by Nick Bryant
The pilgrimage to Australia Zoo also gathered pace, with the tribute wall starting to take up more of the car park. Little-known country and western singers brought out Steve Irwin tribute songs – much to the annoyance of his rights-conscious management team – and a trail of mutilated stingrays, at least ten of them, were found along the Queensland coast, killed in an apparent string of revenge attacks.
Television channels changed their schedules to accommodate his death, the current-affairs shows mounted live broadcasts from Australia Zoo (one featured a presenter resplendent in a safari suit with a lizard perched on her shoulder) and the networks enjoyed a ratings bonanza. Indeed, the only program that week to outperform the fast-assembled Irwin tribute programs was the fly-on-the-wall documentary Border Security: Australia’s Frontline, which hinted at a quite different story altogether.
The main reason why Irwin’s death became so engrossing, however, was that it fast became an intellectual event: part of that perennial debate, long-running and anguished, over Australia’s national identity. Arguably an even more confronting figure in death than he was in life, the question of his contribution to Australian life became the subject of an ever more rancorous quarrel. It began as an argument between those who saw him as the living embodiment of some of Australia’s most celebrated values – courage, resilience, humour, larrikinism and mateship – and those who bridled at how this caricature of a man had become Australia’s most bankable global brand ambassador.
In the hours after his death, Russell Crowe had set the ball rolling by describing him as ‘the Australian we all yearn to be’. But then came a counterblast from London from one of the country’s cultural castaways, and a woman who could once have laid claim, like Irwin, to being the world’s most famous Australian. In the pages of The Guardian, Germaine Greer launched a ferocious attack on Irwin for spawning ‘a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small’ who would ‘shout in the ears of animals with hearing ten times more acute than them’. Deliciously, there was also a political edge to Greer’s assault. Irwin had not only lauded John Howard as ‘Australia’s greatest ever prime minister’, she complained, but only a few months before had also enjoyed a ‘gala barbecue’ with George W. Bush.
Now, posthumously, the wildfire warrior had become a cultural warrior, and his fellow Queenslander, the author John Birmingham, leapt, Irwin-like, to his defence. Birmingham started by savaging Greer – a ‘feral hag’ and a ‘poorly sketched caricature of a harridan’. Then he skewered the ‘inner urban elite’, which had viewed Irwin as just a ‘fucking moron’ and, worse, a ‘cashed-up bogan’.
Birmingham predicted that Irwin’s death ‘may become our very own Kennedy moment’, and that he would take ‘his place in the mass cultural afterlife next to JFK and Princess Di’.
The writer found an echo on the floor of the New South Wales parliament, during a debate on a motion condemning Germaine Greer for her anti-Irwin tirade. According to the Liberal MLC Charlie Lynn, she was nothing more than a ‘radical, left-wing, hairy-armpitted feminist’ on the hunt for publicity. ‘It was a sad and sorry day for the left-wingers and the terrorists,’ he added, to be confronted with the groundswell of sympathy for an authentic Australian hero. ‘They hate anything to do with Australia, and they cannot understand what it is to be Australian.’
The argument over Irwin had fast become a proxy battle between the urban elites and, seemingly, everyone else. Andrew Bolt, a columnist at Melbourne’s Herald Sun, spoke witheringly of a ‘cultural class that feels threatened by blokes in work boots who shout “crikey”’.
But the urban elites hit back. ‘Irwin’s death provided a trigger for a gratuitous outpouring of hatred directed at the “elites” who found his antics embarrassing, especially when they were represented as authentically Australian,’ opined Clive Hamilton, the then head of the Australia Institute. ‘It’s the new face of the cultural cringe – we canonise anybody who makes it in the US or Britain no matter how lowbrow the performer.’
