Why haven't my fellow countrymen written anything worthwhile?

naw worse
sydney

>sydney

Ah. Is being easy going outlawed by your Sharia Law now?

>originally from melbourne
naw you can smell the convict roots in this city i swear

Murnane is one of the best writers.
up there with kafka

>Why haven't my fellow countrymen written anything worthwhile?

we have something called the Cultural Cringe. anything that smells of wank is immediately ridiculed, so we don't have a lot of professional postmodernists or philosophers. we're more likely to be taking the piss out of them (see the "Angry Penguins" scandal).

David Chalmers and Peter Singer

You make the best hoaxes.

It was the first country to have a social Democratic Party in power and demonstrated you could have good working conditions and a strong labour movement without vilolence or inefficiency.

Managed to create the most egalitarian society of all the settler colonies and successfully defeated numerous attempts to import or create the inequality and tyranny that fucked over and created conflict in other colonies.

Ensured that land was distributed in a way that wouldn't centralise it the hands of absente landlords

Put down an Irish rebellion

Defeated attempts by planters to introduce slavery
In general though Australia is probably one of the most surprising countries in history what started as penal colony run by he military somehow managed to produce one of the most stable, prosperous and egalitarian nations in history all of which was done without the immense violence and blood shed seen in other nations

Shit could be worse. The only internationally known NZ writer is Katherine Mansfield, and that was a century ago. And most of the world thinks she's British anyway.

Any other 20+ ausfags about to experience another lonely weekend in solitary?

Yep. But I'm going to get shitfaced tonight, so I've got that to look forward to.

I don't even drink. My weekend will be trying to work up the willpower to get studying done and feeling bad about how little I study for 2 days straight.

I'd like to get fucking munted but my doughy physique is already doing me no favours.

Bush poetry is objectively awful.

In the UK I would say Peter Carey is probably the most famous Australian writer on the literary scene.

Aren't there like 6 people in Australia? Why would you have more writers than say Canada?

What about Elliot Perlman? He's not groundbreaking or anything but his stuff is pretty good. I actually quite liked Three Dollars. A.B Faceys An Unfortunate Life is also a really good look at life in Australia at the turn of last century. It's almost Dickensian.

Man that hits close to home

>science, sport and economic endeavors.
Even that we lag behind in other countries. The only things that helps us stand out is the memes people have about Australia, which most locals embrace with unironic gusto.

Also, why would the age of the country have anything to so with it?

All of these examples probably speak more to our apathy than anything else

you australians invented en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime

Probably because we don't give a shit about something unless its considered cool or popular

I don't think you would find another group of people on the planet who are lore masters for both Greek mythology and Rambo movies. I don't think I have ever met someone who has read Plato but they get the gist of Zeus raping people. Other than that its all Harry Potter and Game of Thrones (the show, not the books)

>Also, why would the age of the country have anything to so with it?
Because the "Australian Identity" hasn't existed long enough for there to really be anything in it worth discussing in a literary sense that's uniquely Australian.

We have a similar origin to the US with our frontier period, and our whole egalitarian, sobriety thing in regards to the ANZACs is pretty similar to the death of the old west. We're currently going through a weird transitional period as we start aligning more with China as a result of our economy which might trigger a little introspection, but overall we don't have a huge amount that's unique to Australian culture, particularly in literature. Films are a bit better, probably because they're more accessible to the majority than literature is (see The Rover, Animal Kingdom, Wake in Fright, Gallipoli).

But America has always had a literary/philosopher culture. After the federation it seems like we all just went "fuck it"

If you like hard sci-fi, Aussie author Greg Egan writes some of the best out there.

Australia's most famous author will be YOU!

True, but America's first settlers were pilgrims that carried a religious/philosophical tradition with them, and the revolution was basically a lightning rod for anti-monarchists, who would have been more likely to be writers/philosophers than other groups, whereas Australia's colonization was based more on social/economic grounds, with a majority lower class immigrant population for most of it's history, and a culture focused less on abstract ideals like the American Dream and more on getting enough to eat.

