Quick Guide

Australian wisdom

Quotes by Australians

By way of personal instinct, I have an inherent distaste for grandiose rhetorical statements, which don’t have any substantive dimension to them - Kevin Rudd prime minister

Never complain, never explain personal motto of Kerry Packer - billionaire

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop Robert Hughes - art critic and author

Winning needs no explanation, losing has no alibi Greg Baum - journalist

The bigger the hat, the smaller the property - Australian proverb

A champion team will always beat a team of champions - Early Collingwood Magpies teams

Where there are Torres Strait Islanders there is a community - Bill Stephens

I like villains because there's something so attractive about a committed person -- they have a plan, an ideology, no matter how twisted. They're motivated. Russel Crowe - actor

It's Australian to do such things because, however uncivilised they may seem, it's human to do them. Hugh Mackay

Unless you're willing to have a go, fail miserably, and have another go, success won't happen Phillip Adams - Left-wing journalist

As a leader you must celebrate life, you must celebrate success and paradoxically, you must celebrate heroic failures Lieutenant General D.M. Mueller

All our best heroes are losers Richard Glover - radio presenter

There are people who wish to draw attention to themselves by attacking me - Don Bradman - cricket player

Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It'll be the only one trying - Jack Lang - Labor premier

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks - Clive James

I've never seen anyone rehabilitated by punishment Henry Lawson - poet

The true Aussie battler and his wife thrust doggedly onwards: starting again, failing again, implacably thrusting towards success. For success, even if it is only the success of knowing that one has tried to the utmost and never surrendered, is the target of every battler Michael Page & Robert Inapen - authors

If the section cannot remain here alive, it will remain here dead, but in any case it will remain here. Should any man through shell-shock or other cause attempt to surrender, he will remain here dead. Lieutenant F.P. Bethune (clergyman by trade)

It's dead easy to die; it's the keeping on living that's hard - Douglas Mawson - Scientist and polar survivor

You never want an Australian with his back against the wall. You put any 12 blokes together and you'll get a job done. Whether it's getting a bogged four-wheel-drive off the beach or standing in front of a cricket wicket and making sure we're in a dominant position. It's the same dog, different leg action, so to speak - Matthew Hayden - cricket player

Not lip service, nor obsequious homage to superiors, nor servile observance of forms and customs...the Australian army is proof that individualism is the best and not the worst foundation upon which to build up collective discipline - General Monash

May as well be here we are as where we are -Australian Aboriginal saying

A Platypus is a duck designed by a committee - anon

Do you know why I have credibility? Because I don't exude morality Bob Hawke - Prime Minister

It's no good crying over spilt milk; all we can do is bail up another cow Joseph Chiefley - Prime Minister

It is long accepted by the missionaries that morality is inversely proportional to the amount of clothing people wore - Alex Carey

The media loved him. Why? Because he was a great exemplar of the new morality - in which you are judged not by your own sins, but by how savagely you damn those of others Andrew Bolt - journalist

The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy - Alex Carey

Nationalism is both a vital medicine and a dangerous drug Geoffrey Blainey - Historian

When you play test cricket, you don't give the Englishmen an inch. Play it tough, all the way. Grind them into the dust Don Bradman - Cricket player

It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies Arthur Calwell - Politician

If the guy next to you is swearing like a wharfie he's probably a billionaire. Or, just conceivably, a wharfie - Australian observation

A Man of Business is one who becomes possessed of other people's money, without bringing himself under the power of the law Marcus Clarke - historian

A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful money-maker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example Robert Menzies - Prime minister

The best way to help the poor is not to become one of them Lang Hancock - mining magnate

Ordinary people need to lead and not sit there and think that governments are going to spoon feed them Ian Kiernan - organiser of Clean up Australia Day

There is nothing so costly to the state as a ruined life Catherine Spence - Social and political reformer, writer and teacher

Shoot straight you bastards. Don't make a mess of it Harry (Breaker) Morant - executed soldier and poet

The most intense hatreds are not between political parties but within them Phillip Adams - journalist

The difference between a stupid man and a wise one is the stupid man's inability to calculate the consequences of the action. The same goes for government Brian Penton - journalist

The further left one travels, the more unhappiness you find - Janet Albrechtsen - journalist

Encourage your people to be committed to a project rather than just involved in it. You know the difference between involvement and commitment don't you? In a meal of bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved, the pig is committed Richard Pratt - billionaire

Australians will never acquire a national identity until individual Australians acquire identities of their own Patrick White - author

I admire not idealise Alice Swanson - Australian

Those who lose dreaming are lost - Australian Aboriginal proverb

Its like the axe that's had two new blades and three new handles but otherwise is just as it was when grandfather bought it - Australian proverb

The law locks up the man who steals the goose from the common, but leaves the greater criminal loose who steals the common from the goose - convict saying

