Pommy-bashing
Richard West
On a bus in Johannesburg one day this year, a girl who had been looking over my shoulder at the Spectator, indicated a headline and asked: 'Excuse me, what does "Anglophobia" mean?' When I explained that it meant fear or dislike of the English, she looked rather puzzled. This exchange came back to my mind when I read the recent anti-English or 'porn bashing' remarks by Australian politicians, and noticed the sullen scowls of their Test players on TV this week. A girl on a Sydney bus might not know the word "Anglophobia", but she would know the feeling all right.
Indeed Australia is the one country to which I have been where an Englishman can expect to be met with hostility as soon as he opens his mouth in a public place. 'They drink warm beer and bath only once a week' is the stock abuse shouted by Sydney cabbies at those who are slow starting up at the green light, for Poms are widely regarded as bad drivers. This anglophobia — which does not I think extend to the Scotch, Welsh or Irish — derives from the old hostility to imperial rule, to which has been added a new dislike of immigrant shop stewards and other trade union militants.
It is no use the Englishman pointing out that Australia's native trade unionists need no instruction in bloody-mindedness, as one can see in Broken Hills, the old mining community now union governed. There is no consistency among =porn-bashers'. One English journalist was knocked to the ground and cursed as a 'Pommy pooftah' for having ordered a dry sherry, yet Sydney teems with Australian homosexuals, The Poms are often roundly accused of 'coming over here and stealing our women'. We lose all ways.
Having said this, I must admit that most of the English people I met in Australia gave little grounds for national pride and indeed seemed to justify 'porn. bashing'. In Sydney, for instance, I met a young man who regaled me for some time with antiAustralian jokes and boastful accounts of the fights he had won against 'convicts'. He then revealed, without spotting the irony, that he had managed to emigrate in spite of having served two prison sentences because his local police force had hushed up his record in order to get him out of the country. (Australia normally will not accept convicted criminals). In Perth I met an English girl whose father and mother had gone back home (after coming with a state-assisted passage) because they disliked Australian bread.
Amazement at my countrymen increased after having been tipped off by a TV reporter (himself an Englishman) concerning a certain pub in down-tewn Sydney, on Pitt Street as I remember. During the week it is an average, that is to say rather dreary, Australian pub frequented mostly by office workers but which, at the weekends is taken over by young English immigrants, or sons and daughters of English immigrants. Their average age was just over twenty. I went into the smarter downstairs bar, what we would call the saloon, and started to talk with a young man and his girl friend, whose families had lived in the west of London. They came here each Friday' and Saturday night, they said, in order to get away from Australians and to talk about England with other English people. The things they talked about most, they told me, were Ole unfriendliness of the Australians, the gassy beer, the lack of discotheques, the lack of good football teams and the incomprehensible accents. Since these young people and their friends had most of them
been brought up in Australia I was surprised by their insularity and still more surprised to be told that even the English did not mix with each other. In the bar we were in, they were all 'Southerners' -from below the Trent; to meet the 'Northerners' I would have to go to the other bar at street level.
In the public or 'Northerners' bar I met a boy of about eighteen whose parents had come out from Bradford when he was seven. He told me he did not enjoy Australia and indeed he still spoke with a Yorkshire accent, but life was all right as they had a nice 'unit' (Australian word for 'flat') and nice neighbours most of whom , were from 'home'. 'You mean from the UK?' I prompted him. 'No, from Bradford and Leeds' he corrected me, 'although there are some from Sheffield and even London'.
My surprise turned to bewilderment when this young man went on to explain that even within the 'Northers' bar there was no fraternisation between the Yorkshiremen, who drank on one side of the room, and the Lancashiremen, who drank on the other. The manager of the pub, an Australian, told me that sometimes after a football match in England, involving Leeds or Manchester or one of the Northern towns, there was quite a lot of argument, What is it the English immigrants miss in Australia? They have their cars, TV, scandalous newspapers, racing, cricket, alcohol and a tolerant tradition of letting workers take 'sickles' or days off on Monday. For the Greek and Italian immigrants it is a different matter; they must learn a new language and way of life, which many find uncongenial. A Greek barber complained to me for example; 'In Greece, on Sunday, man puts on dark suit, goes to cafe, drinks coffee talks with friends, family. Meets everyone. Laughs. Here in Australia, on Sunday, man stays at home. Wears shorts. Mows lawn. Drinks beer. Meets nobody. Does not laugh'. Australian suburban life makes no appeal to gregarious South Europeans but is not markedly different from life in an English suburb.
The mutual hostility of the Australians and the English has been put down to various economic and ociological causes', some of them no doubt valid, but there is also a quite irrational and instinctive dislike. Each people gets the other's goat. The old hostility between the two cricket teams, which blazed during the 'body-line' argument in. the Thirties, was rekindled three years ago by the 'bouncer' dispute and still further inflamed this year by Kerry Packer's threat to the Test Series by crass, bullying Packer, as seen on British TV, might serve as a caricature of his nation in British eyes. It now appears that the first result of his enterprise has been to destroy first the morale and then the competence of the very Australian team he has tried to buy. The resulting English triumphs and jubilation have irked the Australians and may be responsible for the outbursts of 'pommybashing'.
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