Mathew Reilly is a better aussie version of Tom Clancy

Although he writes from the perspective of non-Australians and, well, how great is Tom Clancy?

Reilly's pretty great if you want to read a Spielberg movie

>Peter Singer
:^)
>A.B Facey
I tried reading him but his writing was awful. I guess that was the point because it was the first thing he'd written in like his 80s and it was hyper-sincerity or something but still
Fun fact: I dropped acid once and communed with local dreamtime ancestors.
Yeah I know.
Is bush poetry really awful? I find it kind of endearing. It's pretty cringey sometimes though. But if you don't know Waltzing Matilda off by heart you can fuck right off back to China

Has anyone read The Shiralee? I greatly enjoyed that one.

The Road with less depression and more drunken bogan fights.

Waltzing Matilda is about a undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who steals a sheep, sings to it and then rather than go to jail, jumps into a river and dies, and his autistic ghost haunts the creek for years to come

And there are mother fuckers that want that shit to be the national anthem

>Waltzing Matilda is about a undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who steals a sheep, sings to it and then rather than go to jail, jumps into a river and dies, and his autistic ghost haunts the creek for years to come

Holy fuck how could you NOT like this

>go to jail
haven't they hanged them for sheepstealing back then?

>implying that isn't emblematic of Australian culture

>Fun fact: I dropped acid once and communed with local dreamtime ancestors.
You can't just say that and not elaborate

What is there to elaborate? I didn't really communicate actually I just saw shit like pic related moving around me. Probably influenced by the fact that a day before I was reading a thing on Jungian archetypes and aboriginal myths (it might have been a Joseph Campbell book).

It was honestly terrifying, I mean I actually thought the spirits were going to kill me for a bit. Haven't done any drugs since.

I didn't say I didn't like it, but its just a meme that has gone way to far

That sounds like a sick time, I gotta hang out with you more aus-friend

tell us more about your dreamtime journey, user

I was kinda surrounded by weird figures like those in the pic dancing around me and I remember thinking I was going to die and then the hallucinations got real strong and I believed for a while that I was actually dead.

At some point I just kind of gave in and stopped worrying about being dead but it still wasn't nice.

Yeah, lots of good psych research is happening in your shit country.

>:^)

Aside from preference utilitarianism clearly having nothing fundamental to stand on, what's wrong with him? He does a much more thorough job of showing exactly where other moral philosophies are bullshit compared to any other philosopher.

Clive James is a remarkable wirer. Cultural Amnesia being his best work

>le killing babies man xD

Memes aside, he actually makes very logical points and I agree with him on pretty much every one of his opinions I've read. It's just that in aus we study his theories in HS as part of the ethics unit of the Philosophy course and so he's a meme.

Yes, it's not lonely if you have alcohol.
Study and alcohol can be a potent combination, as long as you have some study meds like ritalin or modafinil to add to the combo. Though this is for an arts degree, I don't know what it's like for "real" courses.

>Cultural Amnesia being his best work
Noice mate. I don't know how much James counts as an Australian writer since he's lived in the UK most of his "adult" life.

Emily Rodda is based.

quads confirm

Every weekend perpetual solitude here.
Do you know anybody that reads? Only thing anybody reads is game of plebs.

Melbourne here.

I'm literally at a party, sitting in the corner reading bleeding edge.

Fucking end me senpai.

We spell it as 'gaol', cunt.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

>ctrl+f Peter Carey
>a fucking pom's the only one mentioning him
What the fuck's wrong with you people? Oscar & Lucinda is a masterpiece.

>see the "Angry Penguins" scandal
>tfw genuinely enjoyed those poems

But he's not Australian...

>tfw had a dream about Slim fucking Dusty last night

Turbo autist

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate

He was born in Melbourne.

...