Anyone available to do an "Ask the Aussie" thread?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I think we often assume, perhaps correctly to a large extent, that a shared language makes for a shared culture. But there are definitely differences.

I am an American, I think this board is overwhelmingly populated by Americans. I have had several friends from other English-speaking countries, helping me understand the cultural differences, primarily Irish (free, not Northern) and English.

I’ve never personally known an Australian. I’ve met a few, but I have never had an Australian friend, so I have no clue about what sort of cultural differences exist. (I know that in spite of growing up in California, I find the whole idea of Christmas occuring smack in the middle of a blistering summer is weird. And it must be a little strange for Aussies having white/snowy Christmas portrayed in most non-Aussie English stories and songs.)

Anyway, what makes Australians noticeably different from Americans and Scots and Irish and English and Canadians?
(Incidentally, my fundamentally ignorant perception is that Australians are more culturally similar to Americans than Brits are. It strikes me as a country full of Californians. Probably the whole beachy thing.

2

I have been to Sydney three times and Melbourne one time on business and, at least for those two areas, the above is roughly true. The thing that always strikes me the most about Australia is the humor in the culture. People are very casual and love to give each other a hard time all in good fun. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen an Aussie get offended. Like the typical Californian, the typical Aussie is very laid back. You hear “No worries, mate” there even more often than you hear “No problem, dude” here. Also like America, it is a nation with a lot of immigrants.

3

I’m an Australian, but I don’t see myself as all that typical. That’s partly because (during the 64 years of my life) I’ve lived in England for about 8 years (mostly as a young child), and in the US for the last 10 years. So, I’d contribute to such a thread, but I wouldn’t want to be the OP (Ozzie Protagonist).

4

You seem to have an excellent perspective from which to answer the question, Giles, since you’ve spent long amounts of time in the “Big Three”: England, US, Australia.

So what do YOU think are the most noticeable differences between “Ozzies” Brits and Yanks?

5

Well, Australians are more like Americans than the British. They have more of a culture of informality and egalitarianism that either of the other do.

6

You’re definitely right about the teasing sense of humour. One of the first things an Aussie learns in dealing with Americans is that ‘Americans can’t take a joke about themselves’. Later we learn that this isn’t entirely true, but that the borderlines of acceptable teasing are considerably narrower than they are here. Also, our delivery might have a lot to do with it.

Based on my (limited) experience of your restaurant food vs fast food vs homecooked food, I’d have to say:

  • The restaurant food is on par with anything we have here; very tasty, good quality. Huge portion sizes, but that’s more of a plus in my book!
  • The homecooked stuff that I had was amazingly good, with lots of ‘comfort food’ options that were new to me (‘biscuits’n’gravy’ FTW).
  • The fast food was weird. McDonalds and KFC were surprisingly awful; compared to the Aussie versions of the chains, the food was dreadfully fatty and salty. However, Jack-in-the-box (which doesn’t exist here) was actually pretty good. For the record, though, we only tried one McDonalds (California), one KFC (California) and two Jack-in-the-Boxes (Washington).
  • Right across the board, we fully approved of the sugar levels in your desserts. :wink:

Culturally there’s a lot of similarity, probably because of US television saturation at this end.

The big, big difference is that most Aussies are probably very unpatriotic from your point of view. On the whole we think people who put flags up of their own country (while in their own country) are a little bit dim at best ('you need to be reminded where you live?) and someone to be wary of at worst (‘oh, great, another patriotic nutjob who probably wants us to be a White Australia’). If you want to put up a flag of your home country in your front yard while living here we’ll be a lot more tolerant, but in my conversational experience an Aussie flag flying in an Aussie garden just disturbs most of us.

We’re not overly attached to our national anthem; it’s okay, could be better, is hard to sing. An informal poll around the office at my last job revealed that most people there would be all for replacing the entire thing with the chorus of “I am, you are, we are Australian”, on the basis that it pretty much says everything worth saying and the rest of any anthem is pretty much just total wank. This was only the opinion of an office of about 15 people though, so don’t take that as indicative of the population as a whole. :wink:

7

Aussies are awesome! Kiwis too!

So what is the national anthem? “Ozzie ozzie ozzie, oi oi oi?” :wink:

Tr0psn4j, an American.

8

Kiwis are awesome, yes. :slight_smile: We’re very pleased to have them as neighbours. Sometimes they party a little loud, but you know they’d help you out in a pinch. And they’re funny as hell.

As someone who cringes at ‘ozzie ozzie ozzie - oi oi oi’ I rather hope we don’t replace the current (tolerable) anthem with that one at least. When that chant goes off it’s rather like a group of time-travelling 19th century Cockney bootblacks have mysteriously appeared and decided to make a lot of noise. It’s a chant that’s powered by alcohol and not really something you’d want to go into sober.

