The minutiae of popular culture has a very different weight and significance for people from the UK, and a role in the creation of collective and personal identity that simply isn’t the case in Australia. I opened the k-punk book again the other day and stumbled across a line (from Part III of his massive essay on The Fall) about The Birthday Party and their trash Americana schtick, which Mark described as a way for the band to try and ‘cancel an Australian identity that they in any case experienced as empty, devoid of any distinguishing features.’ Ooof. Ouch. But it’s true — I’m sure The Birthday Party did see Australia in those terms. I was having a text message exchange a little while back with a friend about how one of the tasks of trying to decolonise one’s thinking is to learn to see what’s in front of you, what’s actually here, in all its existing complexity, and not be forever in thrall to the idea that culture, ‘real’ culture, only happens elsewhere. But the cultural cringe, as we call it here, is really hard to unlearn, and there are material circumstances that contribute to it, like the sheer fact of Australia’s distance from the rest of the world, which the internet doesn’t really eradicate (though obviously, without it, I would never have come into contact with any of you). And the fact that when it comes to things like pop music, Australia has always been a secondary market. Expectations are always low that anything original will come from here, and I think we’re too often content to be sold to, rather than to make, or to answer back. I know that one of the reasons — probably the primary reason — I was so in thrall to the British music press as a teenager was because it seemed like these questions about popular culture, and cultural production, really mattered, and it mattering felt intuitively right to me.
One thing that is excruciatingly difficult to do in Australia is to talk about the nation’s history in any honest sense, and in a collective sense, and often the people who try doing so get picked off and targeted as aberrant individuals — particularly Aboriginal people, particularly people of colour, whether or not they already have a public profile, though I think an existing profile tends to compound the backlash. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘If you don’t like it here, then leave’ etc. etc. And the nation’s collective inability to confront our history has everything to do, I think, with the general devaluation of culture, here. Mark’s sense that The Birthday Party experienced Australian identity as ‘empty’ has absolutely everything to do with the ‘legal’ declaration of emptiness — terra nullius — by which the British justified invading and colonising this land in the first place. Nullity runs so deep in Australia, back to the nation’s legally fictional beginnings. There’s a lot of self-hate at work in this place, even when (or perhaps especially when) it operates as a belligerent nationalism