Australia

"[C]ulturally there is a vast amount of hard work to be done before the average Australian has ordinary tolerance and understanding of American life and thought."

"We are the sons of Australia, Of the men who fashioned the land, We are the sons of the women Who walked with them, hand in hand; And we swear by the dead who bore us, By the heroes who blazed the trail, No foe shall gather our harvest, Or sit on our stockyard rail."

"Australia to the world lay hid in night: God said, "Let Grattan be!" and all was light."

"Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all. ... And the complaisant reception of them was only part of the inferiority complex of the Australian; accepting the domination of lesser men because they came from afar, and lied boldly."

"There was a bushman serving at Pentridge a sentence for horse stealing. He was a very honest man. He would not think of stealing a penny, but a horse was a different matter."

"Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe—appearing either as the Cringe Direct, or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of the Blatant Blatherskite, the God's-Own-Country and I'm-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian bore."

"Shame on the mouth That would deny The knotted hands That set us high!"

"White Australia must not be regarded as a mere political shibboleth. It was Australia's Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere this. It would have been engulfed in an Asian tidal wave."

"Never allow the thoughtless to delcare That we have no tradition here!"

"Distance is the continual theme and has been one of the main conditioning factors in Australian history. She was distant and dependent, a continent swinging on a long chain in antipodean darkness."

"Isolation became something of a cult in Australia before the advances of applied science, particularly the cable and the aeroplane, broke it down. The Australians, as they early came to call themselves, felt protected by it. They were alone to grow in their own way, to make their mistakes in private."

"The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. The bora ring is gone. The corroboree is gone. And we are going."

"Flax was the first conqueror – a hollow conqueror – of the distance which so often shaped Australia's destiny."

"The continent had to be discovered emotionally. It had to become a homeland and feel like home. The sense of overpowering space, the isolation, the warmth of summer, the garish light, the shiny-leafed trees, the birds and insects, the smell of air filled with dust, the strange silences, and the landscapes in all their oddness had to become familiar. Nearly every immigrant arrived with strong north European preferences in landscape, sunlight, colour, temperatures and vegetation preferences which Australia could rarely meet [...]. The physical mastering of Australia was swift and often dramatic, but the emotional conquest was slow."

"[At the time of Federation] Most Australians were still strangers in a new land. The land was only half won."

"Do you come from a land down under Where women glow and men plunder? Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder? You better run, you better take cover."

"Anyone will tell you it's a prisoner island, Hidden in the summer for a million years."

"Every day's a good day in Australia."

"If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will."

"Australians must decide for themselves whether this was the land of the dreaming, the land of the Holy Spirit, the New Britannia, the Millennial Eden, or the new demesne for Mammon to infest."

"Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable... unimaginable... unspeakable."

"The arse end of the world."

"I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians."

"With its weird red earth and its alien flora and fauna... Australia was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars."

"You can take them out of England, but you just can't take the convict out of them."

"Yeah mate I bloody was like a rat up a drainpipe in one of them runs there."