The current and approved anthem is actually some upsy-downsy tune that goes forever, though we usually stick with:
*
Australians all* let us rejoice, for we are young and free
with golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea
our land abounds in nature’s gifts of beauty rich and rare
in history’s page, let every stage advance Australia fair
In joyful strains then let us sing: Advance Australia Fair*

Things that are wrong with the anthem:

  1. One of the best things you can say about the country is that it’s got water on all sides? Seriously?
  2. Looks short, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s sung at a funereal pace. There are no ‘joyful strains’.
  3. Golden soil: some beaches have yellow sand, I suppose. And the centre is a desert. other than that, I have no idea what it’s talking about here. The dirt where I came from is red, dusty, and coats everything.
  4. In history’s page, let every stage Advance Australia fair. Uh, yeaaahhhh… okay. :dubious:
  • Used to be Australia’s sons. They PC’d it in the 80s or 90s.
9

The national anthem that (almost) everyone wanted is “Waltzing Matilda” – in American terms, a song about a hobo, who is caught by the police stealing sheep, and who drowns himself rather than go to prison. Instead, we got “Advance Australia”, a song which celebrates (among other things) the fact that Australia is an island (“our home is girt by sea”).

10

You know what would have been better? Have the final line rhyme with ‘free’ and ‘sea’ and turn it into a limerick. A musical limerick. It couldn’t hurt, and would be bound to be more lively.

11

Aside from the thieving and the suicide and the ghost part, it’s a decent song - but it’d suffer from the fact that you can’t just cut it dead at Verse 1; you’d have to sing every single verse. Having a short version is an important thing in an anthem, otherwise other countries get up and go to lunch during your country’s turn on the Olympic medal podiums. :smiley:

The other problem with Waltzing Matilda is that during the chorus it hits the same notes that nobody can sing in the Happy Birthday song. Those notes cannot be allowed in an anthem; it’s just asking for trouble.

12

I have consulted with three different Australian companies and it always went the same way. They were a little hesitant with me at first but soon enough they realized that I could give as good as I got and then things were cool. It may be that I am an engineer and American engineers love giving each other shit but in Australia shit giving is an art form.

13

I’m Australian. I’ve noticed a number of others here, I’d expect we’d be happy to give opinions here, so I guess this thread can be the de facto “Ask the Aussies” thread.

I’ve met plenty of Americans, and generally liked them, but the kind of Americans that end up here are atypical in that they’re travellers, which tends to make them more interested and better informed about the outside world.

The general perception here (certainly among the people I know) is that Americans in general are woefully ill-informed about everything except the USA. I’ve found that in real life as well as online, people from everywhere except the US have a pretty good grasp of the fact that the world is a big place with a wide variety of different ways of doing things, and that being different is not a question of being right/wrong or better/worse.

The patriotism thing mentioned above is a good example: there are arguments about whether Australia is a good place or not. There are plenty of people here who love criticising Australia and claiming it’s exactly the same as Nazi Germany and so on, but most sensible Australians with a good grasp on reality are of the opinion that we’re incredibly lucky to be here and to be Australian. It’s certainly been my experience that foreigners that visit here end up thinking that, too.

But no-one takes American-style patriotism very seriously. All that flag-waving crap is pretty much confined to xenophobic fringe groups, and the rest of us look on that sort of thing with a great deal of suspicion. Australians, by and large, love being Australians, but don’t feel the need to make a big deal about it. We have a great place here, we’re proud of it, but it’s very tasteless and quite possibly xenophobic to go around loudly and aggressively insisting that it’s superior to everywhere else. That’s considered very “American” behaviour and anyone doing that here is considered a nutjob at best.

14

Something that that might be of use here is that I’m a history nerd and particularly interested in colonial Australian history (1788 -1901), so I can, for instance, point out that only one or two percent of modern Australians are actually descended from the convicts: most “old” Australians (like me) are descended from Gold Rush era immigrants from the 1850s onwards, and most “newer” Australians are descended from the massive influx of post WW2 Europeans.

The convict era did contribute a lot to “the Australian character”, but more of it came from the Gold Rush diggers and later settlers who were, like Americans, generally poor people who came here looking for a better life. While both Australia and the US are nations of immigrants (including some unwilling immigrants in both cases), the fact that Australia remained a collection of British colonies until Federation in 1901 means we absorbed a lot more recent British culture, particularly in terms of law and government, than the US did. So we have a much more “European” approach to government and law and that kind of thing.

15

What about religion? Sexuality? Are you guys more like Europeans (i.e., enlightened, vs. US style bi-polar).

Any particular social habits that are identifiably Australian? Do you guys have a raging obesity problem?

What about the Aboriginal communities? Discrimination? Racism?

16

Shame v. Pride - for instance, as an American, I can put racism, obesity, religious zealotry, general cluelessness about the world in the “shame” category. I put political structure (structure, not practice!) and entertainment in the “pride” category.

What about you guys?

17

I have spent several weeks there but not as a tourist. I was there as a consultant who went to work in the morning and worked all day with my clients installing equipment and running training classes.

