Latest video script

You know, we need somebody to really represent Australia. And since nobody else is volunteering I guess it’s gotta be me. When I saw a post about Overwatch (of course it’s gotta be overwatch) all those years ago, making a maps SET in Australia. And using the word takeout. I was, let’s just say, flabbergasted. They, of course, changed the sign to the correct term, takeaway. The standard term used all over the entire continent of Australia. But it raised an interesting question for me: Did they have a single Australian working on the map set in Australia?

You see, some game developers talk a lot about representation. And it’s my absolute favourite thing in the world. Because they’ll represent diverse locations and brand new, unheard of viewpoints like: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and if they’re daring, maybe even the American south. And it isn’t just American developers either. Rockstar/GTA emerged out of Scotland originally, but makes games based on American culture. Finns are making games like Max Payne, set in New York. Poles make games based on an alternate version of LA. The world is obsessed with America, and at this point, isn’t it a little boring? Like what new story are you going to tell? NYC has cold bitter winters. Ooh le Wall Street. Le capitalism. Le consumerism. Le hamburgers. [it’s boring, from pronouns guy].

I love it when they do something different. Anything different. And I don’t mean fictional settings. Because sci-fi often just ends up as ‘space-America’. I mean other places on Earth. Other cultures. Occasionally, other devs do represent their culture well. Like the Witcher is set in Poland. Not actual Poland, but it’s Poland in the same sense that Tolkiens world is England. It’s a mythical representation of the real place.

Now, I know why this is. It’s because all the media/content they consume and all their favourite makers are from America. I think “write what you know” is more interesting when it’s about unique cultural experiences that you know intimately. Rather than movies you like that everybody else knows about as well. And what movie have most people watched that tells them everything they need to know about Australia? Obviously Mad Max.

And I find the Mad Max game an interesting study

[review this section after playing it]

Because it’s made by Swedes. Who are basically going off the films and general cultural cliches about the country. They were originally going to get rid of Max’s Australian accent. Which is just absolute sacrilege. Max is Australian. If he isn’t, he’s not Mad Max. That’s like core to the games identity. In the original US theatre run, they actually dubbed the original Australian actors with American voice actors. If you can’t listen to an Australian accent, you can’t watch Mad Max. And this game doesn’t really feel much like Australia. Besides all the American accents around. Just look at it. The colours are not right. Australia has these rusty reds. Dark greens and browns. It’s the colour of the earth. The most earthy part of the earth. It’s really the ochre colour palette which defines Australia. The colour of the flora is really distinct as well. The continent is dominated and, really, defined by the gum tree. The eucalyptus. It’s often a mix of deep greens that are almost blue-grey. But can also come in all sorts of colours, like the gorgeous snow gum. The different soil composition and environment causes the continent to have a completely different type of flora. Australian ecosystems are fire-adapted in ways that Northern Hemisphere forests aren't. It actually survives getting burnt, so you’ll see these charred trunks sprouting new branches. Many Australian plants not only survive fire but require it to reproduce. Banksia cones only open and release seeds after a bushfire. Grass trees flower prolifically after fire. This creates these cyclical landscapes that are constantly being renewed by fire. How would you even portray this in a game? Temperate regions have these rich, black, fertile soils. Australia? We've often got these ancient, leached soils that are poor in nutrients. They're red from iron oxide. Literally rusting away for millions of years. This creates these landscapes that have this incredible rusty, orange-red colour palette you don't see anywhere else. This game has just about every other colour, greys, bright whites and yellows. It has these jagged rock formations. It’s a desert, sure, but it’s not Australia. It just doesn’t look like anywhere in the country. Tonally it’s just completely wrong.

