Aussie arrogance will be their undoing

September 5, 2002 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp ‑  05/09/2002

As dif­fi­cult as it may be for South Africans to stom­ach, the bare truth of the aver­age Aussie/South African rela­tion­ship is that the Aussie inher­ent­ly believes he/she is supe­ri­or. And not just on the sports field, either.

Vast areas of the plan­et have been colonised at some time or anoth­er and the major­i­ty of the world’s peo­ple have been, or are, dom­i­nat­ed by the minority.

The same applies today in Aus­tralia but you won’t find many peo­ple acknowl­edg­ing or admit­ting it. In South Africa, of course, that revolt­ing truth was giv­en a name by Hen­drik Ver­wo­erd. Most oth­ers left it to the oppressed to name their suffering.

As a great Aus­tralian friend of mine said one night after too much wine, “Thank God for white South Africans — put on the earth to make the rest of the oppres­sors feel bet­ter about themselves.”

That feel­ing has been grow­ing in Aus­tralia for half a cen­tu­ry and has now become a state of nat­ur­al existance.

In a sport­ing con­text, just look at the Ben Tune drugs scan­dal in rug­by. A decade of whinge­ing about cheat­ing Chi­nese swim­mers and Bul­gar­i­an weight-lifters was sud­den­ly for­got­ten because “Tuney” was a “dinkum, good bloke Aussie” who would nev­er dream of tak­ing any banned drugs. Right.

So when a press release land­ed in my inbox today from the Aus­tralian Crick­et Board, I was par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in one mis­take. For a start, the ACB Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Depart­ment is so per­fect they ‘nev­er’ make mis­takes, but this one was real­ly spe­cial, straight out of the draw­er labelled “born, nat­ur­al arrogance.”

In announc­ing the Aus­tralian Test squad to play against Pak­istan next month, the state­ment glam­orous­ly intro­duced off-spin­ner Nathan Hau­ritz before mak­ing the fol­low­ing observation.

“The squad has been reduced from 15 to 14 after Aus­trali­a’s suc­cess­ful Trav­elex Tour of South Africa, which Aus­tralia won 3–0.”

Believe me, that was no typ­ing error. That was an assump­tion made by an Aus­tralian who is employed and paid to be thor­ough, accu­rate and even-hand­ed. He is expect­ed to know better.

His name is Pat O’Beirne and I know that he reads this col­umn. If he has the man­ners to cor­rect his state­ment, I promise you, read­ers, you will be the first to know.

(In case you need a reminder, Pat, South Africa won the final Test of that series which, I believe, made the score­line 2:1)