The Blackberry Walk

Yesterday, an Australian colleague of mine was telling me that in Australia people don't say what they are but rather what they are not. For instance, in Australia, when you ask how someone is feeling, they say "not bad"; or if you ask how much something costs, they say "not much". When I pointed out that it is the same in Britain, he seemed a bit peeved. I then, in all my autism, emphatically exclaimed that the Australians are children of Albion; after which he looked at someone else in the lab and so as to confirm that I was acting a little kooky. It had been a long day. Australia is hardly too different from the UK in many ways, since most of their population arrived there in the past one-hundred and fifty years. There are small Mediterranean groups in the mix, but unlike the US, the bulk of the population is British: and you can tell. Australian humour and customs parallel Britain, albeit a bit more laid back. Much like how all the religious extremists of the 16th century formed the seed of the United States, later fruiting an nation of zealots, Australia is also born of the seed of extremists, albeit of a different flower. Australia was of course founded as a penal colony, and much of the land was given to freed convicts or military men wishing to stay. The seed of Australia, as we see also in its fruit today, is a strange balance between the freedom of the surf board and a barbie on the beach drinking fosters juxtaposed against some of the most stringent laws on drugs, immigration and border security in the Anglosphere. Whilst Australia's seed lies in this juxtaposition of the penal colony, the country grew to maturity with several waves of mostly British immigration after the Second World War. "Ten Pound Poms", named owing to how much it cost them to migrate (wiki states is £500 in today's money), arrived in Australia in droves. And although moving to Australia is now far more expensive, even when adjusted for inflation, it hasn't ceased to be a popular option. A colleague of mine recently went - and from what I've heard he has no intention of returning. Why post-Second World War? Why now? It's because Australia acts as a kind of bastion for when the economy is depressed in Britain. Those with ambition and a drive to adventure journey to the Outback's Mars-like terrain in search of a new life. This has selected, much like with the zealotry of America, for a very specific type of people: those who are laid back, high in openness to new experiences, and have no qualms being unmoored from the ritual and scenery of their homeland. I am not one of those people. Even when I go on holiday I begin to yearn for familiar sights of Britain - particularly for that shade of emerald green only to be found here in the grass and the foliage. The Martian terrain of Down Under would be bad for my digestion. For the next part, please listen to this song, Australia by The Kinks. The song listed above I think distils what Australia is. It is a place 'without class distinction', where people are chill and 'don't have a chip on their shoulder'. It's a place with good weather - that constant bug-bear of the British - where you can 'surf like in the USA. Seemingly Australia is a cake-eaters society. The Australian dream, in a similar but distinct way to the American dream, is to have all the good bits of Britain without some of the stickier traditions. Class distinction, whether you see it as core to the British experience or as a curse from Norman times, is one of Britain's awkward paradoxes; where else in the West do you find such bifurcated cultures across class divides? Perhaps related to the anxiety of class, the British with their 'stiff upper lip', their prudishness, and their other complexes is always how we're caricatured of the continent. But Australians aren't like that. I reckon it has something to do with the expanse of land they have compared with our claustrophobia. Australia's painted as an image of Anglo-paradise; and yet it's somewhere where you'll have a 'sunny Christmas day'. As I've described elsewhere, where Britain was once considered a society on the fringe, home to the twilight-lit scenes of Arthurian lore and their magical happenings, by the Second World War she had become front and centre of the world. In this context, Australia became the 'edge of the world' where mysterious happenings occur; a topsy-turvy land of inversion where Christmas is in midsummer. If you listen to some of The Kinks' other songs, like their album Village Green Preservation Society, you'll realise that much of their complements for Australia are backhanded. Best exemplifying this in the song are lines like 'everyone walks around with a perpetual smile upon their face': the song Australia is written as a parody of how people view the country as an Antipodean Eden. Once you realise the song is a sardonic critique of excitement for Australia, you begin to see the rest of Australia's promises dripping in irony. Because, as Chesterton put it, being run away from their local communities in order to start again, without care for fixing the communities which raised them.

It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.

The Australian type, therefore, is one who runs away from the problems at home in hope of a new beginning, instead of attempting to beautify England. Now we come to the rather shaky premise promised in the title: the connection with the Human Instrumentality of Evangelion. The truth is that the jazzy, near-psychedelic improvisation making up the bulk of the aforementioned song reminds me of HI. There's this sense in the instrumentation of a psychic soup, of a merging of individuals, and a kind of psychosis of the unification of opposites. This same musicality is in The End by The Doors, Waka Jawaka by Frank Zappa, and, of course, in Komm Susser Tod, particularly at the end where Shinji enters instrumentality. The comparison isn't as flimsy as that however: much like how Shinji throughout Eva runs away from his problems, there is a part of the Australian experience which is the same. Running away from your issues at home and not standing up to them and solving them just leaves more unexorcised demons to chase you; and the more those demons hunt you, the more of a fantastical vision you develop for where you will escape. For Shinji, in the microcosmic understanding of Evangelion, his constant fleeing from standing up for himself generates his vision of Human Instrumentality: a world where, as John Lennon says in Imagine, 'there are no borders'; communication is effortless; and interacting with others needn't require courage. Granted, Australians don't suffer as Shinji suffers. But the song is sung from the perspective of an advertiser of Australia to those at home in Blighty. Like HI, Australia is a new Eden - a place where the difficulties of your current life choked up in a dying seaside town can be gotten rid of. You can run away to Australia, leaving you relatives and neighbours behind to start a new life. It is certainly tempting. When I first came to uni I did the same; I ran away from the town I grew up in to moult my cringey teenage self to become someone new. And whilst looking back I recognise how important that was to my growth as a person, I often also wonder what I left behind. Layers of papier-mache of awkward lies, once cured around the heart, makes certain eras difficult to revisit.