Everything we don't want you to know about Australia

Over 30,000 people go missing every year in Australia. Taken from the movie Wolf Creek. Must be their population control at work.

Typical grossness.

Horrifying "don't give a ****" insensitivity and ignorance.

I assume Pyne's staffer, at least, doesn't have any excuses re lack of education and opportunity to learn about what is appropriate behaviour in other countries.

From Australian Missing Persons Co-ordination Centre.

"In Australia an estimated 35,000 people are reported missing each year compared with 220,000 in the United Kingdom and 16,000 in New Zealand.

The rate of missing persons in Australia is 1.7 per 1,000 people. In the United Kingdom it's 3.6 per 1,000 people.

Although this data gives a rough comparison, each State / Territory and country record information relating to missing persons differently. For example, in the United States, missing adults are not accounted for as they are not defined as ‘missing'."


So, I don't think that's a fair swipe at Oz.

Yeah, Wolf Creek wasn't a doco.

This is from the offical govt Missing Persons site - not quite as bad as the Wolf Creek numbers. https://www.missingpersons.gov.au/view-all-profiles

And considering that all our animals want to kill us we're doing pretty good!

They don't WANT to kill us off, sharks and a few parasites excluded! We just get in their way.

I'm going to be a bit all over here, just a warning.

I've got on my Netflix list The Snowtown Murders, and frankly, I'm afraid to watch it.
My husband said it disturbed him, and for Him to say that, it's gotta be bad. But, things like this happen all over the world, in every country.

I'll be honest. I don't get Australia, at all.

None of the following is me saying I dislike your country, I just don't understand so much of it.

As an American, I'm confronted with the worlds view that we are an obese lot. However, Australians are nipping at our heels on that, and I never hear boo. Sometimes I feel like the world looks at the U.S. like we are all racist, and wear white hoods over our heads. I look at Australias history of settlement of the continent, and get mightily confused. Besides the history of outsider takeover, you're a country of over 90% white people, so I don't think can really understand the day to day dynamics of living somewhere, where many times one person hasn't a clue that someone is looking at them as a racist, even though it might couldn't be futher from the truth.

Americans I think are largely thought of as loud crass bumbleheads. Southerners are stupid, North Easterners are rude, every Texan is walking around with 5 guns.
Much of this comes from how people from different areas sound, their accents.
To me Australians sound like they are going full tilt at all times. I know that can't be true, no more than it's true of anyone.
Me? I need a lot of quiet and downtime. I don't think I'd get much there. If Australia was a musical instrument, it would be a trumpet. I'm a gong. Sometimes loud, but many times zen.

I know this wasn't exactly the topic, but those are things I don't know.

hingehead, I remember being floored when I realized you are from Australia.
You have always seemed very calming to me.

Yeah! He seemed like such a nice young man, didn't he?

Well, thank you Chai. I was going to say you see a lot less of us (through info and entertainment media) than we see of you - and that might be the cause of our perceived 'otherness' - but we get deluged with media from and about the USA and you guys (as a whole) are pretty unfathomable to us (and are definitely in the brass section).

You're right about the obesity stuff, well you were - I think I remember about 8 years ago we were a real chance of knocking the US off the child obesity dais. But something's happened and now we're below the New Zealanders and Canada at number 25 (don't get to say that too often).
http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/29-most-obese-countries-in-the-world.html

Everyone knows about our deadly snakes, spiders, drop bears, shark attacks - but we know all about your Sandy Hooks and Orlandos - and we think we lucked out. That said every Australian I know who's been to the US has been knocked out by the hospitality and friendliness. But..., I've been knocked out by the friendliness and hospitality everywhere I've been - from Fiji to Cyprus, London to Lisboa.

Interesting point you hint at with our colonial experiences. Australia is what America would have been without slavery. Mostly white with an indigenous people struggling with the after effects massive dispossession. Although you'd still have a huge latino influence, a bit like our smaller, but distinctive, Asian influences. We both differ from South Africa - where the white colonisers never outnumbered the indigenous peoples.

