Pity, derision and puzzled anger are part of the deal when I cross the border.
I’ve taken some long drives recently, leaving Victoria and crossing the border into Australia. And I’ve found that people out there in Oz pity us Victorians with a raised lip, the way you pity an addict, a drunk, an embezzler or beggar who came from a good home and an easy start in life but crashed to infamy via years of wantonly sybaritic habits.
“Yeah, it’s sad what’s happened to her – but she did it to herself, and she’s no one else to blame.”
It’s tough to be a Victorian in greater Australia now. Walk into any pub in South Australia. “Where you guys from?”
“Victoria.”
“Victoria, eh? Jesus! What’s goin’ on there?” And they’ll cite Dan and Jacinta and our debt and that bent unions and bikies are our kings in The Garden State now and what a shame it is. “Why do you need tunnels, anyway, when Jacinta’s got you all working from home?” they joke.
They think of us now the way the rest of America thinks of California – some collectivist faction that’s broken away from the commonwealth, rejected family values in favour of a woke sophistication, repudiated the rolled-up sleeves and the fair-go in favour of living on credit and diversity, and junked a perfectly good friendship with her sister states.
Of course, this comparison is way off the mark. California has a thriving economy, it’s a place of innovation and invention, the place where the IT age was born, the place Apple, Google et al live, and the place that is even now pregnant with AI, the world’s future. Whereas Victoria … well, we got the Commonwealth Games in a vote-buying exercise so cynical it would’ve been catnip to Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
“How did you guys fall for that?” they ask in the pubs of NSW. But they don’t want an answer. The question is the answer. Just a way of acknowledging Victorians are more easily duped than lemmings.
I have a German friend, Karl, who has lived in Australia for 40 years and routinely describes himself as Dutch when meeting people because, even all these years later, there’s always some smart arse in every cafe or gallery who must mention the wars when he hears you’re German. It’s easier to claim to be Dutch and let strangers roll out their hackneyed dyke jokes and their lame clog witticisms.
The people I’ve been travelling with recently began to use the same modus operandi as this German friend. When asked by a vintner at a wine tasting in the Clare Valley where we came from one companion said, “Orange, New South Wales”. With her being from Euroa this surprised me, but led to an easy conversation about the delights of rural New South Wales. Others among us, Victorians all, soon cottoned on. Where do you come from? Noosa, Queensland, Byron, Albany…
One lady, who lives in Port Melbourne, when asked where she was from said she was from Hobart, and had a lovely conversation about Mona. The trick is not to tell an actual Australian you’re from Victoria. “Sicktoria” one woman in Adelaide called it when, ambushed and flustered, I was honest about my roots.
There’s been interstate banter since Federation. In New South Wales they called us Mexicans because we were south of the border. We throw the sobriquets croweater, sandgroper and banana bender around. But that was a smiling tribalism got up because, really, we didn’t have any major rifts, differences, beefs or prejudices. We were, at bottom, family. It’s different now.
This isn’t affable siblings stirring each other. Victoria is on the nose out there – pitied, despised, held in contempt, laughed at. But most of all I detected a type of puzzled anger. “You guys actually wanted to be East Germany? After the countless dread examples, the smoking husks of wannabe Nirvanas, littering the globe … you guys actually voted yourselves into the arms of authoritarian collectivists and their crooked puppet masters?”
Whenever I’m interstate now, out and about enjoying a less corrupt reality, and some affable Australian asks me where I’m from, I clutch my throat with one hand and tell them the question is a microaggression. And if you come from Victoria, it is.
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Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