The continent is, due to its isolation, one of the most visually unique places on the planet. There are so many details about Australia that you need to get right to really evoke the correct mood. Like rivers being brown. And there are a bunch of unique geological features. All the pink lakes. Or the giant meteoric blue lake in Mount Gambier. There are so many potential locales you could show off in a game. It’s geologically ancient, with flora and fauna that evolved in isolation for millions of years. What does being ancient mean specifically? Well, in Europe, you have a lot of relatively recent geological formations. Like the Swiss alps. This means that they have sharp, defined, pointy, tall mountains. A lot of Australia used to have tall mountains, but they have been worn down by erosion over millions of years. This means a lot of hills, a lot of “mounds” and rocks. And they’re very round. Very curved. We don’t have as many sharp geological features. Australia is geographically stable. It doesn’t sit near the boundary of a tectonic plate. It has it’s own. Look at some of the tallest mountains in Australia. They look worn. Ancient. Like mount Zeil. And they’re not that tall. Seriously, the tallest mountain in this entire continent is less than 2500 km. It’s really quite a flat country.

Australia is dry so a lot of river systems in the interior have really flat riverbeds that only fill after rain. Like Lake Ayer. Australian deserts are not interchangeable with the sahara or the sonora. We don’t have cacti. We don’t have scorpions. We do have camels (but they’re not native). We also have these cute little burrowing marsupials. To get a taste of the unique geology, look to the Bungle Bungle Range in the Kimberley. These bizarre beehive-shaped formations with distinct orange and black striping. Or the famous Uluru, it's what geologists call a "monolith" - an exposed remnant of ancient sandstone that's been weathered for 550 million years. There’s the Wave. So many distinct features to go off. Distinct references.

This is partially a byproduct of how artists build levels in modern games. It’s a bit like Halo Forge. They use prefab pieces to construct the environment. Like a big rock piece. You just place a ton of these to create a cliff. But you can’t use this industry standard approach to create more unique environments. Like ones with rounded, soft edges. Eroded rocks. The artists who are building these environments are hampered by the existing workflows. In addition to having to learn a brand new visual style with a distinct colour palette. And, oh yeah, they can’t rely on an existing asset library. Whether it be a company internal one or an online asset store. Because you gotta build everything from scratch to get the look right. A lot of studios may rely heavily on asset libraries and photogrammetry data collected primarily in North America and Europe.

Another example of an Australian game is Forza Horizon 3. The gameplay in these is centered around the cars. While the environment is just a pretty backdrop. So they have an opportunity to represent some of the most naturally beautiful areas in Australia. And I will say it does better than most. The colour palette still doesn’t feel entirely right. What it certainly does do really well, is show the diversity of the Australian continent. Because that’s what it is. A continent larger, and more biodiverse, than Europe. It is kinda funny how “abridged” it is. Like that is how they build the maps, as a kind of “best of” the region. But placing the Yarra valley next to a desert. Or Byron bay below the great ocean road is funny to me. I mean, they dedicated a whole game to the UK. This map is kind of like a map that places new york, Miami and Baja California right next to each other in one playable space. Like these are just completely different environments. Different weather, different wildlife, different plants, different architecture. Just worlds apart. The north of Australia is tropical. It’s more like these island nations. There’s this house named the Queenslander, it’s a bit like the houses in Florida. It’s built for the tropics. In the south you see a lot of bluestone, AKA basalt. Try to incorporate that if you want it to look like Australia. I do want to applaud them on the accuracy of the towns. They didn’t do a bad here. There are also some locations I would say are actually less impressive in the game than in real life, like the great ocean road. I still don’t think they entirely nailed the flora here either. It doesn’t look dry enough. All our grass turns gold in summer. Not enough shrubbery, too saturated. Not rocky enough. No gibber plains. Not scrubby. How often do you see something like the bottlebrush, or the golden wattle?

And you know, with all the biomes they showed off… they honestly could’ve shown way more. Like the Black Spur in Victoria. One of the best drives in the world. It’s a rainforest with these super tall mountain ash eucalyptus, the tallest flowering plants on Earth, and these giant ferns. Through this wet, green location. With waterfalls everywhere. I’ll reiterate again, Australia feels ancient. This feels like Jurassic park.

