A Here’s-to-You, Mate! Syndrome : Down Under, Dundee Is About as Australian as Rambo Is American

Pints of rich foam-topped Foster’s beer are being raised in the abundance of pubs here to toast the international reports of the financial success of Paul Hogan’s “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee II.”

“Here’s-to-Paul-mates,” they declare in the rapid fire tones of a variation of the English language known as “Strine.” With a cluck or two over the artistic merits of the film and Hogan’s separation from his wife, the beer is downed in a long gulp.

The impressive box office returns for the film are seen as recognition that despite its remote location, relatively small population, and inverted seasons, an Australian can grind out a very slick product, rake in the dollars, and climb to the top of the heap that is Hollywood.

“Dundee has definitely enhanced Australia’s national identity, just as the Beatles did in the ‘60s for the POMS (an acronym for ‘prisoners of her majesty’ Australians use to describe the British),” commented Paul Thompson, a playwright and director of the national film, television and radio workshop here. “Certainly it is a cause for celebration.”

But Thompson and other local cultural commentators are quick to add that Hogan’s Dundee is about as Australian as Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo is American, with the conflict rubbing raw the Australian Angst.

“We are happy for Hogan’s success. No doubt in some way it will aid our economy,” said writer Berwyn Lewis of the Australian, a national daily, while at a pub in the Paddington suburb of Sydney.

“However, though many Australian males may think themselves tough, wily and worldly, like Dundee,” adds the writer, “most are benignly adolescent, a product of a relatively benign country that has never suffered a revolution, a civil war, or saturation bombing to really test its manhood. So it relies on myths, such as Dundee.”

It is noted that about 80% of the nation’s 16 million citizens live in and around a host of relatively cosmopolitan cities that cling to the cultivated coastlines, leaving the raw and mystical outback of the sprawling central and northern Australia where Dundee roams to fringe characters, sheep and cattle farmers, and the Aboriginals. Indeed, there seems to be a real fear of the outback.

As befitting a European-settled, urban-oriented nation, most residents hold soft, sales-related service industry jobs; religiously follow the varied and active local sporting scene; and when bellying up to the bar tend to discuss the latest football scores, automotive designs and neighborhood real estate prices.

“What dominates here is the suburban ideal, a single family house, a late model car in the driveway, a pub down the road full of mates, a barbecue in the back yard and a stack of steaks ready to throw on it.” observes Thompson. “Life is very comfortable for most persons in Australia; so comfortable you could almost fall asleep. That is why they need a hero to live out some of the fantasies and overcome a national inferiority complex.”

Movies have given them heroes. Before Dundee there was “Breaker Morant” and “Gallipoli,” both of which stirred the macho soul of the country. “Thank God when the films came out there was no war on at the time or half of the male population would have signed up for combat duty and we would have lost most,” commented a local architect observing the backslapping at a downtown Sydney pub. “I fear because of Dundee a lot of mates are going to get lost in the bush, or hurt themselves with knives.”

As for Australians’ pose as a rough and tumble descandents of the convict settlers of the country, author Thomas Keneally recently noted just a small fraction are genetically related to the original prisoners. Nevertheless, when gathered in social situations here they certainly seem to be spiritual heirs, expressing in thickening Strine tones a healthy suspicion of wealth, politics and power.

What concerns Lewis is that such a film as Dundee will exacerbate what she calls the mateship syndrome, as expressed in the phrases “How-are-you-mate?” and “Here’s-to-ya-mate,” in Friday night raffles at the neighborhood pub, and in the meals there offering for $5 (U.S.) all the rump steak you can eat.

“The next thing you know they will start naming their kids Paul and Mick, and then we’re all in trouble,” she said. “Let’s just hope there won’t be a ‘Dundee III.’ ”

It was something to think about while elbowing through a phalanx of mates to order up another beer and looking forward to throwing if not another shrimp on the barbie, then perhaps a lamb chop.