Perhaps this was precisely the kind of verbal stoush that Steve would have wanted, and a fitting requiem. Unknown to most, three years before his death he had declared himself to be a conservationist not only of Australian wildlife but also of the country’s colloquialisms. His grandfather and great-grandfather had fought and died for Australia, he had said back in 2003. He uttered each crikey, strewth and fair dinkum in their honour. ‘They didn’t fight on the frontline and get shot at by the enemy for us to forget who we are,’ he declared. ‘They weren’t saying holy smokes or goddamn. They were saying crikey, strewth, fair dinkum, have a go ya mug. That’s what they were saying, mate.’ Evoking the Anzac spirit, the most solid of sentimental buttresses, he concluded, ‘I want to speak Australian, mate, because I believe that’s what they fought for.’
What I was witnessing, then, was Australia’s very own clash of civilisations: not so much the bush against the big cities but the battlers against the elites, and the lowbrow against the high. For a newly arrived foreign journalist, it was hard to think of a more instructive initiation. The stereotypes I had set out to avoid had become the subject of feisty debate. The stereotypes were the story.
Admittedly, not much of this dissonance came across in our coverage. The bosses in London, whose kids were traumatised by the death of their beloved Crocodile Hunter, saw Steve Irwin as a great Australian hero, and his memorial service as a fittingly Antipodean send-off. They especially liked the idea of Diana-lite mourning, and the sight and sound of hardbitten Australian cobbers temporarily succumbing to their emotions. On television especially, we pretty much delivered the consoling certainties that were expected, from the elephants sauntering into the Crocoseum to the tribute wall of khaki shirts. Like the rest of the world, we loved this orgy of Australiana.
By the time we drove back to Brisbane along a road that would soon be renamed the Steve Irwin Way, even the memorial service had become a matter of contention. The debate centred on whether it could be described as authentically Australian at all. In its big box office staging, there was a showiness, even a brashness, that was at odds with the usual preference for understatement and muted ceremony. The ute and exotic animals became props in a production choreographed with an American audience in mind. Unlike the funeral, say, of Sir Donald Bradman, the service was not even televised in its entirety on free-to-air channels in Australia, since the global rights were held by the US behemoth Animal Planet.
Besides, this paean to the bush had been put together by Irwin’s business partner, the Brisbane-based television impresario John Stainton, who admitted during his oration at the service to being a self-confessed ‘city slicker’. Arguably, then, it owed more to Oprah than to the outback. Then came the counter-argument: the easy embrace of imported idioms, the idolatry of the bush from inhabitants of the cities, and the desire to impress audiences in America and Britain were the very things that made the memorial so faithfully Australian.
If nothing else, Irwin’s death demonstrated that Australia was far more complicated than international news organisations, such as the BBC, liked to think. We preferred hearing about an assumed Australia, recalling the usual stereotypes, rather than anything more confounding or unfamiliar. No doubt, this is one of the reasons why big international news organisations have neglected the ‘land down under’, a phrase dripping with inconsequentiality. Generally, they have viewed it as a faraway backwater, where many of its stories, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might have put it, ‘fell just short of being news’.
Long ago, Australia lost the legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite – just as President Johnson lost him over Vietnam – who wryly observed that the country harboured too many reporters and not enough news. Australia’s sheer irrelevance also provided the starting point for another American, Bill Bryson, whose book Down Under is probably the most widely read portrait of modern Australia. Before setting off for Sydney, Bryson sauntered the short distance to his local library and conducted a fruitless search of The
New York Times index for 1997. Australia merited just 20 mentions, whereas Albania got 150. If anything, that year yielded an exceptionally rich harvest of Antipodean yarns. Over the following 12 months, just six stories were considered ripe for publication. Ending his adventures and travelogue, Bryson left readers with a departing thought, as melodramatic as it was melancholic: ‘Life would go on in Australia,’ he opined, ‘and I would hear almost nothing of it.’
My hunch was that all this neglect was born of a false sense of understanding: the misplaced notion that because assumed Australia was so easily comprehensible there was no real need for any further enquiry. It was almost as if we allowed Australia’s tourism advertisements to do our journalism for us. Every few years or so, another would pop up to reassure us that everything we supposed was true. The blokes still drank beer. The women were still blonde, bikini-clad and beautiful. The barbie was still aflame, like some Antipodean chariot of fire.