Let’s look at that Overwatch map again. What’s the issue with it? Well it’s just the exact same stereotype from Mad Max. The ramshackle tin shack. It is… BORING. And that’s all they want to show about Australia because it’s all they know about Australia. “did you know Australians are just british texans?” reddit gold 100. Have all my le gold kind gentlesir this is so epic. Have all the bacons and maybe even a kangaroo mate. Did you know that 87% of Australians live in cities? It’s actually one of the most urbanised populations in the world. You know, if Sydney and Melbourne were cities in Germany (with it’s 80 million inhabitants), they would be the two largest cities in Germany. It would be more accurate to represent Australia with Kath and Kim than Crocodile Dundee. There is a swelling class of effete, overly educated middle managers in Australia (do the voice). Far more presence on the island than rugged bushmen. It least the tin shed part is accurate. That is an important material to take into account if you want to represent Australia. Even better: colorbond steel. It’s right up there next to bluestone, weatherboard, tan brick, tanbark, rusted iron.

In rainbow 6 siege they did the same thing. Wow, it’s a “roadhouse”. In the middle of the desert. Because le Mad Max was in le desert. Isn’t Rainbow 6 about spec ops teams? Of course, if I do a terrorist attack, I’m going to do it in the middle of nowhere where nothing happens. Here’s one of the little niggles I have about Mad Max, starting from the second one. It’s flanderised. Like an over the top parody version of Australia because: why, in the event that the world ended, and it’s very difficult to survive, would you go to the centre of the country where nobody lives and there is no water and it is the most difficult to survive? Even in the modern day, these remote communities literally only survive because supplies are being brought to them by trucks from nearer to the coast. There’s also the obvious American influence. Like it’ being a “roadhouse”. Now, you probably can find a couple places with this name in Australia, but it’s not the most common term. You would be more likely to hear of truckers stopping at a petrol station, or servo (service station). Or they would stop at a pub. What’s even worse, is that this is the last chance for “gas”. Now, Australians don’t put gas in their cars. They put a liquid in. Which is referred to as petrol. Like “takeout”, you have to wonder if there was a single Australian to sign off on this.

Can a game try to represent some other part of Australia? Like you could do a city. The cities are quite distinct. Wide streets, victorian architecture, the sprawling suburbs. If you did Melbourne you’d show off the trams, the laneways, the city built on a grid. If you did Sydney, it’d be more hilly. More curves and winding roads.

The Hunter: Call of the Wild did an Australian DLC. It could have had more unique geological features. I’m not sure exactly what it is but it feels like they still haven’t quite nailed the visuals. But the biggest thing they could’ve done is represent Australias fauna. Which I think they could’ve done better. Some people complained about too many deer so that may have been an issue at some point. Certainly, kangaroos are far more common in Australia than deer. We do have deer, but they aren’t that common. Roos would ideally be the main thing you’re hunting. Aside from that, it just seems like a random assortment from fuck knows where, a bit like forza horizon 3. Like why so many deer? What do Australian hunters tend to hunt? Ducks, feral pigs, kangaroos, rabbits, emus. There are so many unique bird varieties that just went unrepresented on this map. No emus? Australia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world and there are only 4 native species.

Now how about the culture of Australia? How do they represent that? Terribly. Payday 2, R6S, Overwatch. All of these introduced Australian characters. And do you know what the worst thing about them is? The fucking voice. Nobody sounds like this. Do you know what it is? It’s the Australian equivalent of the fucking anime voice: “s-s-senpai, not like this”. “oh yeah well bonza that’s reaalllly greaaat”. Can you not just have some nuance in your voice performance like a regular character would?

They don’t show the urban nature of Australia. They don’t show different archetypes that you’d find in Australia. The language that we tend to use. There are subtle cultural differences that you only notice when you’re from that culture and have other places to compare with. The diet is different, even. We eat a lot more lamb than the rest of you guys do. We have basically the best public amenities in the world. Our coffee is better than anywhere else in the world. And I mean that. The $1 coffee from 7/11 is better than anything you could buy in Italy or Vienna. Did you even know that we ski? In our own country? Or how about that we play our own football, which is actually the oldest football currently played in the world. It’s older than soccer. Or we invented wi-fi. Or these sauce packets where all these influencers are like “wow Japan is so futuristic there’s no mess with these packets. WOW THING JAPAN. They’re actually Australian.

