Tall-poppy Syndrome and Australian identity

Australians love an underdog. We often get behind the disadvantaged or 'battling' party in sporting matches, in conflicts, and in any situation where some number of people potentially come out 'on top' of another. Often, however, this psychology goes so far that we display the type of behaviour that is commonly labelled 'tall poppy syndrome' in that we tear down the 'best' among us in the various pursuits that together comprise the activities of our society and our communities, be they economic, sporting, artistic, intellectual, and so on.

Accordingly, a person cannot be held up as an ideal in Australian society for long before he or she is attacked and scorned, often in quite a primitive and vicious manner, by various people and/or interest groups. So what could possibly be the cause of this? Two hypotheses suggest themselves to my mind: our convict past on the one hand and our multiculturalism and pluralism on the other.

To the first: A large part of our outlook as a people was forged at a time when Australian society was sharply divided between ruler and ruled, master and slave, corrector and convict. From 1790 to 1820 the nation was first and foremost a British penal colony, and a modern and materially developed nation was so quickly built simply because the then leaders of the separate colonies possessed the luxury of a totally subject labouring force, i.e. the convicts, who could be mobilised and set to work at once where ever some infrastructure building needed to be done, largely for pastoral, agricultural, and settling purposes.

Many convicts were subsequently 'placed' in the employment of freemen, many of whom came to Australia basically as businessmen to benefit from the economic opportunities presented by a rapidly developing Western capitalist nation with a large and cheap labour force. The convict workers were given very few, 'rights', if any, and punishment for abandoning one's assigned duties, be they in the service of the particular colony on the one hand or a freeman on the other, was swift.

It would not be a huge leap of faith to assume that a subjugated collection of British outcasts shipped to a harsh and inhospitable new land and made to work under the hot Australian sun would have harboured a very vivid resentment and jealousy towards those 'on top' considering the comparative luxury in which the British officers and subsequent free settlers surrounded themselves with.

The second hypothesis behind our Tall Poppy Syndrome is another but more recent aspect of our collective outlook: the political philosophy of pluralism and an associated social philosophy, multiculturalism. Pluralism in a multicultural setting is basically an idea that encourages the coexistence of different interests, lifestyles and ideals within a single geographical and political entity, many of which naturally would have existed with more autonomy in less globalised times.

Considering the inherent lack of consensus in matters of ideals that this Pluralism promotes by its very definition it should surprise us little that Australian cultural possesses no meaningful shared definition, on the whole, of what constitutes success or failure, resulting in the state of affairs in which anyone held up as an elite or as encompassing the ideal is quickly torn down from their pedestal.

But of course Australian society does possess some kind of unconscious common ideological orientation, despite the fact that this is not to an extent that we can publicly glorify those who encompass it. Due to the disparity of values that is effectually promoted in our society by pluralism and multiculturalism we simply lack any consensus of what constitutes success beyond that element of success which is common to all the interests, lifestyles and ideals that bubble away around us: materialism.

The aspect of the 'good life', or that which constitutes success, and is common to all the competing sets of values has naturally taken the form merely of material success. For everyone, no matter their culture, beliefs or ideals, needs to achieve a certain level of material sustenance before they can then fulfil their higher desires or ideals. Such a point of commonality held amongst people possessing different value systems can thus be referred to as the 'lowest common denominator'.

Thus, while we scrap with each other to tear down the different individuals who are held up as the ideal Australian from time to time, be they a particular sportsman/woman, intellectual, artist, public figure, or worker etc, it comes as no surprise that all the while behind the scenes the one type of person who is increasingly being emulated by the average joe is the purely material man or woman: the person who has the big car, the big TV, the McMansion and accordingly the big ego, put up like a wall around him or herself to block out anything which goes beyond the lowest common denominator concern for status through goods and money.

By David