In my more evangelical moments, this was something I was determined to change, both out of national interest and self-interest. No longer should the tyranny of distance mean that Australia, and its resident correspondent, would suffer the felony of neglect. Any talk of ‘relevance deficiency syndrome’ would be confined to the past. And although coming to Australia still had the feel of a lifestyle sabbatical, part of my search for a balanced life, there was still enough of the egomaniacal foreign correspondent in me not to want to disappear entirely from public view.
So when I arrived in Australia, I planned to start with the internal contradictions and then work from there, in the hope of persuading London that this truly was a continent that defied neat encapsulation. Ahead of my BBC interview for the Sydney post, I even drew up a list of anomalies, which effectively became my pitch. How did the ‘no worries, mate’ nation come to enter the new century with the third-highest suicide rate among the world’s rich club of nations and see the consumption of anti-depressants triple over the past decade? How was it that such a supposedly laid-back country had some of the longest working hours in the Western world? Why the sanctification of the bush and the outback in what was one of the most urbanised countries in the world? Why was the country regarded as so fiercely nationalistic when its competing states appeared surprisingly antagonistic? Why such a boozy reputation when its ranking had slipped in the world drinking league to a lowly 20th? Though the championing of the underdog and the trumpeting of the ‘fair go’ suggested that a spirit of egalitarianism still prevailed, why had those nostrums not always been extended to its original occupants or most recent arrivals, especially those conveyed by boat? Why did this fun-and larrikin-loving land have such a zealous and overbearing bureaucracy, a question of especial pertinence to Paul Hogan, its most celebrated comedian, who at that stage was being targeted by the tax authorities? Call that a stereotype? Even the word ‘mate’ had a dual meaning and could be deployed to indicate both genial camaraderie and snarling menace. My hunch was that we had got Australia wrong.
In coming to Sydney, I realised I had retreated from the frontline of news but found myself disorientated nonetheless by the speed at which I was flung centrifugally to its outermost margins. It was a case of Kabul one minute and Kylie the next. Literally. The Princess of Pop had recently announced that after a successful convalescence from breast-cancer treatment her global comeback tour would commence in Sydney. Naturally, London went ballistic.
Looking to infuse the story with greater depth and meaning, I was keen to report that Kylie had emerged from her brush with mortality a much more substantial figure, that the experience of going through a treatment she likened to being hit by a nuclear bomb had made her an advocate as well as a battler, a fully realised woman rather than the chirpy tomboy we had grown up with on Neighbours. What I was proposing, I suppose, was an Antipodean Angelina, a storyline that would work for both of us.
But the evidence supporting my thesis seemed a little weak. Take Kylie’s first public appearance in her comeback week at a mansion overlooking Sydney Harbour, where the media assembled to watch her spruik her new celebrity-branded fragrance, Couture. Consider the book she penned during her convalescence, The Showgirl Princess, a story she herself described as a true fairy tale, full of glitter, glamour and dreams. Finally, there was her long-awaited entry at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, through a trapdoor in the stage, enshrouded in a cloud of dry ice and enclosed in a stunning pink costume designed by John Galliano. In the age of the sermonising rock star, a beaming Kylie made do with the briefest of salutations: ‘Good evening, Sydney! How are you feeling tonight?’
That same week, Israel had bombarded Gaza, Nancy Pelosi was about to become America’s first-ever female house speaker, Aung San Suu Kyi had been allowed to leave her house for the first time in six months, Russia announced that the way was now clear for its entry into the World Trade Organisation, and the head of MI5 had warned that hundreds of young British Muslims had been radicalised to the point of jihad.
While all this was unfolding, the central question facing the BBC’s new Australia correspondent was whether the diminutive Kylie would collapse under the weight of her feather tiara. For the news that night, I delivered my obligatory piece to camera with Kylie on stage and fans wearing ‘Look at Moiey, Look at Moiey’ T-shirts ranged behind me. But for one of the first times in my television career, I rather hoped that the viewers would avert their gaze – or, even better, venture into the kitchen to boil the kettle. Those who were watching – alas, seven million – saw me tread the dark path of show-business cliché as I reassured the great British public that Kylie had tonight lived out her own fairy tale. With plumed pomp and musical majesty, the Princess of Pop was most definitely back.
