Australia versus England: FIFA Women’s World Cup exposes a raw truth

The Women’s World Cup has exposed a raw truth about Australia’s complicated relationship with England — and it ain’t pretty.

It’s time to face up to an uncomfortable truth: England does not like us.

There’s nothing jesting nor affectionate in the latest stream of snarky commentary around the Women’s World Cup.

It’s not good-natured banter. It’s genuine curled-lip stuff. They really mean it.

Australia is just as bad, the barely concealed glee in commentary around England’s painful loss to Spain in the gripping final exceeded only by the graceless, smug gloating of England after the Lionesses’ mauling of the Matildas in the semi-final.

Sure, they played rough, but at least they put Australia in its place: that seemed to be the gist of it.

And therein lies the problem. We are not the same.

An England fan rejoices as the Lionesses score during the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Picture: Getty Images

And anyone still labouring under the misapprehension that England is “the Mother Country” really needs to take a closer look at all the evidence to the contrary.

As a constitutional monarchy, Australia remains shackled to England, but the very idea that King Charles is our king seems risible in 2023.

At best, it’s an appropriately eccentric situation for two very idiosyncratic countries. At worst, it’s so peculiar and foreign that Britain’s rabid attachment to its wildly dysfunctional monarchy should be just that: peculiar and foreign.

England fans during the Women’s World Cup semi-final between the Lionesses and the Matildas. Picture: AFP

What is so enraging about this scenario is that the failure of the 1999 republican referendum only reinforced England’s proprietorial sense of where it sits in relation to Australia.

I did my time in the UK, following the well-beaten path of the working holiday visa, and I voted “Hell, yes” in that referendum from London.

I barely survived the capital’s low, grey sky that made me duck each time I walked out the door. But infinitely harder to deal with than the weather was the attitude. It was a constant pile on.

Travelling to the UK is a rite of passage for many young Aussies.

There were too many Aussies. We were tight (the exchange rate was 33 pence to the Aussie dollar when I arrived). We were this, we were that. One boss actually called me a “colonial” and I know she thought nothing of it. That’s just what I was to her. Lower in status and of course in class, because class in Britain is really the stick by which all else is measured. No one likes to admit that, because it’s ugly, but it’s true.

I have many English mates. Some of my very best friends and favourite people on the planet are Poms.

We have so many things in common, including humour, the most uniting of all human forces next to love. Many of them have made their lives in Australia, some have married Aussies and have little Antipodean children, but there’s still that pervasive air when you get a bunch of Poms together that we’re like a little resort for their use and pleasure, and they’d like the resort so much better were it not for all the bloody Australians.

Aussies in London have their own issues to contend with. Picture: iStock

But talking to three very dear English friends on a girls’ weekend to Byron Bay with another Aussie friend was bracing. All three — two quite posh — said they were taught nothing about the ANZACS in school.

Not only did they have no idea Australia fought alongside Britain and the Allies in both World Wars, they were bemused — what were we even doing there? What, other than being sent to our deaths as decoys by British generals? Gosh, now you mention it, I really don’t know!

One of the trio, a great mate who was born and bred in London and used to open her window to listen to all the big acts playing at Wembley Stadium, arrived in Australia for the first time as a backpacker and landed in WA (the working holiday thing goes both ways and always has done). She said she had no idea, not until she was moving through the airport, increasingly surprised and perplexed, that Australia had First Nations peoples.

“I thought to myself, right, I’d better find out about these Aboriginals,” she said.

It was an immediate commitment of hers to educate herself but take a moment to understand that it wasn’t any part of her formal education in England. It still leaves me gobsmacked, to borrow an expression from Blighty.

Since being colonised by England, Australia has always been in that relationship — she doesn’t even know who she is without England.

Even though there’s definitely some interesting frisson between Australia and the US, America’s not quite right for her either. Too shouty and way too many guns, for a start.

But if Australia were a friend of mine, I’d be saying, “Honey, you can do so much better than this — and that includes being on your own.”

Originally published as Australia versus England: FIFA Women’s World Cup exposes a raw truth