The Age newspaper, Melbourne
Dumbing down when blonde ambition rules
Greg Baum
October 16, 2010
BRITISH social researcher Simon Anholt attracted some opprobrium this week when he said Australia was seen as the world’s ‘‘dumb blonde’’: attractive, but shallow and self-possessed. It is not fair, but it is no less fair than the unflattering generalisations we make about the rest of the world, including the Brits. And since most of the rest of the world knows Australia only by media imagery, it is a perception that we either will have to deal with or learn to live with. Protesting that it is wrong won’t change it.
Anholt’s timing was incidentally telling. For most of the past two weeks, as the Delhi Commonwealth Games has unfolded, much of Australia has resembled a dumb blonde, tizzying itself up in its green-and-gold ensemble in the mirror, twirling all that gold through its fingertips, stroking the silver, too, but wrinkling its nose at the bronze. Bronze doesn’t really go with green-and-gold.
This flaunting, flouncing, flirting Australia either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that much of its bedecking is fool’s gold, sparkling like the real precious metal, but without its weight and purity. The Commonwealth Games is by definition now a discount competition. Australia takes it seriously, because we take all sport seriously, and ourselves more seriously than we once did, too, as seriously as, well, a dumb blonde.
Advertisement: Story continues below In Delhi, India took the Games seriously because it was the host, and England took them moderately seriously because it is hosting the Olympics in two years’. The rest, as far as could be told from here, lacked either enthusiasm or resources, or looked upon the Games as they look upon the Commonwealth, an anachronism. Commonwealth records are so meaningless now that one was claimed by an Australian in an aths final, only for someone to realise later that it had already been broken in a heat.
Contemporaneously with the Delhi Games, in Bangalore, Sachin Tendulkar was making a masterful double-century to lead India to a series victory over Australia. In 10 years’ time, I know what Indians will remember most vividly about this month, and it will not be a few trinkets from the Games.
That is not to ridicule the Australian athletes, who can only do their best. But it is to question the way the context of their feats was impossibly distorted. The way it looked on commercial television, Australians’ victories were at the same time world-beating and won against shadow or invisible opposition. They could not be both. One report said Australians had finished second and third in a race, but did not even identify the country of the winner, let alone his name.
This, of course, is not new. At the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games, at least twice the broadcaster cut away from medal presentation ceremonies after minor medals had been presented to Australians, but before the anthem of the non-Australian winner was played. Visitors remarked on this narrowcasting. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world sees us as self-obsessed?
Even the ABC was guilty this time. It covered the Games comprehensively, which was frustrating in one sense because it meant that there was no coverage of the Test cricket, but laudable in another, recognising that the ABC has a broad charter. But too many ABC commentators used ‘‘we’’, ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘our’’ when talking about Australian athletic feats. Professionally, this was jarring.
On the second-last day, I heard a long three-way conversation about what ‘‘we’’ would have to do to raise ‘‘our’’ performance in track and field before the London Olympics. The ABC had a team in Delhi, but it was there to commentate, not compete. It has a duty to make that distinction clear.
Anholt said it was surprising that Australia did not have an organisation devoted to the promotion of culture, like Germany’s Goethe Institute or France’s Alliance Francaise. Arguably, Australia’s are the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Institute of Sport. The role they have played in reclaiming Australian sporting pride after the gold-less Montreal Olympics in 1976 cannot be underestimated. Nor can the way this had fed into national morale.
But nor should Australians overestimate their place in the world because of well-developed prowess. If I were to generalise about the British attitude to Australia’s sporting success, for instance, I would say it is admiration, but not necessarily envy. Many Brits would like their country to be better at sport, but do not depend on improvement as a crutch for their self-worth. They think Australians do.
When I wrote about this once previously, I was met with a barrage of indignant and abusive mail, which, sadly, served only to underscore the point. It was the dumb blonde’s hissy fit.
But the dumb blonde analogy is unfair in one important way, not to Australia, but to women, and for this point I am grateful to a schoolboy at a breakfast at Scotch College yesterday. He noted that in Delhi, two Australian men had cracked it when beaten, both making unseemly gestures at officials.
But Sally Pearson and the Australian netball team, both denied gold medals in circumstances at least as heart-breaking, accepted their fates nobly. Pearson distinguished herself by congratulating the British team whose protest had relegated her, saying she had no hard feelings.
Evidently, Australian women are better than men at winning and losing.