
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 its 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. Theres no sense of
a high culture anywhere, and extreme characters abound. TV ads are often leeringly
sexual "These are the only balls youll see at our health club,"
says an ad for a womens 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