Antipodean Anxiety

Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is also so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

Mark Twain, More Tramps Abroad, London, 1897

Perhaps it's a symptom of that time honoured Australian tradition of cultural-cringe, but I tend to forget that we have been (& still are?) a destination of some interest to quite a few famous modern writers (Michener, Kipling, A.C. Doyle and Lawrence, to name but a few). Now I'm not going to pretend I'm any huge fan of Twain - it's not that I don't like his work, it's more that I don't love it - however I will confess to a involuntary ripple of patriotic pride when I discovered he considered us worthy of this... rather obtuse scribble. I suppose I’m pleased the passage found me, but I really wish I hadn’t thought too much about its premise because now it’s just annoying me. After all, it's a rather backhanded compliment isn't it? Mr Twain has merely restated up one of the great Western/European egocentricities – we exist as an authentic ‘reality’, you exist as our ‘sublime Antipodean other’. But this is well ploughed intellectual ground. The world has moved on since 1897 and while the idealised mythologies of the exotic still haunt global media exchanges, the conception of what constitutes Antipodality has broadened considerably.

It’s always been kind of amusing to me that Australians tend to use the word ‘Antipodean’ with a kind of reverence or intellectual relish which completely belies the true derogatory meaning of the term. I strongly suspect it has something to do with the 5 syllables ;-) I don’t exactly find it vexing (in fact I think since the historical roots of the term have long passed from common knowledge, the word itself has correspondingly passed into new meaning) but I can’t help resenting the implication, seeing that Antipodean originates from the Latin phrase, ‘beneath the feet’.

It’s helpful for me to remind myself occasionally though, that the Antipodes are not strictly limited to Australia and New Zealand. I’m afraid my instinctual world view still tends to flagrantly betray my Angelo-Celtic origins, and I find myself unilaterally ignoring all those other Asian-Pacific countries with an even greater claim to marginalisation. Shocker! Antipodality, in a general sense, is simply the feeling of being neither here nor there. It is an experience of identity in relation to the ‘other’, in which the relation always appears more strongly to consciousness than either the identity it founds or the ‘other’ it projects. Experiencing Antipodality is always very unsettling and sometimes a little schizophrenic. Thus there is nothing uniquely Australian about it, although it is a very common anxiety in Australian culture. This is a place which is always and has always (before it was even discovered by Europeans, one might claim) been perceived in relation to an ‘elsewhere’ – a powerful ‘other’ at that. First the British came and colonised. Then the Americans came and coca-colonised. We are no-one, whoever we are; always oscillating in Antipodality with elsewheres.

There is no question in my mind that the anxiety of Antipodality is growing ever more common. The globalisation of trade and cultural flows, made possible by information technology, has re-opened old wounds of identity. The volume and velocity of cultural product in circulation keeps rising. Popular music, cinema and television, the raw materials of popular culture, are increasingly sold into global markets in accordance with transnational financing and marketing plans. Suddenly cultural identity looks like it is in flux on a global level. What I find disturbing though, is that the relations and the flows are more clearly identifiable than the tangible sources or destinations themselves. Cultural differences seem to be no longer tied to the experience of a specific place. The 'traditional' differences of locality, ethnicity & nation are doubled by 'contemporary' differences, determined not by being rooted in a particular place but by being affiliated with a particular network.

This new experience of difference is an experience of an active exchange between places, identities and formations, rather than a straightforward drawing of borders. Welcome to modern Antipodality. With CNN beaming into every part of the globe that can afford it, more and more people are experiencing 'Antipodality' - the feeling of being caught in a network of cultural trajectories beyond their control. It’s sobering to think that the acceleration of transnational communication will only serve to make this Antipodean experience even more common in the future.

So what do we do when faced with the Antipodean experience? Well on the one hand, it can lead to attempts to shore up identity against the flux - a reactive return to an imagined core of immutable identity and community. Alternatively, Antipodality can be treated more as a fact of life than as a threat to identity – in essence creating identity on the basis of said exclusion or subordination. Ahhhh, actually that’s a little simplistic but I’m tired of writing…

Here’s a thought to end with: “We no longer have roots, we have aerials.”