Australian exceptionalism

I was thinking about the 2005 Asian tsunami today, and specifically my own brush with it. For our first overseas holiday, my wife and I had planned to go to Phuket, but instead decided on Sabah, in Malaysian Brunei. We were lounging on a beach there on the day that Phuket, Sumatra, southern India and any number of other areas around the Indian Ocean were levelled.

In Australia, we are a proudly agnostic nation, where aggressive atheism is often considered a part of our natural charm. Yet we share a strong faith and that is: bad things don't happen here, not the way they happen elsewhere.

Sure, we're not entirely insulated from reality. We have car crashes, floods, bushfires, drownings and bankruptcies. The very mundanity of those events, however, goes towards the ultimate thrust of our belief. There are no terrorist attacks in Australia. (Not entirely true, but true in effect.) Our soldiers go overseas, rough up the natives and come back largely unmolested. Our economy might labour at times but it rarely goes backwards. Our worst earthquake, in 1989, was the result of mining subsidence and killed about thirteen people.

So we instinctively feel that, here, we are safe, or as safe as one can be in a soft, pink, infinitely breakable body. The obverse of this belief is that once we transgress our national borders, we live under an unfamiliar shadow of danger.

This mindset has its most outstanding example in the Bali bombings. Australians were shocked - shocked! - that anyone would want to carry on their nasty foreign politics in a way that might hurt Australians, let alone in Bali, which because of the number of bogans wandering its beaches had been adopted as an honorary part of Australia. So upset were we that we couldn't help but adopt Indonesia's tragedy as our own, wearing our horror at the death of 88 Australians shamelessly while completely disengaging from the significantly larger number of Indonesians murdered.

It's a big part of the reason the world has started to regard us as louder and more drunken Ugly Americans - this air of bulletproof freedom from consequences, the feeling that anything happening to us is a lark rather than a real event, that the rest of the world is a mere amusement park for the cynical atheists of Australia.

But what is this attitude if not faith?

It's an easy argument to make that this shared belief is a truer and deeper faith than that of the average churchgoer. Separate from societal expectation, and without any real reason to do so, we accept that the world is run in a specific and benevolent way for our own benefit.

It's an odd position for a nation built on genocide to take.