If I had a donkey What Wouldn't go, do you think I'd wallop him, oh dear no - convict saying

Why are people so unkind? Kamahl - singer

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs Robert Hughes - author and critic

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art Robert Hughes - author and critic

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism Robert Hughes - author and critic

Dog must not steal from dog - convict saying

Such is life Ned Kelly - bushranger

If my lips teach the public that men are made mad by bad treatment, and if the police are taught that they may exasperate to madness men they persecute and ill treat, my life will not be entirely thrown away Ned Kelly - bushranger

I do not pretend that I have led a blameless life, or that one fault justifies another, but the public in judging a case like mine should remember that the darkest life may now have a bright side Ned Kelly - bushranger

I have outlived that care that curries public favour or dreads the public frown...let the hand of law strike me down if it will, but I ask that my story be heard and considered Ned Kelly - bushranger

If you go out for a big night and by some misadventure you end up in a prison cell, you can count on your best friend to bail you out, but your best mate will be in there besides you Australian observation

Out in the bush, the tarred road always ends just after the house of the local mayor - Australian observation

There is nothing more Australian than spending time in somebody else's country - anon

A queer country, so old that as you walk on and on, there's a feeling comes over you that you are gone back to Genesis - Australian bushman

The wowser mistakes the world for a penitentiary and themselves as the warden - Australian observation

The cricket bat is mightier than the pen and the sword combined - anon

It may be that your sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others - anon

We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavoured to live with the land; they seemed to live off it Tom Dystra - Aboriginal man

Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once - anon

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour - anon

Before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them, you're a mile away and have their shoes - anon

The Australian nation is a nation of blow-ins and we've got the lot here – bog Irish, reffos, dagos, wogs, slopes, you name it Bill Leak - cartoonist

A fair go for all, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, except for Poms, Seppos and Kiwis - anon

They who came here in chains, who were lashed while they worked in convict gangs at Port Arthur. They who like many others were driven through starvation or oppression from their home-lands to the shores of this new country, Australia. They, who for a multitude of reasons that hopefully, I or my children will never witness or experience, decided not to harbour grudges or discontent but rather to look to the future. They who embraced this country as their own and said; "let's get on with it, this is a new land, this is our home. Dennis O'Keeffe - Musician

What rugby league teaches you is that everything is temporary. The dead-set certainty is that there's adversity coming as well as success. You may as well make the most of it while you can. Matthew Elliott - football coach

I say to the young blokes, when you get asked for an autograph, don't knock it back because there'll be a time where no one will ask you Brett Kenny - footballer

The wisdom of Errol Flynn

It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper

I am not biased against the rich because they are rich, but the most lively people are those without money who would like to have some

Someone, I don't know who- it might have even been me- said, 'Any man at the age of twenty-five who is not a Communist has no heart: any man who is still is at the age of thirty-five has no head.'

Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality. It is a dream of young idealists. In practice a misnomer

I crave the indulgence of my senses but this is countered by an interior desire that is even keener than my senses to know the meaning of things

I want faith; but I am faithless

I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British museum or the Metropolitan - in the same spirit of curiosity. Here are the works of man, here is an art of man, here is the eternal pursuit of gold and pleasure. I couldn't be more sincere. This doesn't mean that if I go to La Scala in Milan to hear Carmen I want to get up on the stage and participate. I do not. Neither do I always participate in a fine representative national whorehouse - but I must see it as a spectacle, an offering, a symptom of a nation.

I portray myself as wicked, hoping I will not be regarded as wicked. But I may be wicked in the biblical sense

I am on the side of the underdog except when I am on the side of the rich

It is habit for me to discount myself before somebody else does it for me. Better to get in the first lick

You can never trust a human being to behave as you would have expected in a given circumstance

Has every oyster a different taste?

If they say I am inconsistent let them say it, for it is true, because inconsistency is a part of living

I am convinced of the validity of contradiction. There are many worlds. Each is true, at its time, in its own fashion

It is a mistake to think you cant be hurt if you don't care

Flynn is not always in

Wisdom of a convict

To plunder is at first as natural as to eat. How readily children lay their little hands upon every tempting article they see, until taught that it is not proper to do so.

How clearly does the behaviour of that unlearned heathen prove that shame is an artificial sentiment resulting from education alone; and that different communities measure propriety, nay even right and wrong, by various standards established under the operation of dissimilar circumstances.

Whether the difficulty in disposing of criminals, and whether the production of so many denote an unsound condition in the mother country, must now be determined by the wiser heads now occupied with the subject. Nevertheless, one cannot help fancying that the necessity for cure, in a certain measure, be economically superseded by prevention.

Indeed I am not certain that every individual in the two English Houses of Parliament would be the worse for seven years, "lagging"; it would make practical men of them.

