Word: less
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...instance, in the bristling posture of denial that the Australian government recently took against U.N. criticism of its flouting of the human rights of Aborigines. Australians still tend to be worried about what "outsiders" think, keep asking and then get furious if the answer is even fractionally less than flattering...
...answer from America is benign but not satisfactory. America's idea of Australia is mostly thin and vague. Americans fantasize in a desultory way about Australia but know much less about us than we do about them. Australia, we hear, is rather like Texas 50 or 100 years ago. The basic American idea of the basic Australian male is - who else? - whatsizname, him with the big knife, star of Crocodile Dundee. Aussies (wrongly pronounced Awzies; the correct pronunciation is Ozzies, though we'd rather you Yanks dropped the dumb pseudo-intimacy altogether and just called us Australians) are all supposed...
...typical Australian" is not, as foreigners once thought, a bushman. He is a slightly worried guy with a tan, a bald spot, a mortgage, a mower and two kids, whose Australian dream is a double-front brick bungalow on a quarter-acre lot in the suburbs less than 30 minutes' drive from the nearest beach, with two other nice, two-kid, one-PC families on either side...
...convict era. They are wound tightly into our social history. One of these is the value set on "mateship"; another, related to it, is a much paraded dislike of ?litism. Mateship - essentially, male bonding - began in the harsh world of the penal settlement. It continued in the hardly less tough environment of labor that was the lot of most men in the bush: shearers, station hands, shepherds. To have a mate was to survive; to betray that mate was to be a scab, less than a man; such was the hard calculus of colonial life, and its traces are very...
...having been in Australia for 40,000 years or more, in contrast to the whites' 200 or less, the Aborigines were not giving up. So the policy changed to assimilation. First, the Aborigines were deprived of their nomadic tribal life and concentrated in "mission stations," communities run mainly by Protestant evangelists, where they were taught the Gospels, shown white ways and prepared for low-level jobs as servants...