Before we start — a question.
When you picture an Australian,
what do you see?
Melbourne and Sydney are among the most ethnically diverse cities on earth. Whatever their background — Vietnamese, Lebanese, Greek, Indian, Sudanese — Australians sound Australian. The accent varies: there's a recognisably Greek-Australian sound, a Lebanese-Australian sound. But the substrate is unmistakably the same. You can hear both where someone's family came from, and where they're from.
The image most people carry of Australia hasn't caught up with that reality. This lesson is partly about the gap.
"Australians aren't actually friendly.
They just pretend to be."
Do you agree?
Hold your answer. We'll return to it at the end — and you'll have more to say about it than you do right now.
In each scene, something culturally awkward happens. Find it — then work out how it should have gone.
"Australians aren't actually friendly.
They just pretend to be."
Now you've been through the scenarios — do you still agree?
Has anything shifted?
Australian friendliness isn't performance. It comes from a genuine belief that everyone deserves a fair go — regardless of background or status. When a stranger chats to you in a queue, or a barista asks how you're going, that warmth is real.
But it goes sideways, not toward you. It says we're all in this together — not I want you to like me. American warmth is expressive and aimed at you: effusive, directed, performing intimacy it may not mean. Australian warmth doesn't do that. The Czech student was reading the absence of escalation as the absence of feeling. That's the misread.
Australian friendliness is wide and doesn't go deep quickly.
Turning easy warmth into actual friendship takes time, consistency, and repeated low-pressure contact — not one intense bonding moment. The warmth is genuine. It is also genuinely not an invitation to get close. Both things are true at once, and that's exactly what the Czech student found confusing. They weren't wrong. They were just expecting a different architecture.
Australia has done something genuinely difficult: built a multicultural society that largely works. Communities from radically different origins share cities, workplaces, and social norms — and have made those norms their own. That's not nothing. By global standards, it's remarkable — which makes the gap that remains more pointed, not less.
Dr Anne Aly — Egyptian-Australian, Muslim, the first Muslim woman elected to Australia's federal parliament — has said: "To those few who say immigrants should 'go home,' I say: we are home." That sentence lands differently when you understand how deep the settlement actually goes.
Most Australians who pride themselves on mateship and the fair go have never had a conversation with an Indigenous Australian — whose cultures have been here for over 65,000 years. The norms in this lesson are easiest to perform when your presence isn't already in question. Every culture has norms that function as tests of belonging — and every culture makes those tests easier for some people than others.
The question isn't whether Australia does this. The question is whether it knows it does.
"Australians aren't actually friendly.
They just pretend to be."
You started this lesson with a picture of Australia in your head.
How would you rewrite that sentence now — and whose Australia are you writing about?