Ideas@TheCentre
Does an Australian culture need an Australian Game?
Jeremy Sammut |
16 April 2010
The new thinking the CIS has helped to promote is that Australians should reject the cultural cringe and needn’t worry what ‘Euro-snobs’ (to use the tabloid parlance of the Sydney Morning Herald) think about our plebeian culture. Our democratic national ethos – the free and easy social relations between people of different economic classes – is superior to the hierarchical ways of European societies in which elites embrace ‘high culture’ as self-conscious markers of social distinction.
The crass rendering of this thesis is that bogans are better than Brecht. A more interesting and debatable idea is whether those Australians who prefer Melbourne to Sydney because the former is ‘more European’ are cultural-cringers.
As well as raising the perennial Sydney versus Melbourne rivalry, this issue also raises the question which city is the more dinky-di Australian. To find the answer, we have to examine what really matters to Australians: sport, more particularly, football.
Gold and the influx of migrants in the mid-nineteenth century built Melbourne into what it remains to this day: an outstanding example of the Victorian-era metropolis. The native-born sons and daughters of the goldseekers also started playing and following the Australian Rules game.
In Melbourne, everyone follows the AFL regardless of their background. This phenomenon has further democratised the culture of that city because following the footy is a great social leveller.
Not so in Sydney. In fact, Australia’s democratic ethos hits a brick wall in Sydney, a city divided by two competing codes. Sharp social and cultural distinctions are drawn over one’s preference for Rugby League or Rugby Union.
It is appropriately Australian that the plebeian subject of football is invested with such social importance. But what the ‘war of the codes’ suggests is that national culture will never be as democratic nor as national as is commonly claimed unless the Australian game somehow manages to truly becomes the national game. Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at the CIS. He grew up in Sydney and has lived in Melbourne.
