From Cairns to Bunbury, Australians aren’t all the same

Australia is such a vast and isolated nation that we need a better understanding of the way life is lived elsewhere, writes Bernard Salt. Picture: istock

We Australians are unique in our geographic isolation. We are the largest collection of people well removed from the balance of humanity. Some South Atlantic and South Pacific islands are more remote but none of these communities aggregate to our population of 26 million. We are scattered across a vast continent similar in scale to the US mainland and which was settled via separate colonies.

Our language and even our accent reflects these diverse origins. Some Queenslanders, for example, call a suitcase a port as in portmanteau. South Australians pronounce dance, chance and plant with – to my ear – an “ar” sound in the middle instead of a flat “a”.

The historian Geoffrey Blainey encapsulated it best when he said Australians are shaped by the tyranny of distance. And not just by the distance between our cities and their equivalents in the northern hemisphere, but also by the distance within Australia.

When I first visited Perth in the early 1990s, I asked how long it took to drive to Bunbury. “That’s just down the road,” was the reply. My (Victorian) concept of “just down the road” was (and remains) less than an hour. The Bunbury trip took closer to three. Over 200 years, each Australian colony evolved largely independently. Belief in a god, for example, generally diminishes east to west across the continent, according to the census. And there was sufficient time for subtle regional accents and language to evolve.

There are transcendent concepts – of mateship and of a fair go, for example – that we acknowledge to be universally “Australian”. Although similar virtues exist within other cultures. The French for example celebrate liberte, egalite, fraternite while the Americans claim a national quality they call “neighbourliness”.

Because of our isolation, Australia would benefit from direct comparisons of how we live relative to others. There are statistical measures that make such comparisons but each involves “averages” that rarely tell stories at the human level. Instead, we could interview committed couples, male and female, in their early 40s with primary school kids living in the suburbs of Sydney, Los Angeles, London, Toronto, Auckland, Tokyo, Cape Town. Ensure the comparisons are like-for-like. We look at how a life is lived for, say, a teacher-and-nurse couple with kids, where there has been no windfall or inheritance. An everyday family doing their best to survive and thrive.

I am interested in metrics like the floorspace of the home, the time it takes to commute to work, the prospect of holidays, access to childcare and healthcare, and the proportion of the budget required to acquire and manage the home. Even within Australia, I am convinced that such an exercise, publicly or privately sponsored, would be of interest to households struggling with the cost of living. What does it cost to buy a house and raise a family in Cairns, Bunbury, Launceston?

The problem with nationally aggregated data is that such information alone doesn’t explain how life is lived. Australia is such a vast and isolated nation that we need a better understanding of the way life is lived elsewhere, to see our good fortune or indeed to lobby for change to the way we live.