What makes Australia Australia?
Chris Arnade Walks the World
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What makes Australia Australia?<br>Thoughts from Sydney and Darwin
Chris Arnade<br>Aug 23, 2026
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(Prior pieces on Australia: First impressions of Sydney, Sydney the suburban paradise, Twenty-seven hours on the Aussie dog, Alice Springs, and Final thoughts on Australia, and from last week, Perth.<br>I’m in a McDonald’s in Katherine, half way on my bus trip to Alice Springs. I have more to write about that, and about Alice Springs, but until I can get settled and figure it all out, here is an essay I wrote over last few days. Sorry for being a little late!)<br>Travel comes with lows and highs and right now I’m at a low, and have been for over a week. I’m not saying this for sympathy — I have a great life and job — but rather because I don’t want to lie to people and suggest being in another country automatically means constant happiness. Or that everything always goes as planned.<br>On my last few days in Perth, a beautiful but lonely city, as I was navigating another screen trying to book another round of bus trips and hotels, and failing because getting a room in small town Western Australia is close to impossible for less than five hundred a night, I decided I was done with this whole walking the world thing and needed to quit for a bit. In a moment of haste I booked a flight to Sydney, then moved my flight back home to an earlier date, but a few days later my mood lifted and I regretted that, and booked a flight to Darwin, where I am now, with the plan to head to Alice Springs by bus.<br>When I was a trader (on Wall Street) I used to say the easy part of the job was evaluating risk, and the difficult part was controlling your emotions. Emotional management, not risk management, was the actual key to being successful at the job, and that’s also true of what I do now.<br>On this trip I’ve failed at the emotional management part. I was down for a few days — lonely, a feeling magnified by being turned upside down by twelve hour time change, removed from everyone and everything I knew, in a town bereft of people — and looked forward and saw only more challenges and emptiness, and I hit the eject button, to a place I felt more at home, Sydney.<br>That worked for a few days, because as I wrote last year, it might be the most comfortable city in the world, assuming you can afford it. A first world city, immersed in physical beauty, with a healthy balance between work and leisure. So for a week I spent each morning at my local cafe chatting with employees (from Vietnam, Indonesia) and regulars, then went for a ten mile walk along the southern shore of cliffs, beaches, and inlets, napped, and ended the day with an exceptional meal (Australia has the world’s best Asian cuisine) and sipping ciders and reading in a pub.<br>That’s all well and good, but that’s not why I travel. I travel to experience the different, and most of Australia isn’t different, not to an American at least. Sydney is a fantastic town to move to, get a job in, and start a family in, but it doesn’t work for what I am doing right now, which is trying to figure out how the world works. It is different enough to feel imbalanced, to feel enough out of sorts to be isolated, but not enough to be stimulated.<br>As I noted last year the US and Australia are strikingly similar. Not only are they so alike at a thin level — in built environment, and all the necessities of life, to a point where a first time US visitor to Australia will experience whatever the opposite of culture shock is (Culture embrace, cultural salve, culture balm), but they share a thick culture. They have roughly the same national purpose, the same animating purpose that the majority of citizens have without knowing they have it.<br>Both have a national dream, or a vision of success, which are minor variations of the same thing — which is to be justly rewarded for all of your hard work with a house of your own, personal safety, a plethora of free time to explore your hobbies, and a better life for your children. It is an entrepreneurial understanding of success that binds the otherwise disparate citizens together, along with a moral code descended from the Old Testament.<br>That house isn’t any house though, it is a suburban house, a stand alone gated home on a plot of land in a community of the like-minded with as many cars as people. It is a very individualistic concept of the good life, in the sense that while you live in a community, you have your own estate, even if it might be less than a quarter of an acre.<br>It is the democratization of the lordly life for the well-to-do plebes. A fenced-in home that is yours and yours alone, on a quarter-acre yard, with a two-car garage, is a trickle down version of the English manor, complete with “having a carriage (car),” for the masses.
As I’ve written many times, the English-speaking world’s love of suburbia isn’t an accident, isn’t a lifestyle forced on the masses by...