The USA and Britain fascinate me because there are distinct regional cultures and dialects. Australia has these but to a much lesser extent - we're way too geographically mobile (and settled way too late in world history (at the dawn of the steam age) - for these to develop through isolation.

If I was an instrument I think I'd be a bass kalimba. (what a fun mental game!)

Sorry for this mumbling ramble - you just made so many interesting points that got me thinking. Thanks!

Oh, and Snowtown. Yew. I think your husband might have tapped in to the truly scary thing about it - the banality of the horror. One of our rock legends (Jimmy Barnes) said recently that he 'liked' Snowtown because it reminded him of growing up in the Adelaide outskirts. His biography is out and it sounds like his early days were a nightmare of drunken domestic violence. DV, another great Australian shame.

Ah, those were the days!

I know way more about Snowtown than I ever wanted to...via work.

I have the dvd but also haven't watched it.

I suspect that the same sort of horror goes on in many places but may not be discovered in larger places...eg apparently the US does not count adults as missing persons. (I just read that for another thing I was looking at.)

I see many of the kinds of people portrayed in the film. It is an ineffably tragic and increasing (our poverty is becoming entrenched as we become more and more fans of economic rationalism) sub-culture of generational poverty and trauma that interacts in awful ways.

I suspect the film is a powerful portrayal of that subculture, but I'd think twice about watching it. It's real. Not fantasy.

I agree we have less of the experience of living with people who assume you are racist....but we have a similar history, as you say, and because I have worked a lot with Indigenous people, both as colleagues and clients, I certainly know about the awkwardness and difficulty of rubbing elbows with people where there is a terrible history of dispossession, genocide, racism and abuse that hangs between us.

We don't have your history of importing masses of people as slaves so we do not reproduce your racial history there. Ours is more like white America's relationship with First Nation peoples.

I am very surprised by that figure of 90% Anglo and I can't believe it. It was likely true when I was a kid but I don't think it true now.

I was certainly brought up to believe that the US was extremely racist, but I think the first whiff of reflection and understanding about Australia and about people in general blows that away. I think the perception remains because, as Hinge says, US sins tend to be writ large, usually by Americans, in the news and in popular culture.

I have no concept that the US is more racist at all. I am sure lots of unreflective Australians do believe it though. We all like to regard ourselves as better than others if we can.

The loudness I cannot comment on...it's hard to look at your own culture objectively...however I do think the US is way more verbal.

I am sure we have lots of quiet people too...they just probably aren't the ones you notice!

Yeah, I think the 90% Anglo is wrong - it's apparently more like 92% WHITE, with white accounting for European migrants from Malta to Macedonia.

Country of birth breakdown is interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Australia#Country_of_birth

But that ignores second and third generations who still identify (at least partly) with their ancestral ethnicity.

That was really interesting.
I was suprised to see so many US Americans in Australia and also so many from Nepal.

good post hingehead.

Funny what you said about Jimmy Barnes. When the series The Sopranos was out, I had more people than I would like thinking perhaps their activities were things that happened in my upbringing. No, sorry, my dad and none of my friends dads were Mafia bosses, and we didn't put out hits on anyone.
However, I really enjoyed watching the show, partly because sometimes I would see a place familiar from my childhood.
I certainly wouldn't associate the murders with simply being Australian. Just that this was a violent psychopath that got others to follow.
Still up in the air as to if I'll watch. I think not.

Re our notions of what we know about each other. I had to look up what a budgie smuggler was, and had never heard of a drop bear. I'm going to ask around and see if anyone around me has heard of them. I do know however, a sure fire way of avoiding shark attacks. I grew up on the Atlantic Ocean, first 20 years or so, and have lived about the last 20 years 350 miles inland in Texas, and haven't once been threatened by a shark here.

Interesting what you said about cultures and dialects, accents developing through isolation. I've seen changes in that even in my life time. I've also lived in the Midwest and very briefly in the Pacific NW. It would be interesting to see how the country as a whole sounds 50, 100, 200 years from now. More and more similar. With easy access to travel, the internet, we're melding. When I went to my birthplace a couple of years ago, no one under the age of 35 sounded the way I did growing up.

