You assume that Australia is an outpost of British/European culture on the other side of the world, but in many ways they are much closer to their relative neighbours China (just without any of the many interesting things that China has). For a country which prides itself on its invented myth of cheeky rebelliousness, they are the most conformist place you can imagine. Perhaps it is partially due to their unwavering commitment to boring shitness, and their hatred of anything new or from outside, but everything is banned. You will get a fine for not voting, for drinking in the park, for not having a fence around a swimming pool in your own back garden, for not putting stickers on glass doors – again in your own home, for parking facing the opposite direction to traffic, and for any number of other pieces of nonsense. Nobody complains about any of this, to do so is to be ‘unaustralian’.

Simply walking on the streets is viewed as an eccentric and possibly suspicious act. I used to walk to work – 20 minutes – and my colleagues reacted to this with baffled concern. This is one of the reasons it is such a cultural desert. Nobody is on the streets, and so there is no life. This is why its cities are as dead as its natural landscape. The population hates having to interact with anyone unless they have to, all they want is to have their block of land with their shitty uniform fences (you know the one I mean if you have ever been there) and to be left alone.

Their cities are an endless sprawl of shitty, monotonous housing with no public transport linking them. They set aside a couple of miles, build a shopping centre which looks dated before it is finished and which all contain the same shitty shops, and call that a town centre. To paraphrase Tacitus, they build a cultural desert and call it a desirable place to live. To own a home in these dessicated tombs is what people there aspire to, no matter how far from anywhere they might be. It’s not like they will actually see much of the area they live in anyway. They will drive from their air-conditioned house in their air-conditioned 4x4 to their air-conditioned shopping mall, thus avoiding human interaction and doing their bit to help warm the planet as quickly as possible.

Because the outside world is so anathema, and because there are so few of them, it is extremely hard to actually get to know any of them. As a general rule, they have a group of friends which they made in school, and who remain their friends for the rest of their life to the exclusion of anyone else. They then proceed to do the same thing every weekend until they die – drink in a garden and talk about… well nothing, because there is nothing new to talk about.

Of course, if you can integrate yourself into one of these groups, this will quickly bore you to death and you will find it impossible to make any meaningful connections, because the most exciting topic of conversation will be some stupid new restaurant which overcharges for the privilege of eating some nonsense try-to-hard combination of ingredients and some ‘quirky’ decoration. That, or which of the thousand stupid flowery beers with stupid names and stupid cans they most prefer. This is what they have instead of a culture.

Every country has its inward looking idiots. Britain is often thought to have an island mentality and a hostility to outsiders. This is true among some, but it is nothing compared to level which Australia takes it to. More importantly though, there is such a plurality of people in Britain (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) that, even if those voices are loud, you will not have trouble finding people across the spectrum of opinions and interests. The crushing uniformity of Australia means that you cannot escape it. Search high and low, and you will struggle to find an interesting person.

Like a particularly slow child who has reached adulthood and been forced to make its own way in the world, post-independence Australia has, after a painful period aping its parents as a shit knock-off Britain, made some feeble attempts to forge its own identity. Lacking the wit to do so, besides the gimmicky restaurants and craft beer, scrabbling around for something to build a country around, it has become increasingly obsessed with the military. Despite the fact it has only followed places of more consequence into misguided foreign wars, and never done anything for itself, now the ANZACS are deified. This is new – although ANZAC day is almost a religious event - nobody even paid attention to it until a few decades ago.