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Australians can't bear it that the outside world pays so little attention to them, and I don't blame them. This is a country where interesting things happen, and all the time - Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
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Australia is a country of 24 million people located in the Southern Hemisphere on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. The thing to understand about Australia is that it's a big country - indeed, it's a continent that's also a country - with big opportunities and big people to go after them. That's what makes it, in our opinion, such a great place to build Life Sciences companies. After you read this article describing what we're like, check out our article in Australia's specific strengths in Life Sciences (click here) and our Watch List of companies in the sector (click here).
Just where is Australia anyway?
Pick up a world map and you find us at 34 degrees South of the Equator and 151 degrees East of Greenwich. Actually that's Sydney, our biggest city, on Australia's East Coast, where NDF Research is located. The time on this side of the country is GMT+10, meaning that we're one of the first major countries in the world on which the sun rises. You have probably heard of our nickname of 'Down Under'. We get that because there aren't many major countries in the world this far south - indeed, there's really only South Africa (34 degrees South at Cape Town), Chile (33 degrees South at Santiago), Argentina (35 degrees South at Buenos Aires) and New Zealand (37 degrees South at Auckland).
How big is Australia?
Really big, in terms of its surface area. We're the sixth largest country in the world, at about 95% of the size of the contiguous United States. To drive from Sydney on the East Coast to Perth on the West Coast is a 3,940 km journey, almost exactly the distance from New York City to Los Angeles. As you may have guessed from the fact that our population is only 7% of the US's, most of the country is desert.
If there's so few of you Aussies, where can I find you?
Mostly piled up on top of each other on the coast, in five cities - Sydney (4.9 million in the metro area, or 21% of the population), Melbourne (4.5 million, 19%) and Brisbane (2.3 million, 10%) on the East Coast, Adelaide (1.3 million, 6%) in South Australia and Perth (2.0 million, 9%) in Western Australia. Another 400,000 people live in and around our Federal capital, Canberra, which is roughly midway between Sydney and Melbourne. As for there being so few of us, that could change. Australia has a relatively high birthrate, at over 1.9 children per woman (click here), a reflection of our optimistic nature (see below). And Mercer, looking at various factors including crime, recreational facilities and housing, ranked six Australian cities in its 2016 list of the world's 50 most 'liveable' cities (click here): Sydney (No. 10), Melbourne (15, tied with Toronto), Perth (21, tied with Brussels), Adelaide (27), Canberra (28, tied with San Francisco) and Brisbane (36).
So who owns Australia?
We Australians. Our country may have started life as a dumping ground for British prisoners in 1788, but it evolved into a collection of free-settled British colonies with their own legislatures from the 1850s onwards. We then took the big step of joining the six colonies together in 1901 to become the Commonwealth of Australia with our own Federal government. Just like the Canadians, only they did it in 1867. As with Canada, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is our Head of State. Unlike Canada we still have the British flag in the corner of ours and we don't understand ice hockey.
Do you own those big islands to the east?
No, that's another sovereign nation called New Zealand (NZ) around 2,000 km to our east, with whom we have close ties. Their nickname is 'the Kiwis', after a native flightless bird. Like Australia, NZ was seeded and then spun off by Britain in the 19th Century, the difference being that the original inhabitants, the Maori, are a bigger percentage of the current population (around 14% vs 3% for Australia's Aboriginals). NZ may be small - the two islands have the surface area of Colorado and only 4.5 million people (versus Colorado's 5.5 million - click here and here) - but the country has a heck of a lot going for it. It has the third freest economy in the world (click here) and a formidable national Rugby team (click here). Heaven probably looks a bit like NZ in terms of the landscape (click here). I analyse New Zealand and its prospects for Life Sciences success in an article on this site headlined '100% Bullish on the New Zealand Life Science sector' (click here).
How come you Aussies are so good looking? And why do you talk so funny?
