Why Australia is Awesome, Part 349

[kerravonsen]

Australia is one of the better places to be right now. Certainly, compared to the US and much of Europe, we are sooooooo much better off. But it isn't just the obvious things that have given us advantages, such as being an island and having actual public health care. It's our history and culture, especially as contrasted with that of the USA.

We've never had a war of independence or a civil war. Because we've never had to rebel against a duly appointed government, we don't have a history of having our trust in government betrayed. So we're less likely to assume that the government is out to get us. Which means we're more likely to cooperate when it's important to.

Mind you, we are a former penal colony. Which means we're very cynical when it comes to politics. We don't adulate our representatives -- I get the impression that US folks do, that if you've voted for someone, then they can do no wrong in your eyes, and if you voted against someone, they are the devil incarnate. Our politics are more evenhanded: we criticise everyone. Australians are relentlessly egalitarian. Anybody who gets airs, who thinks they are better than everyone else, they get cut down pretty quick. Known as the "tall poppy syndrome". This also means that we have more respect for the "quiet achiever" than for someone who boasts about their accomplishments. There isn't quite so much worship-of-the-individual as you get in the US.

Part of that, I think, is that the kind of challenges we've had as a nation have been better solved by cooperation than by macho action. Not to say that the European invaders of Australia didn't massacre the First Nations peoples here; we did, it's ugly, but it happened. But it isn't adulated in our culture. The big challenge of the early colony wasn't conquering the nations, it was the land itself. Yes, yes, we have jokes about the tons of venomous creatures in Australia, but guess what? We don't have any large predators. No bears, no mountain lions, just dingos (and they won't kill you unless you're a helpless baby). Carrying a gun does not help you survive the deathtrap that is the Australian bush. We aren't afraid of the land, no, but we respect it. We take sensible precautions. If you go bushwalking, you wear boots, you carry water, you tell people where you're going. If it is fire season and you plan on travelling, you check the weather, you listen to the radio, you pay attention to government directives, because if you don't, you could die.

Fire season? Yeah, it's a thing. The fires in January 2020 may have made international headlines, but it wasn't because they were bushfires, it was because they were the worst in living memory. Summer is bushfire season. It just is. And if it isn't fire, it's flood. If it isn't flood, it's drought. Natural disasters, we have 'em. All... The... Bloody... Time. So we have a lot of practice in dealing with them. You rally round, you help your neighbours, you jolly well don't loot, and you never complain. Well, not until afterwards, when you call for a Royal Commission to investigate whether the government was negligent.

A global pandemic, well, that's just another natural disaster, innit? Rationing? Yeah, well, you do that in drought time with water restrictions, for the common good. Stay At Home orders? Bushfires, when it's not feasible to evacuate. Isolation? Well, people get cut off by floods, don't they?

We know how to deal with this stuff. It's just a slightly different flavour of natural disaster, which happens to be affecting the entire country. We've got this thing. We'll come out the other side. We'll be okay.

Australia is a great place to live. We just don't boast about it because boasting is un-Australian. We already know that this is The Lucky Country, why would we have to tell anyone?

Comments

[thewayne]

But... but... DROP BEARS! They're all over!

;-)

I would so love to visit your country some day. I just wish you had some bigger optical telescopes. NZ also has a dearth of them.

[kerravonsen]

Interest in optical telescopes? Do tell.

[thewayne]

My wife runs a 3.5 meter telescope. She's also pushing 25 years at her current gig and looking for a new job, preferably in a country that has good health care.

http://waynewestphotography.com/gallery/index.php?/category/3

[thewayne]

There was a very nice optical telescope there (don't ask me where), but the site was overrun by a wildfire a few years back and the telescope/mirror was destroyed.

Wildfires are a risk up here, the site manager sets up fire sprinklers - VERY heavy-duty - whenever the risk is high. We've had fires start to come up the cliff that the observatory is on! The current site manager, he's retiring later this year, is also a member of one of the local volunteer fire depts.

I know there are radio telescopes in AU and maybe NZ (yes, I know the two places are a thousand miles apart), but that's not my wife's field.

[kerravonsen]

Yeah, the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in Canberra was destroyed by bushfires in 2003. While they've restored a lot, only one of the telescopes survived, and it was a small one. So it was basically decommissioned as a working observatory. And that is unlikely to change, especially with the conservative governments we've had here of late, who hate funding science.

English-speaking countries with good healthcare? Any single one except the USA, probably. I know that UK, Australia and NZ have good public healthcare. No idea about Canada.

[thewayne]

Sadly, Canada and UK have terrible weather when it comes to optical telescopes.  NZ and AU have great weather, but a dearth of large optical telescopes.  I think South Africa is the furthest south that has large opticals, and I would definitely not want to live there!  Peru has an excellent collection of observatories because of its elevation and equatorial siting.  Problem with Peru is it's not exactly first-world when it comes to medical care, and I need that for my immune disorder.  There's talk that the border agents have sticky fingers when it comes to expensive meds crossing borders, and mine are definitely costly.  My prev supplier billed my insurance company over $1M US in a calendar year for my meds: they didn't get paid nearly that amount, but it shows you how expensive antibody meds are. It's sad when politicians don't realize how much investing in science returns.  The payback that we spent in NASA and the space program was HUGE!

[kerravonsen]

Or the Greater Magellan Telescope in Chile, but I expect that would have the same problems as Peru.

[thewayne]

Dain bramage. I meant Chile, not Peru. It’s been a long day.

[vilakins]

That's very much us, though our natural disasters are earthquakes and floods. For once I'm happy feeling isolated at the end of the earth.

The trouble with the US is that they have the power to inflict their insanity on others.

[kerravonsen]

That's very much us, though our natural disasters are earthquakes and floods.

Oh yes, they would be, wouldn't they?

For once I'm happy feeling isolated at the end of the earth.

Yep. Best place to survive an apocalypse... as has been already pointed out in fiction. If I recall correctly, in The Chrysalids, New Zealand ("Sealand") was a place of refuge for our mutant protagonists...

[watervole]

I always remember Nevil Shute's 'On the Beach' where even Australia provided no safety in the end.