Choosing 200 Significant Australians
Why 200?
That's easy. We set out to choose 100 but just couldn't trim enough
remarkable people off the list so we ended up with 200. Even then we've
cheated - there's over 200 but nobody is ever going to count them so we
should be able to get away with that.
This one is not so easy. If a person was born in Australia but spent most
of their careers overseas we have sometimes claimed them as
Australians. This includes people like
Jack Smart and Peter Porter.
Often Australians who have become world class have had to travel to where
the audiences or laboratories are. Then there are people like
Patrick White and
Germaine Greer who were often highly
derogatory about their country of origin, or
Rupert Murdoch who chose to
renounce his Australian citizenship in order to further his business
interests. Some, such as P. L.
Travers (author of Mary Poppins) seemed to attempt to quietly
hide their Australian background. In the end we restricted ourselves to
people who have lived in Australia and who were influenced by, or have
influenced, Australia. For instance, people who still retain a noticeable
Australian accent are likely to have been influenced by their time in
Australia. As it turns out, there are only a small percentage of people on
our list where people might want to quibble about their nationality, and, to
our knowledge, none who would object to being described as Australians.
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Why significant?
Why not
great Australians? Why not famous Australians? Why not
successful Australians? Why not most popular Australians?. Well,
that's harder still.
We didn't choose great Australians because there are some people
who have had a strong influence on Australia who are not necessarily great.
Ned Kelly was a murderer but was
quickly elevated to legend
status. We may have large reservations about the work
Daisy Bates did with the Aborigines,
but she is still a remarkable woman who influenced thinking in Australia.
Some others like Vida Goldstien
are included not so much for what she achieved but for what people think
she achieved. Many people would argue that
Rupert Murdoch is not a great man,
but most would agree that he is a significant person who has had an
impact not only on Australia but the rest of the world.
Selecting people from the history syllabus would leave major
holes. It is the nature of much current Australian history teaching that
areas such as the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering and the like are
simply ignored. Although twelve out of Australia's thirteen
Nobel Prize winners are
scientists or mathematicians, many history teachers could name only a few of
them and less could explain the significance of their work, but most could
wax lyrical about minor writers or painters who never achieved international
recognition. Similarly the place of business and industry in Australian
history is often ignored or dismissed as 'vaguely dirty'. Hence whole
numbers of significant Australians have been written out of (taught)
history.
We didn't choose successful Australians because there are many
people who were successful at earning money or attention but who left
nothing of enduring worth behind them. or who did not take the step of
converting a successful life into a significant life.
Fame would produce a strangely skewed list because of the nature
of fame in Australia. Australian hegemony tends to denigrate people who
become world class or successful in their area. This is sometimes called
The Tall Poppy Syndrome - the tall poppies get their heads cut off. The
only areas where it is acceptable to succeed are sport, and commercial
entertainment such as pop music. As
Robert Hughes put it - "Sport is the only form of elitism that
Australia will accept- and that is its great hypocrisy". (It was also Hughes
who referred to Australia as a "fame brothel") This means that
many important Australians are unknown to the Australian public at large and
are rarely to be found on school curricula while many unimportant people are
famous and feature heavily in school assignments.
In a special wrap-around for
Australia Day 2007 the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper published
a quiz asking "How well do you know your country, the people
who have made it great and its rich history?" The 50
questions included ones such as "Rove McManus has a
cousin in which AFL team?" Of the questions about people, 6
were about naming pop groups or their members, 7 were about
television soapies and light entertainment, 6 were about sport,
3 about film celebritires with one writer, one politician and
nobody else. All of these people were living except for one who
died of substance abuse. So there you have it - these are the
people who made Australia great as decreed by the newspaper with
the largest distribution in the country.
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Fame in recent years has become a commodity manipulated by the media.
Television stations for instance go to great lengths to manipulate people's
thinking about who is important or famous. Quiz programs are devised so that
people feel that it is clever to know the details of the products and people
(often in Hollywood movies) which that station is promoting. Celebrity
trivia is often rebranded as 'news' and Melbourne even has a free evening
paper which seems dedicated to this purpose. Alternatively, by appearing on
a reality TV program you can achieve instant fame for doing nothing of
significance or value. Our list contains very few (if any) instant idols,
vacuous 'personalities' or other products of commercially manufactured fame
(it took Geoffrey Rush 20 years to
become an overnight success).
Then there are some people who are (mildly) famous in Australia for just
one aspect of their achievements. Thus the polymath
Clive James is famous for his
television shows but many Australians are not familiar with his achievements
as a poet, essayist and journalist. Like many others on our list, he would
not have included if we were just considering the achievements for which
people are famous.
People like Steve Irwin are
currently famous but it make take some years before we find out whether his
contributions to entertainment and the environment, are lasting and
sustainable and of the significance of others already listed. If they prove
to be he will happily be added to our list.
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In
2008 the ABC asked its viewers and listeners to vote for their
�Favourite Australian� public figure. After an "overwhelming
response", the results were:
- Olivia Newton John (pop
singer, actress)
- Peter Cundall (gardener,
TV presenter)
-
John Farnham
(pop singer, entertainer)
- Bob Brown
(conservationist, politician)
-
John Howard
(Prime Minister)
-
Fred Hollows
(surgeon, social achiever)
-
Gough Whitlam
(ex Prime Minister)
- Sir William Deane (retired
judge, ex Governor General)
- Johnny Warren (soccer
player)
- Tim Costello (minister,
social achiever)
It seems that there is not much
point in winning a Nobel Prize or being world class in the high arts
or science or mathematics or becoming a significant philanthropist
if you want to be popular in ABC Land.