Yes, it's true, we're very good looking. This is, after all, the country that gave the world Errol Flynn, Nicole Kidman, Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman (Russell Crowe is a Kiwi). One 2010 poll of 5,000 Britons rated us the fourth best looking people in the world, after Americans, Brazilians and Spaniards (click here). And it's also true that we sound strange to foreign ears. The good looks could be attributed to a sunny climate that promotes outdoor activity, which in turn may help explain why we have the world's third highest life expectancy for men (80.5 years) and the sixth highest for women (84.6) - click here. As for speech, that's a function of being an immigrant country where the core migrants spoke English but not 'the King's English'. Here's how the war correspondent Alan Moorehead (1910-1983), who wrote for British newspapers but hailed from Melbourne, described the Australian soldiers who went to Gallipoli in 1915: 'A strange change had overtaken this transplanted British blood. Barely a hundred years before their ancestors had gone out to the other side of the world from the depressed areas of the United Kingdom, many of them dark, small, hungry men. Their sons who had now returned to fight in their country's first foreign war had grown six inches in height, their faces were thin and leathery, their limbs immensely lithe and strong. Their voices too had developed a harsh cockney accent of their own, and their command of the more elementary oaths and blasphemies, even judged by the most liberal army standards, was appalling.' (Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead, New York: Ballantine, 1956).
You're all rich, right?
You bet Australia is a rich country.
We are home to 27 billionaires by Forbes' reckoning (click here), just about all with fortunes built here. In 2015 our GDP of US$1.489 trillion (purchasing power parity) positioned us at 19th place in the list of the world's largest economies, while the Australian Securities Exchange remained in the 'Trillion Dollar Club' of stock exchanges in terms of total market capitalisation of listed companies (at No. 15 on the list - click here). Not bad for only 24 million people. Our 2015 GDP per capita of US$65,400 ranked us as the 14th richest people in the world, with the other 13 living in micro-states with an average population of 1.8 million (click here - source: The CIA World Factbook).
How did we get here? In part by being a very productive farm and quarry. Sure, we get lots of tourists and foreign students, but it's mostly commodities like metals, energy, beef and wheat that we export (click here). However I argue that the real base of our current prosperity is the succession of more-or-less market-friendly governments we've had since 1983. These have made Australia one of the freest economies in the world, according to the Heritage Foundation (click here). It also helps that we have operated since mid-1991 without a recession. That's right - we made it through 2001 and, amazingly, through 2007-09, without one.
We are home to 27 billionaires by Forbes' reckoning (click here), just about all with fortunes built here. In 2015 our GDP of US$1.489 trillion (purchasing power parity) positioned us at 19th place in the list of the world's largest economies, while the Australian Securities Exchange remained in the 'Trillion Dollar Club' of stock exchanges in terms of total market capitalisation of listed companies (at No. 15 on the list - click here). Not bad for only 24 million people. Our 2015 GDP per capita of US$65,400 ranked us as the 14th richest people in the world, with the other 13 living in micro-states with an average population of 1.8 million (click here - source: The CIA World Factbook).
How did we get here? In part by being a very productive farm and quarry. Sure, we get lots of tourists and foreign students, but it's mostly commodities like metals, energy, beef and wheat that we export (click here). However I argue that the real base of our current prosperity is the succession of more-or-less market-friendly governments we've had since 1983. These have made Australia one of the freest economies in the world, according to the Heritage Foundation (click here). It also helps that we have operated since mid-1991 without a recession. That's right - we made it through 2001 and, amazingly, through 2007-09, without one.
So are you smart or lucky?
Both.
As for luck, we are not unlike the late Forbes publisher Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990) who used to say that he got where he was 'through sheer ability (spelled i-n-h-e-r-i-t-a-n-c-e)'. We inherited the British rule of law and free enterprise system, the highly valuable English language, a whole continent loaded with just about every traded commodity known to man, and a location sufficiently distant from Europe and its historic hang-ups to stay out of harm's way (so that, for example, in the 1959 film On the Beach we're the last country in the world still standing). These Providential blessings gave rise to our other nickname of The Lucky Country, even though it was originally applied to us as a criticism (click here).
We're lucky, but we're smart as well. Smart people learn from their mistakes, and when we started freeing up our economy in the 1980s it was in recognition that, as a country, the kind of moderate socialism we had practiced for decades was making us the 'White Trash of Asia'. That's what Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew warned us in 1980 we were becoming (click here), but we avoided that fate. It helped that a lot of us weren't white by then, thanks to the reversal of another mistake called the White Australia Policy that had been in place until the 1960s. These days Australia is at least 10% Asian, just counting where its first generation migrants come from.
We got smart and we stayed smart - we couldn't have made it through the 1990s when commodity prices were lousy without the smarts to build a truly modern and innovative information-based economy. Sure, there are more innovative places than Australia - at the moment we only rank about 17th in the world on the Global Innovation Index (click here) - but we're a contender. As for brains - well, three of our Prime Ministers, including the incumbent, have been Rhodes Scholars, and where do you think the Nobel laureates Lord Florey (1945), Sir Mac Burnet (1960), Sir John Eccles (1963), Sir John Cornforth (1975), Peter Doherty (1996), Barry Marshall and Robin Warren (2005) and Elizabeth Blackburn (2009) got their education? Right here.