Kylie hardly fitted into the new paradigm of Australian reporting that I had arrived determined to usher in. Nor did the only other entry in the news diary when I first landed in Sydney: the start of the Ashes – that ribald orgy of conditioned thinking. True to form, the Gabba – or ‘the Gabbatoir’, I should say – was boiling with Anglo–Australian hostility on the first morning of the series, as each set of supporters played out the role assigned to them by history.
Outside the Colosseum-style stadium, to the tune of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, a male-voice choir sang ‘We shall beat them at the Gabba’. On a promotional stand next door, Ford motors sought to make further inroads into the Australian market by inviting fans to take part in ‘Tonk a Pom’. Bringing to the game a carnival spirit that I have only since seen rivalled at Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, fans streamed into the ground wearing wide-brimmed sombreros, green and gold singlets, and zinc cream smeared across their faces like warpaint. Many had inflatable kangaroos in their arms, the Southern Cross tattooed on their shoulders and tiny Australian flags transferred onto their faces that twinkled like stardust. Not to be outdone, the travelling English hordes arrived dressed in medieval chain mail, suits of armour and jester’s hats. A couple of fans even turned up in drag, impersonating our queen and yours.
‘Good morning, everyone,’ said Richie Benaud, lending both his voice and imprimatur to the hype. ‘In my lifetime, I’ve never known such anticipation for a sporting event.’
Then, England’s lanky opening bowler, Steve Harmison, hurtled towards the popping crease, with the cherry-ripe new ball in his hands and the burden of an expectant nation on his shoulders. In a blur, he hurled down his delivery, which was caught at second slip by the England captain, Andrew Flintoff. Had the batsman, Justin Langer, played any part in altering the ball’s trajectory, England could not have got off to a happier start. Alas, Harmison was solely responsible. His opening delivery had pitched so wide of the wicket that it had come close to landing in the outback.
Bodyline had been replaced by Shoddyline, according to the Aussie scribes, though it was Martin Johnson, that great sage of Lord’s press box, who produced the superlative line of the day. ‘Channel Nine chose the opening day to proudly unveil its new “infra-red hot spot camera” for detecti
ng edges,’ he noted, ‘but it is still some way short of developing the technology required for Harmison’s first ball, which could only have been tracked by a satellite device from Cape Canaveral.’
In the terraces, as well, an unexpected drama had started to unfold. Throughout the morning session, and well into the afternoon, the Barmy Army’s travelling trumpeter had tried to rally the tourists with regular blasts on his bugle. A classically trained musician, Billy Cooper had taken his annual cricketing sabbatical away from the pit of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to belt out morale-boosting ditties such as The Great Escape theme tune, ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Jerusalem’.
But it was his rendering of the theme tune from Neighbours that landed him in trouble. As the crowd joined together to espouse that perfect blend of good neighbourliness and understanding, a group of stewards and policemen moved in, wrenched the trumpet from his lips and ejected him from the ground. Bereft of Billy the Trumpet, the Barmy Army threatened to boycott the rest of the match, and when its members joined in the singing of ‘You all live in a convict colony’ to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’, it seemed especially redolent with meaning.
The Barmy Army interpreted the silencing of their bugler as a product of the Aussie win-at-all-costs mindset, and claimed to be the victims of some vast conspiracy hatched between Cricket Australia and the police. What they failed to appreciate was that the Australian fans were also trampled by this crushing authoritarianism.
There was a backpack ban, food and drink had to be transferred into airport-style plastic bags, and pizza boxes were forbidden, since they could be used as projectiles. For the same reason, streamers, confetti and ticker tape also appeared on the contraband list. A beachball ban was also in place, and anyone who managed to smuggle an offending inflatable into the ground soon had it punctured if it landed within reach of a boiler-suited police officer or steward.