All the evil in his nature (and who is without any) had been developed and nourished by harsh and cruel treatment, kindling, perhaps, a revengeful feeling against all mankind - a feeling, often the cause, in Australia at a future period, of the barbarous murder of innocent individuals.

International descriptions of Australians

What sort or peculiar capitalist country is this in which the workers' representatives predominate in the upper house....and yet the capitalist system is in no danger? Vladimir Lenin - Russian

Australians are, I have found, ready to laugh at themselves if they think that the joke is funny and the humour not ill-directed. And the ability to be self-deprecating is the mark of confidence; it is, as much as anything else, the yardstick by which a society measures how tolerant and self-assured it is Soumya Bhattacharya - Indian

In the colonies, to say a person resembles a European is to give him or her brevet rank as a superior mortal Rosa Praed - English

I can personally affirm that to stand before an audience of beaming Australians and make even the mildest quip about a convict past is to feel the feel the air conditioning immediately elevated. Bill Bryson - American author

The idea that Englishmen are made of paste and the Australian is steel all through, I have found to be universal A Trollope - English

A few years ago we colonised this place with some of our finest felons, thieves, muggers, alcoholics and prostitutes, a strain of depravity which I believe has contributed greatly to this country's amazing vigour and enterprise Ian Wooldridge - English

You feel free in Australia. There is great relief in the atmosphere - a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form. The Skies open above you and the areas open around you. D.H Lawrence - English

The extraordinary rapid growth which has followed upon settlement of the scum of the earth on the shores of Australia would make it appear that in colonisation it is as in gardening, the more your foundations consist of dung, the more rapid and striking the production' David Monre - English

They are not a nation of snobs like the English or of extravagant boasters like the Americans or of reckless profligates like the French, they are simply a nation of drunkards Marcus Clark - English

There is something of the cowboy in every American, but a little bit of the sheep station in most Australians Matthew Parris - English

You have no need to feel iffy about a country where "relaxation is the aim". There's nothing to be worried about if "no worries" is your mantra. People have killed for less. Soumya Bhattacharya - Indian

Australians have a tendency to be loud and obnoxious when they are beered up, which in my experience, is much of the time. They're descendants from pockets and cut purses, and as we all know, the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree. Michael Carey - American

The first thing you notice about Australian culture is that it’s pathetically thin..... The thinness means that modern Australia has fallen for American culture in a way that no one else could....Mimicry is a point of pride." Philip Weiss - American

Australian culture feels as grotesque as The Day of the Locust. There’s no sense of a high culture anywhere, and extreme characters abound. TV ads are often leeringly sexual "These are the only balls you’ll see at our health club," says an ad for a women’s workout center, focusing on some tennis balls Phillip Weis- American

We come from 2,500 years of culture and we all know where they come from Ajurna Rantaunga - Sri Lankan

The Australian, who are the men our troops have had opposite them so far, are extraordinarily tough fighters. The German is more active in the attack, but the enemy stakes his life in the defence and fights to the last with extreme cunning - Major Ballerstedt - German

Not since pre-historic stone ages has such a naked army been seen in civilised warfare as the Australian army corps fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They display an utter abhorrence for superflous clothing. They are famous throughout Europe for their hard-fighting, hard-swearing and nakedness, even to a sense of indecency. - Egyptian

In the Kokoda battle their qualities of adaptability and individual initiative enabled them to show tremendous ability as fighting men in the jungle. They were superb - Lieutenant-General Tsutomu Yoshihara - Japanese

Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - Turkish

Australia seems refreshingly free of class prejudice. Here people take you for what you are, and are less concerned with how you speak, what job you do, where you went to school etc. I enjoy meeting people from many walks of life and treating each other as equals. Paul Davies - British migrant

There is no better way of life in the world than that of the Australian. I firmly believe this. The grumbling, growling, cursing, profane, laughing, beer drinking, abusive, loyal-to-his-mates Australian is one of the few free men left on this earth. He fears no one, crawls to no one, bludges on no one, and acknowledges no master. Learn his way. Learn his language. Get yourself accepted as one of him; and you will enter a world that you never dreamed existed. And once you have entered it, you will never leave it. John O'Grady - Irish

there was hardly the slightest pretension to being gentlemen or civilised. Their faces were coarse and hard bitten. .....the Australian manner..... was blatant and self-assertive and the Australian voice likewise. I am afraid I never wish to meet any more Australians- there seems to much of the Botany Bay strain in them! My servant too complains that they are a rough lot.

Alone of all the races on earth, they seem to be free from the 'Grass is Greener on the other side of the fence' syndrome, and roundly proclaim that Australia is, in fact, the other side of that fence. Douglas Adams - English

As a result of all this hardship, dirt, thirst, and wombats, you would expect Australians to be a dour lot. Instead, they are genial, jolly, cheerful, and always willing to share a kind word with a stranger, unless they are an American. Douglas Adams - English