I await Azealia Banks' anti-Australian Instagram rants with masochistic anticipation. Her latest, prompted earlier this month by a new remix of one of her tracks by an Australian house music producer, was almost certainly her best work. The “piss poor” remake of New Bottega made Banks furious, inspiring a galaxy-brain outline of Australian cultural history—picking up where Robert Hughes left off. After invasion, opined Banks, Indigenous culture was barbarically “stomped out,” and a population of “convicts/mentally insane social rejects” had no choice but to look back anxiously to the country that sent them away in prison ships for their cultural blueprint. The island continent became “a vacuum of off-brand British culture” and not much has changed, except now we look to America for “ideas to regurgitate.” Either way, the so-called Lucky Country is “one the most culturally stale white nations on the planet.”
You don’t have to be a self-hating Australian (like me) to appreciate the truth in this. Non-Indigenous, post-colonial Australian culture is, it must be said, almost entirely Western derivative. We self-consciously try to replicate what’s happening overseas, often a few months or years too late, and then global audiences mostly overlook us, preferring that which comes directly from the Hegemon. Rejection breeds insecurity, envy, and a scarcity mindset, driving many of our most talented to leave, or, worse, paranoiacally deny their overseas influences, producing scenes that are somehow at once imitative and inward-looking.
I've talked about this dynamic with friends endlessly over the years. After one such conversation, someone sent me an excerpt written by Tacitus, the Roman historian, in which he describes how the barbarous Brits on the outskirts of the Empire began copying Roman dress, and soon took great pride in having more refined togas than those in the capital. This amused the Romans, who understood that what the Britons saw as an achievement was in fact only a feature of their cultural enslavement—after all, they were still wearing togas.
Such is life in the cosmopolitan provinces. I have to some extent come to accept it as an inevitable function of cultural imperialism. And yet, on a recent six-week trip through North America, I noticed a peculiar outcropping of Australian culture that offered a counter-example, something spreading away from the island back to the center.
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