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If you need convincing that fame would not be a useful criterion,
just try observing some of the chat groups on the internet and their rather
sad lists of those who the contributors regard as 'famous Australians'. You
will probably find few or none of our
Nobel Prize Winners or
Inventors. We decided therefore to restrict ourselves to people
that matter and will leave it to the media and others to laud those
who are 'famous for being famous'. After all there are plenty of Australians
who are famous but not important, and there are plenty of Australians who
are important but not well known. (See also the ABC Radio program
exploring
fame in music.)
If not famous, what about well known? That produces similar
difficulties to famous. If, for instance, we were to restrict ourselves to
people with entries in high profile online publications like
Wikipedia (which is extensive but not
encyclopaedic) we would end up with a strangely skewed list. For instance in
Wikipedia (as of December 2006) you can find individual listings for
television newsreaders and presenters of no lasting significance to
Australia but no listing for Sydney
Kirkby and numbers others who ended up on our list. For a number of
years, Australian history all but disappeared as a stand-alone subject in
most Australian schools, so television executives were often the major
arbiters of who becomes well known - and a fairly sad and vacuous lot it
often was.
In the end we decided on the label significant Australians
selected using the following criteria:
- People who are the world's best at something significant.
- People who have helped us understand or think about who we are.
- People who have made a significant, lasting difference or impact -
meaning that Australia or the world is a different place because of
them.
- People who have captured the public imagination over a significant
period of time
- People who have created, invented, inspired or contributed something
of long term significance.
- People who have achieved something. For most of our history,
Australians have admired those who have rolled up their sleeves and
done something. There has been somewhat less admiration for those
who only roll up their sleeves in order to wear an armband demanding
that "somebody else should do something about it" or stand on the
sidelines shouting "it's not fair". In the past Australians have called
these people "whingers" or whiners". Currently the fashionable term is
"social activist". We have chosen (with a couple of exceptions) to only
include those who have achieved something rather than drawn
attention to themselves and maybe achieved some passing fame in the
process.
Some comments on our final selections
Although for convenience we have organised people under various
categories, it is a characteristic of remarkable people that they often
excel in a range of areas. Someone like
Sir John Monash would easily have made this list for his achievements in
any of half a dozen areas alone.
- Aboriginal - Aboriginal people came to Australia some 40,000
years ago and over that period that there have doubtless been many
remarkable Aboriginal people. It is likely that the exploits of some are
embedded in the great dreamtime
stories, however there must be many we will never know about. It is
interesting that the proportion of Aborigines we have included on our
list is much greater than their proportion of the population. This is
not as the result of some 'positive discrimination' or 'political
correctness'. They were included on their own merits as remarkable and
significant Australians and are scattered throughout the various
categories below.
- Pioneers & Explorers - In pruning down this list many famous
names are missing. However there is also an important explorer that most
Australians would not recognise -
Sidney Kirkby. We have also included
Robert O'Hara Burke, not because
he proved to be a great explorer but because of his important place in
Australian folklore.
- Inventors, scientists, mathematicians, engineers and medicos
- Twelve out of Australia's thirteen
Nobel Prize winners are
scientists, medicos or mathematicians indicating that these are areas of
endeavour where Australia is truly recognised as world class..
- Education - We have only listed one person in this category
but that is rather misleading. Many people listed in other categories
were also important educators. For instance,
Lawrence Bragg was an excellent
lecturer, Dame Joan Hammond an
important singing teacher and so on.
- Legal
- Business & Philanthropy
- Economists & Politicians
- Other Social Achievers - This is the area that gave rise to
the greatest argument in discussion regarding an appropriate name for
the category. In the end we discarded names including advocates
(some who call themselves advocates are self appointed spokespeople for
those who "cannot speak for themselves" because they would not be
elected by those who could). We eventually discarded social
dissenters, agitators and activists because in the end
that was all a number of them ever did - dissent or agitate. In recent
years there is a certain irony around the word social activists because
it often refers to someone who is not doing something active about a
problem - merely demanding that someone else sho do something active. We
also unfortunately rejected the label of social worker, because
of the connotations with a certain style of social worker who does not
work to break the cycle of dependency but rather to maintain their
importance in their own little empire.
In the end we decided on the
label other social achievers to indicate that these were people
who achieved something positive for society. Some were activist, others
advocates, others dissenters, others social workers and so on. However
the important thing was that in the end they made a difference.
And
finally why the word other? We added this because many people in
other categories were (or are) social achievers. Achieving major
recognition in almost any field, or doing the hard work of being elected
to office or rising to a position of influence, are often the best ways
to be in a position to make a real difference to society. Examples can
be found in nearly all categories. For instance,
Weary Dunlop,
Fred Hollows,
Gus Nossal,
Nugget Coombs, and others are all
responsible for important social advances. This category of other
social achievers therefore contains social achievers who don't
particularly fit in to other areas.
- Philosophers, Historians & Religious
- The Arts
- Sport
- Military
- Media
- Popular Entertainment
- Infamous Australians
You may not agree with our criteria and selection. However, if it
promotes curiosity, discussion and informed debate, then it has fulfilled
its purpose.