https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/10/china-and-the-tyranny-of-proximity/
In the Year of COVID-19, the relative isolation of Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth, not to mention all the small cities, towns and hamlets in Australia’s far-flung regions, rapidly became an asset. Remoteness, in other words, turns out to be an advantage in a country that, in Geoffrey Blainey’s words, suffered from “the tyranny of distance” in its formative years. For Melburnians and non-Melburnians alike, compelled to endure the nightmare of a stage-four lockdown or not, the tyranny of proximity and not the tyranny of distance drives our instincts to survive. If we are to learn anything from the Year of COVID-19, beyond a fanatical commitment to stringent hygiene protocol, it is this.
Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance, first published in 1966, emerged at a pivotal moment in Australian history. Blainey made the case, in the chapter titled “Antipodes Adrift”, that the early British settlers of our continent developed “the kind of community one would expect to find within a few miles of Land’s End”. The problem was, however, that this community happened to dwell on the other side of the world, in the beginning an eight-month voyage under sail. The introduction of the steamship cut that down to ninety days by 1850, while the advent of the Suez Canal route reduced the time of the journey to something like forty-five days by the 1870s. Nonetheless, the next great advance was not until the start-up of regular flights and the “Kangaroo Route” in 1935. For the first century-and-a-half of British settlement, then, Australian society was affected by the anxiety of existing at a great distance from its civilisational wellspring.
Remoteness, maintained Blainey, was not only a matter of geographical separation from Britain, but also of our long-distance governance of Australia’s underpopulated and undeveloped tropical north. The resultant unease of possessing the sensibilities of an Isle of Wight but located on a mostly empty continent in the faraway South Pacific revealed itself in any number of ways, not the least being a hybrid Anglo-Australian patriotism (as implied by the national flag), military expeditions in defence of the empire (Sudan, the Boer War, First World War, Second World War), a British-centric immigration policy and an interdependent economic relationship. Blainey, unsurprisingly, nominated 1941 as the year which marked “Australia’s transition from its traditional role as echo and image of Britain and an outpost of Europe”. December 7, date of the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, might have been a day of infamy for America but it was a moment of salvation for Australia. Thereafter, it was the US and not the “Old Country” that prevented our incorporation into Imperial Japan’s Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