As for luck, we are not unlike the late Forbes publisher Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990) who used to say that he got where he was 'through sheer ability (spelled i-n-h-e-r-i-t-a-n-c-e)'. We inherited the British rule of law and free enterprise system, the highly valuable English language, a whole continent loaded with just about every traded commodity known to man, and a location sufficiently distant from Europe and its historic hang-ups to stay out of harm's way (so that, for example, in the 1959 film On the Beach we're the last country in the world still standing). These Providential blessings gave rise to our other nickname of The Lucky Country, even though it was originally applied to us as a criticism (click here).
We're lucky, but we're smart as well. Smart people learn from their mistakes, and when we started freeing up our economy in the 1980s it was in recognition that, as a country, the kind of moderate socialism we had practiced for decades was making us the 'White Trash of Asia'. That's what Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew warned us in 1980 we were becoming (click here), but we avoided that fate. It helped that a lot of us weren't white by then, thanks to the reversal of another mistake called the White Australia Policy that had been in place until the 1960s. These days Australia is at least 10% Asian, just counting where its first generation migrants come from.
We got smart and we stayed smart - we couldn't have made it through the 1990s when commodity prices were lousy without the smarts to build a truly modern and innovative information-based economy. Sure, there are more innovative places than Australia - at the moment we only rank about 17th in the world on the Global Innovation Index (click here) - but we're a contender. As for brains - well, three of our Prime Ministers, including the incumbent, have been Rhodes Scholars, and where do you think the Nobel laureates Lord Florey (1945), Sir Mac Burnet (1960), Sir John Eccles (1963), Sir John Cornforth (1975), Peter Doherty (1996), Barry Marshall and Robin Warren (2005) and Elizabeth Blackburn (2009) got their education? Right here.
What is the Australian 'national character'?
Optimistic. Australia is a warm climate country so we tend to have a sunny disposition. The opening lines of our National Anthem read 'Australians all, let us rejoice / For we are young and free'.
Egalitarian. Since it was mostly lower class folks from Britain who built Australia, we have tended to eschew any kind of class system. Let's quote from Alan Moorehead again on those legendary Aussie soldiers at Gallipoli: 'Such military forms as the salute did not come very easily to these men, especially in the presence of British officers, whom they regarded as effete, and their own officers appeared to have very little control over them'.
Irreverent. Think Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee. This is related to the aforementioned egalitarian ethic. It doesn't mean we are without reverence, just that authority figures and institutions need to earn our respect. That in turn means we don't easily get sucked in to believing stupid ideas. The irreverence may in part be due to our convict roots, which run deep - around one in six living Australians are descended from those poor criminal sods who started the country in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries (click here).
Enterprising. As an immigrant nation we have tended since the 1850s to be populated by people with 'get up and go' and a willingness to experiment. Frank Lowy, the founder of the Westfield shopping centre empire and now the fourth richest person in the country, came here from Europe via Israel in the 1950s. He started with a coffee shop in a low-rent Sydney suburb called Blacktown. Decades later, when asked whether Westfield should 'stick to its knitting', he replied that 'if I had stuck to my knitting I would still be making the best cappuccino in Blacktown'. It isn't just the recent migrants who know how to 'have a go'. Indeed, one could say we celebrate 'having a go' every 25 April, our veterans' day. 25 April was the day the Anzacs - us and the Kiwis - landed at Gallipoli in 1915, a campaign that ended in defeat. In Alan Seymour's 1960 play The One Day of the Year, which is about Anzac Day, Seymour has one character describe in these terms why he's proud of the Anzacs: 'They lost. But they tried. They tried, and they was beaten. A man's not too bad who'll stand up in the street and remember when 'e was licked'.
Adaptable and pragmatic. Our greatest living historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has shown in his 1966 book The Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne : Sun Books, 1966) how distance - internal and external - was the biggest shaper of Australia's national character. You can make a case that it shaped us for the better. When you are a long away away from the rest of the world (like, London is a 21 hour flight away) or the nearest big city you learn to make do with the resources at your disposal. You also do what has to be done. When the Port Arthur massacre happened in 1996 our then centre-right government tightened up gun laws. The result was a probable saving of lives (click here).
