Thoughts on Australia

The third great force which shaped Australian civilisation is more intangible than the first two, but no less important ... space. In a way not possible in the closer settlements of Britain, Europe and Asia, we offer our inhabitants, both urban and farm dwellers, the kind of possibilities of land ownership which was only open to the privileged in the old world. Until very recently, when some of these dreams began to fade, this country has been a kind of common man’s paradise, where peasants or rural labourers could become farm owners, and where city workers could aspire to generous-sized houses set on substantial suburban blocks. Most Australians have access to sporting fields, tennis courts, public golf courses, the beach and the bush.

Freedom is a complex idea. In part it is reliant on political institutions and civil liberties. But in part, it may also rest on the availability of elbow room and privacy; on the capacity to play, tinker and potter; to raise a family in comfortable surrounds. The very real appeal of Australian life - its relaxation, its cheerfulness, its quiet optimism, is surely connected intimately with this sense of space.

We are now a nation of about 21 million. A huge amount of our population growth over the last several decades has come from people from less happy, less wealthy, less free, less spacious countries than the one they have chosen as their new home. They are the ones, now, who are joining in expanding what began as a humble colony of similar, albeit unwilling, immigrants to a prosperous, politically and socially stable nation.

Despite the huge growth in city populations and the attendant problems with infrastructure and transport, there is still a massive amount of room for people, either immigrants or those born here, to settle and develop.

We should try to keep faith with the future and see through the motives of those who are trying to whip up hostility to whatever perceived threat is fashionable: recently the threat of Asians, and now Muslims or Africans. Give these doomsayers the good old Aussie finger, and then get on with life and a fair go for all.

Let’s never forget that, excluding indigenes, we are all migrants in this place we call our home.