Tim Winton
What I love about Australia is not a place or a town – it’s a quality of character. When I get exasperated about my country and start shouting at the telly, the only way I can talk myself down is by remembering what I love most about Australians. And that’s their capacity to learn and change.
All people get caught in ruts, become captive to lazy thinking and small-minded attitudes. But my countrymen are not as impervious as they sometimes seem. I blame the geography for this peculiar openness. Few of us will die in a ditch for some rigid tradition, insisting “this is how things have been done forever so this is how it’ll be done for good”. After all, you don’t invent the stump-jump plough, the bionic ear or the smashed avocado breakfast by slavishly adhering to established ways.
We’re all travelling, learning, growing. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re on our way from something to something else. And along the way, we tend to ditch bad ideas and pick up better ones. Most often these changes are incremental, barely felt. Sometimes they’re traumatic. But the thing I remind myself of is that we do move on. We change. We’re actually pretty good at it.
When I was a kid, the chest of drawers between my brother’s bed and mine had a little stamp inside to signify that “no coloured labour” had been involved in its construction. The White Australia policy lived in our bedroom.
Just before I was born, Australia let a foreign power explode nuclear bombs on our homeland. The world was a dangerous place, apparently, and we needed nuclear protection. Because the Brits said so. And they knew better. I grew up with that fear. The cultural cringe, too.
When I was a boy, I saw whales sawn up and boiled for fertiliser. Every Saturday. They were being hunted to extinction. Not that I was losing any sleep over it.
Back then being gay made you a criminal. This law lived in our bedroom, too. Even if it took me a while to catch on.
Half the country smoked tobacco. Like my brother. And none of us wore seatbelts. Especially not my brother.
Back then all these laws and attitudes felt permanent. Many were cause for sorrow, distress and rage in our home. But within my lifetime every single one has evaporated. Now they’re old news.
My grandchildren are Eurasian. And neither is ever likely to defer to a Brit. The island off Western Australia where the Poms exploded some of their A-bombs is now a nature reserve – I’ve swum in the crater. Hardly anybody smokes today, not even my brother. And even he wears a seatbelt. He can’t be imprisoned for liking blokes; he can marry one if he wants. Meanwhile, back in my bedroom, I’m losing sleep because of the noise the recovering whale population is making after hours. Ingrates!
Things change. Slowly. Or overnight. Despite how stuck we often seem, the fact is we move on. And grow. I love that about Australia.