There is an obesity problem over there just like here. One of my trips was in 2005 and there was a study that was released then that said that Aussies have larger average BMIs than Americans.

As has been said, there are a lot of immigrants in Oz and a lot of the joking is racial. Much of that would definitely raise eye brows over here but is really good natured and all in fun. For example when I was installing one piece of equipment I cut my hand and some blood dripped on it. They all know that I’m Jewish so the big joke all day was about how that machine was now blessed to make them lots of money.

The Aborigine situations is different. (BTW, IIRC “Aborigine” is no longer the politically correct term.) The only times I have heard anything truly racist, and it wasn’t that often, was about the “Abos.” They are said to be alcoholics, lazy and all on government assistance. It’s my impression that the New Zealanders have done a much better job as a country of embracing their Native culture.

18

Australia has nothing like the US’s Christians - there are some born-again types here but they’re a small minority. Christianity doesn’t have a lot of influence here, certainly not like it does in the US. The US seems to have a higher percentage of Jews in the population, but Australian Jews are not rare, and Jews have been here for as long as Christians have.

In terms of other religions, we’re pretty similar to the US: lots of immigrants from everywhere, so lots of religions, including all the popular ones.

Sexuality? I know plenty of gay Australians, as far as I can tell we’re no more homophobic than the US. And no less so, either. Some parts of the country are very gay-friendly, some aren’t. We don’t have much of the evangelical gay-hate thing, that Fred Phelps guy seems more like a horrible caricature of an American religious nutter than anything believable. Are you sure he’s not some kind of prank?

19

The situation with Aborigines is pretty similar to the situation with native Americans, as far as I can tell. Or First Nations Canadians. There’s an awful lot of negative stereotyping, which does them a lot of harm, and a great deal of harm has come to them through misguided attempts to help them, too.

20

True, but I’d categorise us as much more like the Brits than the Americans.

The phrase is that it’s a good thing that Poms and Aussies understand each other so well so that we don’t have to worry too much about being polite. This does not apply to Americans.

There has been a “Ask the Aussie” thread before, many, many moons ago by DPR. A bit after that TheLoadedDog established G’Dope and we found there were just under 100 posting Aussies on Straight Dope. I have no idea what the current status is.

I’m not a typical Aussie, though I might be stereotypical, more likely an anachronism.
I’m 6th generation on Dads side and 7 on Mums. 70% of Australians were born overseas, or have a parent or grand parent born overseas.

I was brought in the country, in the Riverina of NSW.
80% of Australian live within about an hours drive of the ocean.

Religion, politics and guns would be the big tickets, though we don’t have much interest your sports.

God might be an American, but if he knows is onions he doesn’t actually live with all those loud, abnoxious, bible bashers taking his name in vain, and claiming they have his home phone number, he chills out in the Witsundays.

When the CEO asked Americans and Aussies around the table “What are you guys giving up for Lent?”, the magority of Aussies would thinking “What the fuck’s Lent?”, and those who do know would say “Christianity”.

Thanksgiving passes with barely a ripple and Halloween is a very recent adoption more about lollies than pagans.

Because Australia has predominantly been governed by either a centre right party and a centre left party, politics isn’t played with the intercine warefare of the US. We elect a government and we expect them to get on with it and impliment their policies. How I vote is between me and the ballot box, and we don’t get typecast if the topic does get into conversation at the BBQ.

We also know how to conduct a free and fair election, which is something the US doesn’t. Conversely the Office of Prime Minister has very little of the reverence of the Office of President. We don’t play Hail to the Chief, or stand and applaud if the PM comes to town.

We also like our Prime Minister to be articulate enough to make their own press statements and debate their own policies on floor of the parliament, and to be capable of fielding questions without notice.

Overtly nationalistic pride is not our long suit. Although this has changed significantly and I would draw the line of it’s timing as the Sydney Olympics in 2000. With some reluctance we’ll stand for the national anthem at a sporting venue, will probably mumble the words and definitely won’t put our hands on our hearts.

Sexuality? We’d be comparable with most of the liberal thinking European states. I don’t know how many of the parliamentarians are gay. Like most Aussies I don’t think it’s relevent. We probably did the best job of any Western country when AIDS hit.

We like our Medicare system and the Pharmaeutical Benifits System (PBS) is worlds best practice, much to the chagrin of Big Pharma.

Legislation allowing stem cell research passed without difficulty on a conscience vote, which was emblematic.

Most Australians think our current gun laws are too lax, and the gun lobby is in essence neutered.

On the balance between individual rights and society rights, most Aussies would probably come down on society.

This is a country where euthanasia was legalised (for a period) but we lost a proposal to become a Republic. Abortion is not a hot button issue.
I doubt 2% of Aussies could name 2 members of the Supreme Court. Would be interesting to know how many Aussies could name our current Governor General (who is our Head of State and Bessie Windsor’s repreentative here)

Shame.
Aboriginals. Their health and education status is a blight on our global standing.