There’s a man’s job for you IN AUSTRALIA

It’s not progressivism that has longhoused men, it’s modernity

Maiden Mother Matriarch is sponsored by Qualia. An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

Western Australian Police are trying to poach British police officers, and they seem to be doing a good job of it. The first wave of their recruitment drive apparently attracted 1400 applications, i.e. almost 1% of serving British police. Now they’re bombarding my TikTok feed with ads like this:

Macho, no? This ad is so very different from the “join our diverse team so that you can help people” style of police recruitment ad that became common post-2020. Western Australian Police are selling adventure, and specifically to men. All of the human figures shown in the clip are clearly male, and the beauty and danger of the landscape is the key sell: crocodiles, deserts, mountains, and waterfalls. All set to a drum and bass remix of Men at Work’s 1981 hit ‘Down Under’ (“I come from a land down under/ Where beer does flow and men chunder…”). In other words, “There’s a man’s job for you IN AUSTRALIA.”

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Australia has been poaching adventurous British men (and women) for a very long time. Up until the mid-twentieth century, immigrants to Australia were almost exclusively British. During the ‘Ten Pound Pom’ era, British people were lured out with the promises of subsidised transit costs and a guaranteed job at the other end. For most of Australia’s history, migration was a very serious business – expensive, arduous, and likely permanent. In the days before air travel, migrants departing from British docks would throw a paper streamer to friends and relatives who had come to see them off, both parties holding on to the streamer until it snapped and keeping the broken half as a keepsake, with the expectation that they might never see each other again. No other country has ever sent such large numbers of people off to distant settler colonies – not just Australia, but also America, Canada, and New Zealand – and the willingness of Britons to undertake these journeys indicates some strangeness in the national character: unusually high levels of individualism and xenophilia, I would guess. Traits that led to the making (and now, I fear, the unmaking) of British fortunes.