And the ‘diversity’. Now AAA devs obviously love “representation”. But it’s always looks like the demographics of California. Australia has different immigrant groups as well. There aren’t that many latinos or people of African descent in Australia. There are a lot more southeast Asians, Chinese, Indians. There are more Greeks, Italians, Croatians and Lebanese. These come with their own accents and cultural quirks. Like the lamb souvlaki. That’s almost a uniquely Australian thing. I didn’t even realise lamb wasn’t really used in gyros until I actually visited Greece myself. And obviously there are aboriginals who are barely seen anywhere else in the world.

There are some minor quirks in things like language and how we discuss the country that people elsewhere in the world mightn’t know. We don’t really have villages per se, we have towns. We don’t talk about barns, those are more American. We have sheds. We tend not to have ‘walls’ like the English countryside but we have plenty fences.

Now what do all of these games that I mentioned have in common? They’re all made by foreign developers. They have no first hand experience with Australia.

So they really only have cliches to work off. They’ve seen maybe 1 movie from Australia. Maybe Mad Max. Maybe Crocodile Dundee as well. And that raises the question, why don’t Australian developers come along and tell these stories?

Well, there aren’t that many. Seriously, when have you heard of an Australian game?

Let’s go with the most famous one. Hollow Knight. Made by a team from Adelaide:

It’s an accurate representation of Adelaide. It’s in a fallen world occupied by horde of aggressive, barely sentient bugs who have turned insane. Who have some pretensions of class. Oh and the water is fucking gross and you definitely don’t want to drink it. But for real, for our most famous game, it doesn’t do much to represent Australian culture. It is it’s own world. Which isn’t bad obviously, but it doesn’t help us for our current predicament. And also it’s an indies game. The only game from it’s small studio. That’s telling. Why aren’t there really any large scale developers from Australia? Perhaps it’s telling that there’s a struggle to scale game businesses in Aus. Fallout developer Tim Cain said the Australian vidoe game industry reminded him of the games industry in the 90s. One issue with that: Australia was making games in the 90s. It was a rich country back then. Why did it’s industry not develop more?

There was a Pandemic Australia, 2K Australia, Krome studios Australia. And they all disappeared. Why isn’t development is Australia sustainable?

There are also some famous mobile games made in Australia like jetpack joyride, fruit ninja, crossy road. Again, small studios, small games. Still successful, but it’s mobile. Not hugely sophisticated, not in depth PC games.

Untitled Good Games was made in Melbourne. And they represent Melbourne quite well, because you play as an annoying prick. Unpacking was another. Goose game seemed to be based on England. But they are working on another game which seems to have an Australian setting. Australia is so distinctive. You just need to hear the birds. This actually seems kind of cool and promising. This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about. Yet again though, these are indie titles. Why do these studios so rarely scale up?

There were some older games, like transformers or Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. That was the Australian Crash Bandicoot. And these are highly regarded games. So Australia had an industry in the past. But those studios are all gone. Even Krome died, although it was later resurrected. Ty does something to represent Australia as well. Basically the mascot platformer genre, but with an Australian setting. It does have the same anime voice that I mentioned before. Really playing up the slang that nobody uses in real life. Visually, it isn’t quite there. The colours feel more like a traditional cartoon than uniquely Australian. There are snow levels. I like that they show off diverse environments. This would, in the future, be a good opportunity to show off more biodiversity. Like the snow gum.

