Seadevil Mating

This is one of the most interesting things I have read recently. It is not very Australian, but I did read it in Best Australian Essays 2008.

“…consider the black seadevil. It’s a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish – seemingly all fangs and gape – with a ‘fishing rod’ affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But this is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea – until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a foetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.”

“Where Wonder Awaits Us,” by Tim Flannery

"Ashamed to Be Australian"

We have heard several Australians say that there is one ongoing government policy that makes them ashamed: the treatment of asylum seekers.

Immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers used to find a very open door in Australia. When the Vietnamese "boat people" came in the 1980s, they were held for a few weeks for medical checks and paperwork before entering Australian society.

In 2001 the Norwegian ship Tampa picked up Afghan refugees rescued from a sinking vessel. The Australian government refused to let them land in Australia. The Howard government then won an election based, in part, on fear of large numbers of refugees flooding Australia. The processing centers for refugees and asylum seekers turned into concentration camps patrolled by armed guards. The weeks of health checks and paperwork turned into years of isolation.

It is likely that the new Rudd government will undo some of the policies of their predecessors. It has already started to do so on the touchiest issue, the treatment of aborigines. Indeed, since Prime Minister Rudd issued the "Apology" to the aboriginal peoples, there is a sense among most Australians we have met that problem is heading toward a solution. The wounds caused by the stolen generation, massacres, and general ill-treatment are starting to heal.

Not so with the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. To be sure, there must be many Australians, especially Liberal/National voters, who support to tight controls on refugees. But for the people we talked to, including some Liberals, the asylum-seeker policy is the one great source of national shame.

Australian vs. American Democracy

We had a fascinating conversation with John Hirst, an eminent historian, and Sally Warhaft, editor of The Monthly, about Australia's system of compulsory voting. Australian elections are held on Saturday and are easy to get to. All eligible voters are required to vote. If they don't, they must either get their excuse approved or pay a fine. This system is very unusual in the world. Belgium is the only other high-income country to have it, and the other countries don't enforce the rule. I have been surprised that we have encountered so little discussion of it, one way or the other. It is just accepted here as the way it is.

We agreed that the United States is not likely to ever adopt such a system. For us, democracy means that each individual has a choice, including the choice not to participate. We were also assured that Australia is not likely to drop their system. For them, democracy means that each individual has a voice, so must have (and use) a place at the table.

Joe's Awesome Day

The students had the day off, so I organized an Awesome Day for my son, who is 14. He has been doing the same work as the college students, and been dragged to many an event by dad that would not have been his first choice. He has remained game throughout. So today was his day.

We started last night. A downtown Melbourne movie theater offers all the usual movies - plus "Bollywood." Which actual Bollywood feature they are offering seems to be secondary to the sheer fact that the genre is represented. We went to "Ghajini," a revenge story that turned on short-term memory loss, like "Memento." In the middle of this dark story, though, was a romance between two very handsome leads, with singing, dancing, fantasy sequences, bright colors, but not so much as a kiss. The whole thing last more than three hours, including an intermission. It let out at midnight. There were a dozen Indians, mostly couples, and us. We had a blast.

Today we went to see the State Library of Victoria, a wonderful old rotunda library, like the British Museum reading room. It has a fine exhibit of Melbourne and Victoria history, the highlight of which is the weird home-made armor that the notorious bushranger Ned Kelly wore when he had his final shoot-out with the police in the 1880s.

For lunch we had kangaroo, wallaby, crocodile, and a somewhat less exotic squid. Joe liked the crocodile best.

The highlight of the day was Eureka Tower. This is a residential skyscraper, the tallest residence in the Southern hemisphere (which means it beats another one in Queensland, though that one cheats with a higher antenna). On the top floor there is a great observation deck, including a very breezing outdoor section. Today was clear and hot, so we enjoyed the view and the breeze. The best part, though, is The Edge. This is a cube, about twelve feet on a side, glass on each face including the floor. When you enter, the glass is milky. The whole cube is then extended out past the side of the building. Suddenly, accompanied by scary noises, the cloudiness clears, and you are looking 88 stories straight down. And up, and all around. It is pretty impressive. Joe and I were photographed standing on glass, with the earth visible far below us. He will use the picture to scare his sisters.

"She'll Be All Right"

Today we met with representatives of American businesses. I will not identify them, in case doing so would bring them some grief. They reported an interesting difference between American and Australian business cultures.

Americans take for granted that customer service is necessary to do your job correctly, and for you business to succeed. Likewise, Americans expect managers and professionals to push to improve the business -- coming up with good ideas is a valued way to contribute to the whole and to get ahead personally.

