[vacri]

Australians love to self-denigrate, it's the national pastime. But we won't stand for anyone else doing it!

I'm lost some potential new friends when I've took exception to their usual slogan "Australia has no culture", which either means that we don't have the thousand years of fine art history of Europe or that we don't have a coming-of-age ceremony like some tribe that live in grass huts do.

We waste so much hot air and our media talking about how crap we are and how poorly performing the country is, when we consistently score in the top 5 in any international measure involving quality of life (oh no, so Sweden or Denmark beat us out again... why is that so shameful that we're not always #1 of 200 countries?)

Not to say we don't have some serious problems, but we do tend to look at ourselves in a bubble and compare ourselves against some mythical 'home country', seen through rose-coloured glasses.