Taking a short break from the headlines today to muse about something that’s been bugging me just a little of late. It’s not what you might call a huge issue in the scheme of things, but I think it’s symptomatic of something that looms larger in the Australian psyche in general.  In this case, it has to do with the opening of Zara in Melbourne.

Now, beyond knowing that they sell clothes of some kind, I really don’t get Zara.  I know that I’m not quite the demographic they’re going for, but the same is true of a lot of other stores and I at least understand them.  I don’t go to the Denture Clinic but I comprehend the way it works.  I may never set foot in one of Melbourne’s many motorcycle shops, but their operations are no mystery to me. Zara is just… odd. Putting nightclub-style bouncers and velvet rope outside a retail clothing outlet is a little bit silly and self-congratulatory in my opinion, but that might be just me. They haven’t done anything to be famous here yet, but they act like they have, and so they are. It’s a bit like Paris Hilton, but without the herpes.  But I digress.

It’s not so much the store, however, that I’m chiefly concerned with here… it’s more the way people reacted to its opening, and still seem to be reacting weeks and months later.  In short, people appear to have gone kinda nuts over it.  There was hype and commentary for weeks before it opened, and lines of eager shoppers stretching down Bourke Street for weeks afterwards.  It was like they’d never seen a clothing store before - not even the Myer Christmas Windows get that kind of traffic.  For a shop which in Europe (from whence it hails) is little more than a slightly upmarket version of Target, the full Hollywood red-carpet treatment seems a tad disproportionate, unless the clothes were hand-stitched by Jesus or they’ve re-animated Phar Lap and have him working the register.  This is where we reach the crux of the problem though, because I reckon that if Zara was Australian in origin it would have closed by now due to lack of interest.  I believe the excitement over this shop is due solely to the apparent perception that we’re just so incredibly lucky that an overseas chain has decided to open a store right here in our very own little country.

I’ve got a theory about why this drives us so mental, it’s something we’ve seen a few times before.  The reaction to Zara is akin to a phenomenon that I like to call “Wainscoting Syndrome”, and it’s an ailment that Australia suffers from particularly badly.  The name refers to a Monty Python sketch, in which a man arrives at a house to deal with a rodent infestation, and is told that scratching sounds are coming from behind the wainscoting (the skirting board).  He stops, and says, “that’s a strange word, isn’t it?  Wainscoting.  Wainscoting, wainscoting.  Sounds like a small Dorset village – Wains Coting.”  The scene then cuts to a shot of the outside of a cottage, a sign that says “Welcome to Wains Coting”, and a woman runs out and shouts excitedly, “WE’VE BEEN MENTIONED ON THE TELLY!!!” 

This is exactly what happens any time we get mentioned in an international context, or something international comes here - we just seem to lose our shit completely.  Whenever an Aussie gets nominated for an Oscar or does anything to get someone with a foreign accent saying the word “Australia” on camera where we might see it at home, we jump up and down, whooping and cheering like it’s the most exciting thing to happen to anyone, anywhere, ever.  Even if we’re so much as referred to in passing on a popular TV show from overseas, the same thing happens.  We’ve been mentioned on the telly!! Our name is in lights, we’ve been recognised abroad.  We must have made it.  Famous at last!  Incidentally, I am aware of the irony of using a sketch from a British comedy show to illustrate this point, but you’re just going to have to forgive me for that.

With Zara, the level of hype is so extreme, it’s almost as though just being in a shop with a famous name is enough, or indeed is the whole point of even going.  Buying clothes seems entirely incidental to the process. The very fact that it’s even here has people whipped into a frenzy. When it opened it was like, “Ooh, Zara!  It’s from Europe! And it’s HERE!!  We must be important!” It kind of reminds me of the end of the 1996 US film “Independence Day” (stay with me here): when opening night audiences saw the shot of the Sydney Opera House, there was cheering and applause.  We’re just so grateful to even be thought of, whether it’s a Hollywood movie or a European chain store.

I just wonder, why do we seem to feel that we need our sense of worth to be validated by stuff/people from other places?  Are we really that desperate to prove that we’re tough enough to play with the big kids?  Why do we even care?  Or more pertinently, why do we perpetually see ourselves as “the little kid” in the equation? It’s like when we get American actors and performers to appear at our awards ceremonies for no apparent reason - did having Matt LeBlanc or Kevin Sorbo at the Logies really add anything?  We have some pretty monumentally talented people among us but somehow that never seems to be enough… at least not until they go overseas an win an award or two there.

I’m not saying that local talent making good overseas isn’t something we should be proud of, because it most certainly is; and I’m not saying we should only celebrate Australian achievements and achievers… in many ways it’s great that we so often extend our gaze beyond our borders.  There’s a lot to be said for the fact that we’re so willing to welcome overseas businesses who want to set up shop on our shores… as well as the ones who make it off the shores and further inland (I’m really, really sorry about that last joke).  It’s also great that our arts and theatre scene attracts some pretty awesome performers from around the world -  Sir Ian McKellan has done shows here twice in the last few years, and Kevin Spacey is coming to Sydney soon with a production of Richard III.  But somehow I get the sense that a lot of the time we feel like we need these things just to feel a sense of value in ourselves, when we should be standing tall and proud, on our own two feet. Not taking success for granted, but not scrambling for every single crumb of recognition that falls from the international table.  At least an Aussie is the face of L’Oreal Paris now, maybe we’ll pay attention if one of our own tells us that we’re worth it.

I guess what I’m saying is that we shouldn’t need to be the world’s wall-flower, always waiting for someone else to be the first to ask us to dance, and so disproportionately grateful whenever anyone does.  We can take the lead, and we can carve up the floor pretty nicely with the best of them.  We should act like it more often.