Australian managers and professionals, on the other hand, are told that "tall poppies get cut down." Pushing innovations and improvements is not regarded as contributing to the company, but as arrogant self-promotion. Likewise, Australian workers (and students, we also heard) think that if you have a job or a place, you are entitled to full pay or promotion for it, no matter how well (or poorly) you do the job.

Australian workers, in other words, satisfice. They do not push for the optimal solution, they take the first adequate one. Rather than seeking excellence, at the cost of conflict, an Australian is more likely to accept the status quo on the grounds that "she'll be all right."

National Identity Matters Most When You Are Abroad

One of my main reasons for choosing "Australian National Identity" as the subject of our course here comes from Centre College's extensive experience with study abroad: when they study out of the country, our students discover that they are Americans. (Except the international students, of course, who already had a parallel experience by coming to Centre). Americans probably do proclaim their Americanness to one another more than the citizens of most nations do. Still, there are dozens of distinctive expectations that we have at home without knowing it. These American expectations and assumptions come out by contrast in another society.

Today we had a stellar day with a group of sociologists at LaTrobe University here in Melbourne. Kerreen Reiger had organized a day with her colleagues, most notably Peter Beilharz, Karl Smith, and Sue Turnbull. They helped us reflect on Australianness. They also confirmed that their students think even less about their national identity at home than Americans do -- but discover that they are Australians when they are abroad. Several of the professors, likewise, reported that they only had reason to describe themselves as Australian when abroad.

I don't think this fact means that national identity does not matter at home. I think it just means that national identity is most salient when compared to other national identities.

Advance, Australia Furry

The Australian national anthem is "Advance, Australia Fair."

The two animals on the Australian seal are the red kangaroo and the emu.

They were chosen, in part, because they cannot go backwards. They can only advance.

Koalas in the Trees

Today we drove the Great Ocean Road. We were fortunate to see a bunch of koalas in the trees along the road. I will add a picture tomorrow.

Radical Christians Are Not Radically Australian

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

Today we visited with a fine Christian ministry, Urban Neighbors of Hope. They work in poor and immigrant suburbs east of Melbourne. Their main task is to live the gospel of love with those who need it most. I had not realized that they were a project of the Church of Christ, a cousin to the American denomination of the same name. What was even more surprising for a church with such a Protestant heritage, UNOH has a semi-monastic initiation structure, vow, and commitment. They do allow, even encourage, marriage, which makes a huge difference in how a monastic life plays out. They require, though, that both members of a married couple join the community, or not at all.

UNOH produces community for people who want to live a life of radical Christian commitment. There are small Christian communities like it all over the world. This community was started by an Australian, but he and his family now run the international version of UNOH from a Bangkok slum.

It has been hard for almost every Australian we have met to explain what is distinctive about Australian national identity. I think it was particularly hard for the people in UNOH because their vision of Christianity transcends national identity as much as they can.

The Touchiest Australian Issue: How the Aborigines Were Treated

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

A central front in the Australian culture war is over the "stolen generations" of aboriginal children who were taken from their families and raised in mission schools, fostered out, or adopted out. Conservatives have contested whether the policy was really bad, as well as whether it was really as extensive as liberal scholars and ideologues have contended.

The initial aim of the policy was to take "half-caste" children, to use the 19th century term. The justification for the policy was that mixed-race children were not accepted in aboriginal communities. The schools and foster placements were designed to help them assimilate to mainstream (white) society. The policy was not, at least officially, directed toward children of aboriginal couples.

Today we took a fine "aboriginal heritage tour" sponsored by the Royal Botanical Garden in Melbourne. Our guide, Brian, talked primarily about the many uses aborigines made of the plants in the garden. He started us off, though, with his own story. "I am a member of the stolen generation" he began. He said that he, his brother, and his sister were taken from their mother when he was two. He was adopted by a white Melbourne family. He did not see his siblings for 30 years.

However the policy to remove some children from aborigine mothers may have been conceived, it sure feels like their lives were stolen to some of those children, now grown to adulthood.

Australia Was British Until the 1960s

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

It has been very hard for the Australians we have read and talked to to say with confidence when "Australia" begins. Part of the difficulty is that the political dates are not the emotional ones. 1788, when the First Fleet landed, is commemorated as Australia Day. Yet the fleet came to establish a convict colony -- not something that Australians want to celebrate, even today. 1901 is when the federated Commonwealth began, but the New Year's Day anniversary was just the bureaucrats' deadline to acknowledge a sense of unity that either already existed, or had not yet been achieved. Gallipoli, the World War One battle in which Australian troops fought bravely but futilely, is the emotional birthday of Australia, but is not politically significant.