Global in orientation. As a relatively small country (population-wise) we have to be aware of what's going on outside our borders, and as an immigrant country where 28% of us were born somewhere else (click here) we're intimately connected with most of the rest of the world. This global orientation explains the success of Australian cultural exports like INXS - home grown successes quickly realise that there are new worlds to conquer.
Happy. Okay, we're not Denmark, but we are a fairly happy place, ranking 10th in the 2016 World Happiness Report. Maybe it's because we like a drink. Australia is the world's seventh-biggest wine-producing country (click here).
Tough. We don't just believe in freedom, we fight for it, which is why we show up in so many wars, including Vietnam. When we go to war, we acquit ourselves well. 2016 is the 50th Anniversary of the famous Battle of Long Tan from the Vietnam years, where one night in August 1966 a mere 108 Australian servicemen, many of them conscripts, successfully fought off somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 Viet Cong. Don't mess with Australia.
Egalitarian. Since it was mostly lower class folks from Britain who built Australia, we have tended to eschew any kind of class system. Let's quote from Alan Moorehead again on those legendary Aussie soldiers at Gallipoli: 'Such military forms as the salute did not come very easily to these men, especially in the presence of British officers, whom they regarded as effete, and their own officers appeared to have very little control over them'.
Irreverent. Think Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee. This is related to the aforementioned egalitarian ethic. It doesn't mean we are without reverence, just that authority figures and institutions need to earn our respect. That in turn means we don't easily get sucked in to believing stupid ideas. The irreverence may in part be due to our convict roots, which run deep - around one in six living Australians are descended from those poor criminal sods who started the country in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries (click here).
Enterprising. As an immigrant nation we have tended since the 1850s to be populated by people with 'get up and go' and a willingness to experiment. Frank Lowy, the founder of the Westfield shopping centre empire and now the fourth richest person in the country, came here from Europe via Israel in the 1950s. He started with a coffee shop in a low-rent Sydney suburb called Blacktown. Decades later, when asked whether Westfield should 'stick to its knitting', he replied that 'if I had stuck to my knitting I would still be making the best cappuccino in Blacktown'. It isn't just the recent migrants who know how to 'have a go'. Indeed, one could say we celebrate 'having a go' every 25 April, our veterans' day. 25 April was the day the Anzacs - us and the Kiwis - landed at Gallipoli in 1915, a campaign that ended in defeat. In Alan Seymour's 1960 play The One Day of the Year, which is about Anzac Day, Seymour has one character describe in these terms why he's proud of the Anzacs: 'They lost. But they tried. They tried, and they was beaten. A man's not too bad who'll stand up in the street and remember when 'e was licked'.
Adaptable and pragmatic. Our greatest living historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has shown in his 1966 book The Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne : Sun Books, 1966) how distance - internal and external - was the biggest shaper of Australia's national character. You can make a case that it shaped us for the better. When you are a long away away from the rest of the world (like, London is a 21 hour flight away) or the nearest big city you learn to make do with the resources at your disposal. You also do what has to be done. When the Port Arthur massacre happened in 1996 our then centre-right government tightened up gun laws. The result was a probable saving of lives (click here).
Global in orientation. As a relatively small country (population-wise) we have to be aware of what's going on outside our borders, and as an immigrant country where 28% of us were born somewhere else (click here) we're intimately connected with most of the rest of the world. This global orientation explains the success of Australian cultural exports like INXS - home grown successes quickly realise that there are new worlds to conquer.
Happy. Okay, we're not Denmark, but we are a fairly happy place, ranking 10th in the 2016 World Happiness Report. Maybe it's because we like a drink. Australia is the world's seventh-biggest wine-producing country (click here).
Tough. We don't just believe in freedom, we fight for it, which is why we show up in so many wars, including Vietnam. When we go to war, we acquit ourselves well. 2016 is the 50th Anniversary of the famous Battle of Long Tan from the Vietnam years, where one night in August 1966 a mere 108 Australian servicemen, many of them conscripts, successfully fought off somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 Viet Cong. Don't mess with Australia.
Further reading
- The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History by Geoffrey Blainey (Melbourne : Sun Books, 1966).
- In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
- The Lucky Country - Australia in the 1960s by Donald Horne (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1964).
- The Fatal Shore. The Epic of Australia's Founding by Robert Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
- The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher Koch (Sydney, Penguin Books, 1978).
- Frank Lowy: Pushing the Limits: The inside Story of the Man Who Powers Westfield by Jill Margo (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001).
- Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth by Ian McLean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 2012).
- Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead, New York: Ballantine, 1956.
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