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.

Despite a steep rise in immigration from Asia in recent years, Britons remain the largest immigrant group, and the Australian government can be aggressively cheeky in their pom poaching efforts. During a junior doctors’ protest in London in 2023, the South Australian government put up posters nearby encouraging doctors to desert the NHS, offering $15k towards moving costs and the prospect of a life filled with natural wonders and sunshine. British doctors and nurses are emigrating in droves, attracted primarily by higher pay, but also by the same promise that has always attracted British people to Australia (if centuries of advertising are anything to go by): open spaces, freedom, and adventure.

Not that modern Australia is entirely like that, of course. A population that was just 57.5% urban in 1911 is now 90.3% urban. For most Australians, life contains a lot of air conditioning and not much in the way of crocodiles. But the danger of the landscape has nevertheless shaped the culture in enduring ways. My impression as a partial outsider (I was brought up in Britain, but am descended from Australians) is that Anglo-Celtic Australia continues to venerate the symbols of specifically rural masculinity – utes, blundies, Akubras – and that the larrikin and the sportsman retain their heroic status in popular culture.

Australian progressives are doing their best to knock these masculine icons off their pedestal. During our most recent visit, I noticed a recurrent clash between two competing visions of Australia: the rural, male, coarse, conservative, and white, set against the urban, female, refined, progressive, and ethnically diverse. This clash is well depicted in the so-called ‘bogan wall’, a piece of street art in Fitzroy that depicts a white man adorned with the symbolism of his despicable class: a meat pie, a durry, a stubby, and a tattoo of bushranger Ned Kelly. All caricatured for the enjoyment of the well-heeled residents of inner-city Melbourne.

For a culture that prides itself on its egalitarianism, you sure do hear a lot of animosity directed towards bogans – a style of animosity that will surely be familiar to readers in other parts of the Anglosphere, where chavs, rednecks, and hicks come in for much the same treatment. One possible explanation is that there’s No War but the Class War, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that analysis, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the bogan (and the chav and the redneck and the hick) also codes as both white and male. He is (ahem) an intersectional folk devil. Maligned on the basis of his class, sex, and ethnicity combined.

Some of this is ideological. Just as in Britain, elite Australians are embarrassingly Yankee-brained and many of their political ideas have been imported directly from America. Transgenderism is massive in inner-city progressive enclaves, for instance, and – as in so many parts of the world – George Floyd murals popped up in Australia, much like aspirational Britanni in the furthest outskirts of the Roman Empire donning togas. American progressives say that working class white men are deplorable, therefore it must be so.

But this ideological change is jogging along in the wake of a much more important material change. Put bluntly, it’s not actually progressivism that has longhoused men, it’s modernity. A society that has access to central heating, supermarkets, and a modern police force just doesn’t need men – at an individual level – to chop firewood, hunt for meat, or defend their homes from attack. Of course it still needs men to perform the roles necessary to keep these complex systems working, but tasks that were once performed by every man are now relegated to teams of (overwhelmingly male) engineers, truckers, farmers, police officers, etc. whose work is often invisible. Gloria Steinem insisted that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and on an individual level that’s true. Collectively, we all depend on men to keep the lights on, but it’s easy to forget that our light switches work only because of the ongoing contributions of countless unrecognised men.

Australia has been affected by this process just like every other modern country, but not to the same extent. Despite the best efforts of progressives, Australian culture really is a more masculine than, say, British culture, and working class Australian men have sometimes fiercely resisted their marginalisation. See for instance the recent incident at the ANZAC Day dawn service in Melbourne, and note the very assertive responses of veterans in the BTL comments and in vox pop interviews. These Australian men are really not happy about what they perceive (correctly) as a cultural and political campaign against them.

My suspicion is that the longhousing process has been somewhat delayed in Australia by the challenge of installing modernity in a particularly hostile environment. For instance it took a long time to bring reliable electricity to all of rural Australia – Walhalla, Victoria, was the last mainland town in Australia to be connected to a reticulated electricity supply, finally joining the grid in 1998 – which is why traditional Australian culture prizes the practical skills necessary to live in remote places without access to centralised infrastructure. The status of utes, blundies, and Akubras are symbolic evidence of that.

Add to this the fact that Australian food is overwhelmingly produced by Australian farmers, who are mostly male and almost exclusively white. Of course a hyper-urban society might not necessarily realise who exactly it depends on for food, but the ferocity of the Australian environment can never be entirely forgotten, particularly when it comes to the threat of bushfires. Locals are often called upon to participate in firefighting, organised by regional volunteer forces, and although Victoria’s Country Fire Authority (CFA) now makes a show of recruiting lots of women (firefighting demands “compassion” as well as “brute strength” they say), the roll of honour is overwhelmingly composed of male names – and Anglo-Celtic ones, at that. When the environment is deadly, you do actually need a lot of brute strength, which means you need a lot of men.

The Australian authorities seem to realise this when it comes to pom poaching. It’s only at home that they seem to forget it.