What has been coming clear to me is that Australians thought of themselves as British into the 1960s. World War II caused a rude awakening to the fact that Britain could not protect Australia -- and worse, would not if it cost much. America would thereafter come to be a more important military ally. In the 1960s Australia started incorporating Aborigines fully in the national conception of who made up the Australian nation; it was only in 1967 that a referendum passed to include Aborigines in the national census. It was Britain that gradually weaned Australia from being an overseas part of Britain. The last straw, according to David Malouf, was when Britain joined the Common Market - turning toward Europe and thus turning away from Australia.

As David Malouf said in his Quarterly Essay on Australia's British heritage, "Being tumbled out of the nest was the making of us."

"Immigrants" as Pre-Australians

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

Today we went to Melbourne's fine Immigration Museum, located in the former Customs House. We talked with Georgie Meyer, the director of public programs who led our tour and answered our questions, about who the museum served. Most of the local adults who visit are from British and other European descent. The more recent immigrants, from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, are very unlikely to come on their own.

What I take from this is that the social category "immigrant" is a status between "newcomer" and "old stock descendant." Groups thought of a original settlers are founders, not immigrants (Samuel Huntington says as much, talking about the U.S.). On the other end are groups in which the original immigrant generation is still alive. They don't go to the Immigration Museum to hear their story, they go to the [ethnic] Cultural Center to live their story.

Immigrant is not just a temporal status, though. An immigrant group is assimilated into the "pre-Australian" path. They are part of a larger category, defined not by where they came from, but by what they are about to become. Recent migrants might go back home. Immigrants, on the other hand, can be seen, in retrospect, to be here to stay. Immigrants are migrants turning into Australians.

This insight applies to the United States, and other settler societies, as well.

The Convict Stain

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

We took a tour of Melbourne today. Our able tour guide, a proud Melburnian, emphasized that Melbourne, unlike Sydney and most of the other Australian cities, was not founded by convicts but free settlers. He even allowed that other colonies, later states, in Australia thought Melbourne and Victoria, the state of which it is the capital, were a bit snooty because they did not have the "convict stain."

In fact, though, convicts were sent to Melbourne from its settlement in 1836, often as the indentured servants of free settlers or as indentured laborers in surveying parties. From 1845 to 1849 convicts were sent directly to Melbourne as "Exiles" who had the freedom on the colony, but were not permitted to return to England until their term was served.

Richard Hughes wrote his great book on the convict foundations of Australia, The Fatal Shore, because growing up in Australia the convict past was ignored. The convict stain still lived, though expressed more by silence and ignorance than by cover-up and shame.

Our guide appears to have been raised in the pre-1960s era when the convict past was simply not discussed. It was fascinating to see that the shadow of the convict stain lives on.

The Bushman and the Farmer

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

In 1958 Australian historian Russel Ward published The Australian Legend. He argued that the bushman -- the men who worked in the Australian bush at whatever was to be done, mostly on sheep stations -- loom large as icons in the Australian national identity. Ward's book was a landmark in Australia's thinking of its own national identity. The easy-going, egalitarian, earthy, matey bushman has been read as the foundation of a society of similar virtues. Ward's thesis has been controversial for 50 years, but it is still a powerful starting point for thinking of the Australian-ness of Australians.

Ward explicitly compares the Australian frontier legend with the American version, as articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner. There are similar types in the two frontiers, the cowboy having much in common with the bushman. Still, Ward concludes that the American emphasis on the independent yeoman farmer led to American individualism. The Australian outback, though, was just drier and harsher than the American plains. Instead of family farms, Australian agriculture rested on sheep stations controlled by rich owners. The bushman is an employee. The distinctive virtue that bushman developed in those more difficult geographic and economic circumstances is that distinctive Australian virtue of "mateship." Ward sees this as the foundation of Australia's greater collectivism, when compared with American individualism.

Ward makes a rich argument, which I think holds up in its main points.

Burkas at St. Kilda's.

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

For our first full day in Australia, I took everyone to the beach. This was fun for the students, and had the practical effect of beating jet lag. Our bodies spent the day adjusting internally to the Australian sun clock, and they were so tired afterwards they went to bed at a reasonable time (I think - I do not enquire to closely).

St. Kilda's is an human-scaled beach town just down the tram from central Melbourne. We were advised to get off at the Luna Park stop. We puzzled at the name until we saw the front gate of the amusement park of that name, a four story clown's head. We walked through the clowns' gigantic mouth into an old-fashioned amusement park, with bumper cars, rocking "ships," and a big old roller-coaster running the perimeter. The one oddity of the rides was the "hellarious" haunted house, featuring evil clowns.

