the way we think. We are all equal on the beach: stripped to our cozzies there is no pretence as to class.

Perhaps that's why we like the beach; no one can get too up themselves about their money and position when they are wearing budgie-smugglers.

The Australian identity perhaps like other national identities is on the move; the peripheral stuff shuffles depending on the way we live. But there is an abiding and structural Australianness that I think connects all: this is the notion that it is Empty Island Syndrome and not beer, barbecues and the beach that actually defines the abiding Australian identity.

Bernard Salt is social editor for The Australian, a KPMG Partner and an adjunct professor at Curtin Business School;  Facebook/SocietyforNormal People(SNP); [e-mail]