Winning Respect

Robert
Treborlang
Australia

Winning Respect
To earn people's respect in England you'd do well to marry into a family with a long lineage. In China it's best to join the ranks of the Communist Party. Respect in Iran is earned by praying in a mosque at least five times a day. If you want to be respected in Australia, however, you must become a heavy and committed gambler.

  Australians have a huge admiration for gamblers whom they see as embodiments of the national ethos - something like the way the Swiss regard their more established bankers.

  Unimaginative Europeans, brought up to regard gambling as wasteful, fail to see how risking a large percentage of one's weekly income on a horse running 3000 kilometres away, can be an expression of one's respectability. Australians, of course, know better. They realise that more than a flag, an anthem or a coast to coast highway, a nation gambling as one will always be united against all odds.

  True, every country has its pockets of gambling, but they are regarded merely as an aberration, as something to be done on the sly, in one's spare time and with the connivance of a few shady individuals. No German or Italian politician would dream of flaunting their gambling habits to family, colleagues or constituents. Even in an amoral country like France gambling is seen by most people as something one performs on the quiet, a habit somewhere between picking one's nose and snatching handbags on the subway.

  Australians were the first nation to break through these old-world taboos. Far from apologising for it, they've made gambling the cornerstone of their nationhood and use it the way Popes used Catholicism to unite medieval Europe.

  An intricate network covers the country for this purpose: racecourses, dog tracks, poker machines, lottery agencies, two-up schools, TAB offices, SP shops, bingo houses, trotting meets, stock exchanges, futures markets, art-union mail-outs, church raffles, write-in competitions, lotto promotions, luxury casinos, golden caskets, instant prizes, soccer pools, cockroach races and earthworm tournaments.

  You may hear mysterious incantations wherever you go.
  Eleven and twenty-five always come up together...
  The third in the fourth looks good...
  I was told I'd only get four to seven on the red...
  I got on at four to five...

  In Europe, if you can identify every one of Beethoven's symphonies, people will say about you 'That person is cultured.' Do the same thing in Australia and you'll be called a show-off. Name, however, every horse and rider who's won the Melbourne Cup since 1861 and you will be regarded with great respect.

  Talking about racehorses or dogs is never showing off. You are admired as someone worthwhile. Someone who can be trusted. It's okay to be interested even in something like computers as long as you intend to use them for working out winners at the track or lucky Lotto numbers."

  European men and women who back in Budapest, Zurich and Vienna would have never dreamt of gambling even five dinars of their hard earned money, and whose parents' hair would have turned white at the thought of their children wasting their wages, soon shed all their inhibitions in Australia and devote many intense waking hours to this new source of respectability.

  It's not as if they're gambling - they're simply trying to gain acceptance. Accountants, lawyers, general practitioners, all do it, purely to be sociable and earn the respect of their clients, of course. Most of the clients are at the races, anyway.

  In other countries unenlightened parents are horrified if their children gamble. Australian parents, keen to see their kids grow up respected members of the community, encourage gambling from an early age.
  "Don't waste your money, Bev! Better buy Lotto!"
  "I do but forget to look up the numbers."
  "Grandpa reckons Concerto is set to win."
  "Don't listen to Dad he hasn't had picked a winner in weeks."
  "I bought everyone scratchies for Christmas but gave Mum an Opera House and Nana a Systems Seven."

  It's important, therefore, to train children from an early age to buy lotteries for birthdays, hold intra-family Melbourne Cup sweeps, organise clan nights at the pokies, watch Lotto results gathered around the telly, and to put into practice the wise old dictum: the family that bets together, gets together.

Copyright © 1991-2002 - Robert Treborlang

Robert
Treborlang
Australia

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