In a similar vein, do you feel in your lifetime your dialect has changed more and more from the British English? In 400 years from Jamestown being settled to now, American English is so different. While I think you have more similarities still, it must be evolving.

As far as what I understand about your history, and apologies if this offends, is that it was a place to send convicts from England. At some point they were released into the population. I figure others were moving there on their own, but without investigating, always figured there were (at least at first) many influences from a group of people that no one else wanted around. That means in my mind there were people with money that came there voluntarily, and a larger group that had no choice in the matter.
Maybe like slaves brought to America?

Would I be correct in thinking that the convict era is one Australians are not particularly proud of, yet it's there? Do you feel there are still influences of it felt today? Somehow in my mind, I see the straight forwardness and zeal of the Australians having a foundation in people that weren't there because they wanted to be. But, here we are, let's make the best of it.

It's pretty obvious when meeting a black person here that the odds are good their ancestors were enslaved. It's something that can't be seen in your land, if your great great grandpa was a convict.
Do people talk about it?

I know as a white person in the U.S. I will always be considered to have white privilege. Ugly or not, it's true that by my mere skin color has presented me with options that don't exist for many others.
However, a part of me is annoyed when it's been presented to me that "I" killed the Native Americans, "I" enslaved a group of people.
When in fact, my personal people didn't even arrive at these shores until around the 1920's and can state for a fact that my grandparents, when there arrived, didn't even know Native Americans or Black people existed. Seriously, they had never seen pictures of or heard of these people.

heh. When I was in college, this professor who was probably 5% Indian loved to go on to the class that "Your people killed my people" I went to him after class once and told him "When your people were being killed, MY people didn't even know you existed, and I am 100% those people"
I realize and accept for the most part, that is how I'm seen. As the evil killing My People Did This.



What amazes me is that in such a brief time huge beautiful cities were built. Really gorgeous. The progress made in such a short time.

National stereotypes are nonsensical...except for the ones about the French.

I've spent time in Australia and always enjoyed my visits.

Never really saw a bad side to the Australian people although I'm sure there are Aussie jerks just as there are American jerks, British jerks, Chinese jerks etc.

America has a history that has been stained by racism and so does Australia.

As I understand things, Australia has made great progress in this regard, just as America has.

That's a fascinating list, hinge. People from 52 countries that have 20,000 or more living here. The food has certainly improved.

I remember listening to something... it was on language, more precisely American accents in the Appalachians, and surrounding areas. The expert said that their present day accents were closer to the accents of their ancestors than the people living in the areas from whence their ancestors came. In other words, the accents in the US are truer to the original British accents and language patterns from centuries ago, than the present Brit accents are to them now. In much the same way, Newfoundland has preserved accents and words hardly heard across the pond anymore.

Interestingly, I heard a show just a while ago on accents again, this one was on the Vocal Fry - the Kardashians gift to language. And now I hear it everywhere here, across the bloody country, on the radio, TV, from every nation on earth, and from women/teens of a certain age or younger. It's the growl, the guttural vibration they put on everything. It's annoying as hell.
And it's spread like wildfire not from region to region, but through social media. Like the short lived Valley Girl - Moon Unit Zappa MTV stage and the ongoing Like, like, like, like epidemic.
The newest one in Canada apparently, although I've yet to hear it,
is saying beg for bag. As in: Can I get that in a beg, rather than bahg. Vowel softening. It's popular in the 14 - 16 girl age group. This seemingly is the epicenter of most language change nowadays.

After spending only 4 nights behind bars at no charge the Budgie 9 left Malaysia without a conviction being recorded against them.

This means that each and every one of the seditious surfing smugglers are free to re-enter and offend again.

Imagine the formula four furore if , in all the racy excitement, they had barred up before being thrown behind.

Delectable, desirous and delicate sensibilities deserve better than these tourists trade.

Why go there.