Love, hate or confusion?

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LAST year, a survey by the Lowy Institute concluded that the majority of Australians harboured negative attitudes towards America. John Howard and Peter Costello have since drawn upon this finding to scold Australians for such un-Australian thoughts, while Rupert Murdoch's concerns about anti-Americanism in Australia have predictably hit the headlines this week. But such responses from our political leaders are as simplistic as the question posed in the original survey. Expressions of anti-American or pro-American sentiment are certainly not new in Australian society. But, as with all complex relationships, it's a matter of degree.

The relationship between Australians and Americans dates back to the African-American convicts in the First Fleet when it landed in 1788. Miners from California's goldfields flocked to the goldfields of NSW and Victoria, where they shared their ideas about democracy and liberty and their business skills.

The US offered to the Australian colonies a model of how a modern immigrant society, away from Old Europe, could thrive. It was the model of a republican society, admired by colonial radicals in the antipodes. And, as historian Marilyn Lake has argued, post-Civil War America also provided Australia's federation fathers with lessons about the impossibility of sustaining multiracial democracies. The White Australia Policy emerged as much from white supremacist stories about race relations in the US as from the ideologies of British imperialism.

Australian attitudes to the US have been historically shaped by the influence of British culture and the rise of Australian nationalism. In the 1920s and 1930s, fears about the Americanisation of Australian society were often provoked for left-wing intellectuals by fears about the spread of Hollywood movies and trashy popular culture. When prime minister John Curtin looked to America for military assistance during World War II, this marked a shift in Australia's foreign policy ties with the US in the Asia-Pacific region. The subsequent decisions of Australian governments to participate in wars in Vietnam and Iraq have flowed from that closer relationship.

Australians tend to react to the US in patterned ways. Certain things about American society leap out at Australians because of the grid of their own culture. For example, here is a quick and blunt summary of what Australian university students most often say about the US when it is discussed in class: "Americans talk more fluently than us, and are more self-confident. They are more patriotic, and likely to be more religious. They do not have to vote in their elections, and many of them do not bother to vote at all. They lack a feel for irony and lack humour. They think they have the greatest democracy in the world, yet their own democracy has identifiable flaws, notable among them the treatment of the African-American population through much of its history. Their politics seems strangely organised because the labour/capital, employee/employer divide is not the main axis of political division. The class divide in American politics is always overlaid with racial and ethnic divisions of baffling complexity. Their media-suffused society is all surface and glittering image."

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