Country
In this episode, we explore the question of country, about what it is, what defines it, and why it matters
Some interesting themes have been coming up again recently in the ‘day-job’. One example is that, for reasons I won’t go into here, a colleague and I have been exploring the concept of ‘country’, in context of various phrases such as “defend your country”.
For that one, the assumption seems to have been that that would be all about leaping around with bang-bangs and the like. And yes, I do know about that, as I listen to the constant crack of rifle-fire each weekend from the local gun-club, and, when the wind is right, the occasional dull thud of heavy artillery from the army range way over to the east at Puckapunyal.
But then I remembered this road-sign that’s just a few hundred yards away down the road from here:
More mundane than than all the military stuff, perhaps, yet equally real, equally important in its own way. And this one isn’t about other people doing other things elsewhere: it’s everyone’s responsibility, right here, right now, in each and every action or inaction, every day. In this case, the risk-element is literally tiny, a single female fruit-fly carried on a half-eaten apple that someone’s tossed out of a car-window; but the fruit-fly infestation arising from that casual carelessness can be devastating for the farmers out here. Not A Good Idea…
For here, biosecurity equals food-security, for everyone. Defend your harvest. Defend your country.
To defend our country, we perhaps first need to know what ‘country’ is, or means. Yet what is ‘country’? What defines country? For that matter, who defines ‘country’, and why?
At first glance the answer might seem obvious: country is where you are. I live in Australia, she lives in Bangladesh, you live in Germany or Kenya or Mexico or wherever. Yet even that’s not as simple as it looks: for example, my birth-country is Britain, I still carry the passport that says I belong to that country, I still pay taxes there, even though I’m a citizen of this country and pay taxes here too. One woman I know has legitimate birth-certificates from four different countries: yes, sure, her case is definitely an unusual one, but that’s what happens when real people’s lives collide with too-abstract notions of ‘country'.
And then there’s ‘country’ in that farming sense: country as not-city, anywhere where things grow, anywhere not actively built-on. Out here there are five categories about that concept of country: urban, the emptiness of the city itself; peri-urban or sub-urban, where most of the population live; regional, out here where I am; rural, where it may be an hour or more to get to the closest small town; and remote, where your nearest neighbour may well be more than a hundred miles away. A big contrast to the cramped and crowded cities; and yet it’s all ‘country’, in that other sense of country. Odd.
So many meanings of ‘country’. Confusing.
One way to make sense of it comes from my ‘day-job’ in enterprise-architecture and the like, where we talk about ‘organisation’ versus ‘enterprise’. From the outside, they can often seem to be the same thing: people do often use the two terms as synonyms for each other. Yet they’re actually quite different in some really fundamental ways: an organisation is a legal construct, bounded by rules, roles, responsibilities, whereas an enterprise is an emotive and spiritual construct, bounded by vision, values, commitments - “a bold endeavour” or “the animal spirits of the entrepreneur”, to quote 18th-century economist Adam Smith. The boundaries of those two constructs can coincide, but if often doesn’t help all that much if we do that. More useful to understand the differences, and use the tension between them to help make things work.
So there’s ‘country’ as organisation, something with legal boundaries and the respective boundaries of rules, roles and responsibilities; there’s ‘country’ as enterprise, something bounded by feelings, emotions stories; and they’re not the same.
For example, that’s why, and how, there’s a legal boundary and border between Australia and not-Australia. There’s a physical boundary aligned with that legal boundary. There’s a legal boundary between citizens and not-citizens. Another legal boundary between residents and not-residents, between people who live here versus those who are just visiting. The same legal boundaries determine where I have to pay taxes, but also gain the benefits from those taxes. And then there are oddities and edge-cases, of course, such as the way in which an embassy within another country is legally ‘Australia’. Even in that sense, ‘country’ can be strange.
Yet there’s also the emotive or spiritual side, about meaning, and purpose, of belonging or ‘longing to be’ in relation to something greater than self. A connection to place, too, as in Common Ground’s literally-peculiar concept of particularity or ‘local distinctiveness’. To give a more personal example, there’s that subtler, stranger sense in how I feel Australia is my home, and as my home, the place where my heart is; where my soul is, so to speak. True, at times I do miss Britain so much, the richness of its visible, tangible history, and more; but it’s not my home any more, and in some ways maybe never was.
In the same way, there’s also that sense of loss of connection to country. “I still call Australia home”, as the old song puts it: yet it wasn’t a sales-pitch for the country as a tourist-destination, as it’s often seen now, but more about the sense of disconnection for Australian expatriates out in England and elsewhere. Then there’s that Portuguese term fado, or the Welsh hiraeth, both of them misunderstood and mistranslated as mere homesickness, where in reality the feelings involved are much deeper and more visceral than that.
And then there’s the indigenous concept of country, here in Australia, which in some ways combines all of those themes above: the legal sense, the emotive or spiritual sense, and also, so much, the loss of connection to country. These days we see quite a lot of formal acknowledgement of ‘traditional owners’ and the like, from shires and companies and more: all well-intentioned, no doubt, yet to me it often seems a bit hollow, regarding ‘country’ only in that legal-boundary sense, as an underlay of historic-only ‘rights of possession’ beneath the imposed present-day colonial rules and roles. Nothing much more than that. We do see occasional rites of ‘Welcome to country’, that in principle would connect with that more emotive sense; yet so often, in my experience, it ends up feeling more like an ‘act for tourists’, an empty shell of the real. Again in my experience, it’s only when talking in-person with local elders and the like that the real has a true chance to come through; and even then it’s so often tinged with an all-too-understandable anger, and beneath that, a deep, deep sadness, not only for their own people, but for all of us in this broader country and broader world that we all share. Oh well.
The legal-type definitions of country are just the easy bit; the reality is much more complex, multi-layered, with language, place, hopes, histories, desires, dreams, memories and more, all interwoven with each other in often near-impenetrable ways, often with deep, deep roots. Defend your country, yes; and dance with your country, too.