Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.
? I realize im proving your point but what
The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.)
I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)
This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.
The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor.
When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).
This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.
I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.
Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.
Australians have a very good attitude to respect
…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.
Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.
As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.
… I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people don’t get in the passenger seat of a taxi.
covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.
Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.
One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.
YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!
Different cultures are fascinating.
As an American, in my experience, calling someone “sir” or “ma’am” could have several connotations, depending on context:
- if you’re addressing someone whose name you don’t know, ie a stranger (ex: you see someone drop money from their wallet and they don’t notice, so you get their attention by saying “sir/ma’am, you dropped this”)
- and if a stranger is helping you out, or if you’re helping a stranger out (ex: “sir/ma’am, do you need help carrying that?” If someone holds the door for you, you’d say “thank you sir/ma’am!” (Though most people just say “thank you” and don’t usually add the sir or ma’am)
- addressing an authority figure, such as a boss, business/government official, etc (maybe even a parent of someone you’re dating, or the parent of a friend. Not that they would be seen as “authority figures”, but there’s a certain unspoken formality in addressing a person you’re not familiar with, especially if it’s the parent of someone you’re dating.) In some settings, people will address their boss/bosses by their first name, or by Ms/Mrs/Miss/Mr [Last Name]. It varies between each type of job and each workspace.
- teachers are ALWAYS addressed by students as Ms/Mrs/Miss/Mr [Last Name]. In my time in grade school and high school, I’ve seen students get reprimanded, sometimes harshly, for calling teachers by their first name, whether jokingly or not. It’s pretty universally accepted that if you’re a minor, you address anyone not related to you in this way (part of the controversial “respect your elders” culture)
- college is a mixed bag on this topic. You’ll commonly have professors who will, right off the bat, tell you to go ahead and call them by their first name. Some students do, but then again plenty don’t, because of 18 years of being forced to address teachers in the way I explained above, and it’s a habit not easily broken. In some more professional college settings (off the top of my head, law school or medical school) professors are mostly addressed as “Professor [Last Name]”. Most American elementary/high schools are similar, if not exactly the same in their social cultures. But every college is different.
- if you’re at work and speaking to a customer, because there is a LOT of socially grey area when it comes to customer/employee interactions (but that’s a whole other can of worms)
- and usually vice-versa, if you’re a customer and speaking to an employee (I personally always try to address employees as politely as possible, because the service industry is hell in America, and you would not believe the kind of assholes that workers have to put up with. They deserve much better than what they get, but again, a can of worms for another day.)
Idk these are just some of the examples I can think of