Every world city features wonderful cross-cultural mixes. Australians with Japanese tattoos, Americans with Aussie Rules Football team shirts, a Japanese girl with an "I don't give a chuck" tee-shirt that showed a Chuck Taylor sneaker. My favorite sighting of the day came within Luna Park. Muslim mother and daughter, Pakistani at a guess. Daughter in modest Muslim apparel - covered head, arms, legs. Mother in full burka, only her eyes showing. Both laughing, heading to the rides. And both wearing Crocs - pink for daughter, purple for mom.

Go calmly mixing world.

Happy New Year From Fiji - Tomorrow

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

We are in Fiji on a day-long layover on our way to Melbourne. We left Los Angeles on New Year's Eve (we watched the ball drop in Times Square on streaming video on a student laptop, then blew noisemakers while we waited at the gate). When we arrived it was already the Second (thanks to the International Date Line).

I was going to store our luggage and force sociology on the students by taking cabs to a Hindu Temple and the one-block main street. For ten hours.

Wiser heads prevailed, though, and through the help of Margaret Travel Agency in Nadi airport - that is, by Margaret herself - we instead bought three rooms for the 22 of us at a modest beach resort. We stored the luggage, got to shower and swim in the ocean and the pool, eat a leisurely lunch, and head back to the last leg of the flight refreshed.

I recommend this plan to all.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I Write to You From Australia in the New Year!

The Gruntled Center will take its annual Christmas vacation for the rest of the year.

I hope you enjoy your Christmas week, however you spend it.

If You Are Reading This, Your Odds of Lasting Marriage Are Better Than Even

Divorce360.org has a divorce calculator that lets you calculate the odds of your marriage ending in divorce. The basic finding is that college graduates who did not marry very young have good odds of their marriages lasting. Different generations have different odds, which are built in to the calculator.

Based on old general data on who reads blogs, and anecdotal but very current information on who reads this blog, I would say confidently that the Gruntled Center audience is in the good end of the distribution of lasting marriages. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but your odds are good. So relax and enjoy.

Thinking About a World Without Newspapers

The Gruntleds are heavy news consumers. We listen to National Professors Radio -- I mean, National Public Radio -- each morning. A normal evening in our house has everyone on a laptop reading some kind of news, with cable news in the background, leading into fake news on TV. We have among us dozens of news and semi-news blogs on RSS feed. Mrs. G. has the BBC website as her homepage (I, of course, have Centre College :-) ). Many a blog starts with the New York Times.com or CNN.com or BBC.com. And we subscribe to two daily newspapers, which I read religiously. If news were cut off, we would be in big trouble.

But if newspapers disappeared, our life would barely change.

It is clear that newspapers are in big trouble everywhere. Recently I read some speculation that one consequence of the current recession might be to decimate newspapers as an industry, shrinking down to the very big and the very local.

On the whole I can see more benefits than costs to converting news delivery to electronic forms. They are easier to search, quote, save, and link together.

My only concern is that there is not enough money in online news to support reporters, especially local reporters. Local news may become entirely a part-time "mom job" carried by stringers. We already have the example of the California paper that is written entirely by part-timers in India, reworking public sources. National news may become a subset of cable news. I dearly hope that subscription models of national news sources might work, but I can't think of any right now that I feel a need to subscribe to. Television is profitable because it includes ads in the one information stream it offers at a time, but television is a very bad medium for news.

We do need news, and that means news that pays. We don't need newspapers.

The Coffee House Test of a Crunchy Suburb

David Brooks introduces the useful concept of the "crunchy suburb" in On Paradise Road. This is an inner suburb of a big city. It has more of the people he called "bobos" (bourgeois bohemians) in an earlier book. Among suburbs, it is likely to have more professionals, better schools, and more sophisticated consumer goods.

We are in Mt. Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb where my sister is hosting Christmas this year. It meets these criteria. Mt. Lebanon has, I think, been more corporate and Republican in the past, but is shifting in the professional and Democratic direction that many good-schools inner suburbs are.

Danville, KY, is too much of a small town to have such nuances among the various sections of town. The coffee houses are in the middle of town and serve everyone from all the neighborhoods and "suburbs." We needed to come to a larger city to see a crunchy suburb in action.

We are sitting in a coffee house in Mt. Lebanon. It filled up just after school drop-off. Mrs. G. suggested that this is a measure of a crunchy suburb. The first necessity of a weekday morning is to get the kids to school. The second necessity is espresso.