How much do you hate your expats?

Going through my collection of Australian insults a couple of days ago, something struck me. Knock me down with a budgie feather, but Australians don’t particularly like their expats either.

So it’s not just Jarred Cinman comparing South Africans who leave to a cancer that must be cut out in order for the “healing” to begin, which is a bit like blaming your dripping nasal passages for a nasty cold instead of the virus that caused it. (And there I thought that South Africa had somewhat more pressing problems than whiny housewives and their boring overpaid accountant husbands worried about being hijacked in their SUVs when they’ve left the safety of Dainfern.)

Granted, Australians don’t hate their expats as much as South Africans do. The ones resident in Australia don’t necessarily regard moving to another country as an act of treason. But they do expect their expats to keep any negative opinions on Australia to themselves. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

Germaine Greer is the expat most Australians love to hate and she was in good form in 2008. Writing an essay in which she blamed the abuse of Aboriginal women and children by Aboriginal men by the rage experienced by the latter; rage caused by colonial oppression was bound to make her even more popular. A couple of leading Aboriginal academics dismissed her views as racist.

“Australians are well and truly sick of being lectured to by out-of-touch expatriates. I suspect everyone knows an ex-pat or two — some famous and some not — who cannot refrain from pointing out all the supposed deficiencies of this wonderful country,” declared one reader of the Australian, before going on to suggest that a new noun be developed to describe people who liked to bring Australia down: these people were all “germaines”. (Any critical Australian resident past his sell-by date would be known, conversely, as a “keating”.)

“Greer’s mortal sins are that she lives in Britain, is childless and unmarried, and occasionally gets drunk at dinner parties. Surely she should know the rules of the joint,” left-wing journalist Mike Carlton wrote before he was fired from the Sydney Morning Herald. “Expatriate Australians, returning for a visit, are not expected to knock the joint. They are to bemoan, with grovelling humility, the unhappy turn of fate which has condemned them to fritter away their lives in futile, sunless exile.”

Rolf Harris, famous for Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, a song that I remember singing frequently as a member of the Bryanston Primary School Choir from standard two until standard five, more recently suggested that the problems of the Aborginals stemmed from their traditional values. “Rolf Harris’s pronouncements on indigenous Australians are, like his forays into painting and music, a disaster,” wrote a Sydney Morning Herald reader. “Let 2008 be remembered as the Year of the Embarrassing Expats.”

Australia’s most famous exiles left in the 1960s, desperate to flee the parochialism of the Lucky Country. Greer was one of them; others included Clive James (who became familiar to many South Africans after the 80s-era SABC apparently bought every single TV show he ever made) and Barry Humphries. (Incidentally, JM Coetzee also left for London at this time, though he returned to South Africa after completing his studies and later wrote a typically dry, distant description of the experience in which he refers to himself in the third person.) Clive James wrote in his autobiography of the trauma of sharing accommodation with South Africans, who were all ghastly racists.

In the 1980s, Malcolm Turnbull, who is now the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, attacked all three for their negative portrayal of Australia. Turnbull was especially offended by Humphries’ characters, Dame Edna and Sir Les Patterson, and accused Humphries of being unpatriotic. In the late 90s, his views had hardly shifted: “Humphries has made his living from caricaturing and denigrating his own country in a pretty gross and sickening way … I think he’s done a lot of harm to Australia,” he said.

Personally, I think (by way of comparison) Evita Bezuidenhout would make a marvellous ambassador for South Africa.