Australians Quotes

“Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“I am not your dog that you whistle for; I’m not a stray animal you call over, and I am not, I never have been, nor will I ever be, your “baby”!”
― Joy Jennings, I'm Not Your "Baby": An Australian woman's tortured life of sexual harassment and assault

“wherever they live, travel, hike, swim, fish, dive, kayak, or trek, they risk being confronted by something capable of doing them in with tooth, fang, claw, jaw, or stinger, and yet there is no public clamor to eradicate any animal because of the peril it poses to the human population. australians have learned to coexist in relative peace with nearly everything, and when occasionally a human life is lost to an animal, the public usually reacts philosophically.”
― Peter Benchley, Shark Trouble

“I’m Australian; I know how to use a shotgun!”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“The very essence of Australia is our lack of sophistication–our refusal to conform to pretension and superficiality. We ought to be upholding our ‘fair-dinkumness’ and all the qualities so well documented in our folklore, the non-conformity of the swagman in Waltzing Matilda whose down to earth motto would I’m sure, have been ‘I’d rather be ignorant and fair dinkum than sophisticated and false’. Of course life has been a fight against ignorance, but the danger has always been that gaining knowledge rarely occurs without an increase in sophistication or falseness.”
― Tim Macartney-Snape

“Italians love emotional people. If you're reserved you either have something to hide or you're just plain stupid.”
― Joe Novella, Pepe & Poppy: tarantella vs zorba

“At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.”
― Paul Theroux

“Being in the place of a mother to you, since your poor mother died, I say this, Audrey—when a gentleman goes to Australia, he has his reasons. And when he stays in Australia fifteen years, as Mr. Mark says, and as I know for myself for five years, he has his reasons. And a respectably brought-up girl doesn’t ask what reasons.”
― A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery

“During their long period of unease about a hot Christmas, Australians rarely noticed that they had more access than their British relatives to a vital part of the traditional Christmas story: 'the stars in the bright sky'. Eventually they ceased to lament that their Christmas came in hot weather.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, Black Kettle and Full Moon : Daily Life in a Vanished Australia

“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.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, VI: 'The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green', 1916–1935

“If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia's People Volume 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia

“Australians, like other peoples, tend to think they are highly distinctive, but the characteristics they value may be an extension or an exaggeration of what they brought from the mother country. In some respects they may be more like the peoples of other new lands settled by the British than they are willing to acknowledge. Australian soldiers and Australian nurses of World War I felt themselves to be very different from their English counterparts but the English were inclined to see all the colonials — New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians — as similar and different from themselves.”
― John Hirst, The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the National Character since 1770

“The truth is that most Australians live in cities and always have done. Yet is also true that the average Australian carries the print of great distances on his eyelids and his mind. Even if a window-box is all the earth he owns he is, perhaps sentimentally, aware of the bush, the outback, the back-of-beyond. When he goes abroad he is conscious of his difference and of the size of his country.”
― Marjorie Barnard, A history of Australia