Australia, who the bloody hell are we?

My recent travels confirm Australia doesn’t exist. Not this one, anyway. Get north of Bali and this place is Terra Australis still, a myth. Australia? In Europe they roll the word on the tongue like a jube, searching for taste. “Hmm, give me a minute. What flavour is it, this place name? It would be a cliche to mention kangaroos, of course, but the rascals just come bounding into the front paddock of the mind when you say the word.”

For the peoples of the northern hemisphere she is tucked away beyond the curve of the world, out of sight and significance. A Rorschach blot on the global map that sparks a few faded classroom facts in their heads: “England’s, wasn’t she? Penal colony? Origami Opera House … harbour … ” Then they might spare some brief grief for the reef. (That dobber Attenborough!)

When asked to say what “Australia” means most will say it’s an Australian word for “Canada”. When pressed to explain the meaning of “Canada” they’ll tell you it’s a Canadian word for “Australia”. Press them further and they describe a vast, benign place that exists as a catch-all for the real world’s sporadic totalitarian overspills and crop failures – that is, a type of wan safe zone you wouldn’t migrate to unless you were about to starve or thugs were readying to line you up against a wall. A smiling nonentity too boring to remember, like some middling looker who rocked a pair of cords at uni but never spoke a word. The best that can be said of Australia’s place in the world is that the globe doesn’t bear us any grudges.

I appreciate humanity’s ignorance of Australia. Most of us have a field to till, a shoe to tie, a leaking pipe, a tooth cavity, or an ongoing battle with a neighbour to wage. Typically we’re as local as the nearest chemist. And what do you know, or care, of Angola?

There is, though, another Australia that people have seen on YouTube – a goofy stampede of Aussies who’ve been ambushed by huntsmen, snakes, crocs and sharks, magpies swooping squealing cyclists. A taxi driver in Athens took both hands off the wheel and arched them in a parenthesis that would hold a dinner plate, telling me, “Your house has spiders this big. I would never go to Australia.” I couldn’t convince him otherwise. He’d seen it on YouTube. It occurred to me the government wouldn’t need boat turn-backs if it flooded social media with taipans, funnel webs and box jellyfish.

Despite the fact nobody north of the equator sees us as anything but terra dullius, Australia has convinced herself the world is watching her. She often seems to me like a work-experience kid craving her workmates’ regard, looking down at her shoes (King and Flinders Islands) chewing her nails, waiting to hear from those veterans of nationhood – England, France, and the small, wise Scandinavians – about how she’s doing after her first few days at nationhood.

Australian politicians routinely use the world’s surveillance as a type of moral pressure. The world is watching, they say, with its breath held and a censorious eyebrow cocked to judge us – for our treatment of illegal immigrants, or our decision on an Indigenous voice to parliament, or our great coal cook-up … It’s a fond hope, especially of the left, that some global Big Brother in psychological sync with them will send an undeniable sign that they are right. It’s an almost religious transfer of morality to a higher power.

It’s as risible as the notion of being on the wrong side of history, a threat usually invoked by some shrill seer who, though he missed the mood of the people and just lost the popular vote, can read the minds of our descendants. Turns out the world couldn’t give a damn, and despite the left’s attempts to conscript the future, we don’t know whose side it’s on yet. The world isn’t watching. And why should we care what the future thinks above the present?

Our guide in Athens was showing us a 3000-year-old mosaic of big-lipped dolphins cavorting in tessellated brine. Nothing bigger than an anchovy lives in The Med now. “I swam with dolphins in Australia recently,” I told him. “Ahh,” he said, nodding smiling, feigning delight as if I were a boy showing his teacher a wobbly circle I’d drawn. “But, of course, here we have antiquity,” he said, sweeping his hand toward the mosaic memory of the dolphin.

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