There were a couple big budget games, like LA Noire, made by Team Bondi in collaboration with Rockstar. They’re… not around anymore. And again, more America… yay. Borderlands the Pre-Sequel was also a game in a large franchise made in Australia. It was developed in Canberra. And like Canberra, it was boring as fuck. Ok, that’s harsh, it was actually decent. And it was interesting. Apparently the story with development is that they used placeholder developer voice lines in the game, and when people playtesting heard the characters with these Australian voices, they decided they wanted to keep them. So it ended up being like an alternate, sci-fi version of Australia by complete mistake. And it was charming. Although it was still Borderlands. So it was a little annoying. We weren’t quite at Borderlands 3 level yet, though. Also, we circle back to that Mad Max influence with this. Once again, The studio that made it went kaput.

I played a fun little indie game called Straya. It was funny. A bit overambitious with all the mechanics it has but I think it was made by one guy so I respect it. It’s a random game and it’s funny.

Broken Roads was another indie game. This one was a classic style isometric CRPG set in Western Australia. It’s apparently post apocalyptic, but this just looks like modern day Perth to me. This was a really cool concept and one which I was following for a while. Unfortunately, it kind of disappointed in the end. Typical problems: they were overambitious and ran out of money. What is commendable is that there is seemingly one developer on the game now, who is still going back and updating the game, fixing some of the flaws that it shipped with. Maybe this game is worth a reappraisal. There could be something here.

You’ll notice a trend here. For some reason, it’s hard to make games in Australia. Australia is, culturally, a laggard. Australia is poorly represented because there aren’t enough Australian developers making Australian games. Why has the industry failed there? Australia is very rich, so you can’t blame lack of investment. Not to mention the fortune that the government has poured into arts, to seemingly no avail. America and Japan are obviously thriving. China is clearly rising quickly. But that’s not a fair comparison. What if we compare Australia to Europe? We can’t use the population excuse then. Poland is a little bigger than Australia and has produced so many hits. The biggest studio in Europe. Sweden is smaller than Australia and has produced so many games. Machinegames, Paradox, Amnesia, the recent Indiana Jones, Helldivers. Oh… and MINECRAFT. Not to mention the Mad Max game, the one with a ton of American accents for some reason, was made in AUstralia Finland gave us Remedy, cruelty squad, angry birds. The Czech Republic gave us Kingdom Come Deliverance, Mafia, ARMA. Even tiny little Croatia gave us Croteam, who made the Talos Principle and Serious Sam, and have been around for basically centuries.

So, that answers it. Why is Australia so poorly represented in games? Because Australians aren’t representing themselves well enough. Honestly, I could definitely represent Australia better than whatever they have now. In fact this has annoyed me for so long. Whenever some TV show or Youtuber gets somebody on to “represent Australia” it’s always the worst example: “Oh I don’t know how football works or what the teams are” “oh I don’t like Vegemite” “Oh I haven’t been to these places in Australia”. And they’re just incurious. They have no knowledge of Australia. I really mean it, if you need somebody with knowledge of Australia I’m right here. It’s always been a little pet peeve of mine Because we aren’t making enough big games. There are no big studios coming out of Australia. And studios that operate in Australia always seem to struggle? To be honest, this is a larger question that could certainly warrant a video of it’s own. But a preliminary investigation potentially tells us a few things:

Australia is fairly regulated. It has quite strict employment laws. It has a fairly high tax burden on people and on businesses. Although other countries like Sweden have that as well, perhaps even worse, so it doesn’t tell the whole picture. I think a country needs to have a culture of experimentation and a regard for artists. Australia has quite a free market otherwise. In fact the heritage foundation gives Australia a significantly higher free market score than the USA. But it also gives Sweden a higher score than the US. So a free market could influence that. But it wouldn’t explain why places like Ireland or Switzerland don’t make any games. Ireland seemingly has almost the perfect business environment for making a software product. Canada, the UK and France have tax incentives for game devs, otherwise they’re quite rare. Why Sweden produces so many games is probably another question worth asking. They don’t seem to have any special funding. Just typical arts funding which applies to all types of arts and which basically every country has. Sweden does have a lower corporate tax rate than the US, and certainly Australia, so that might be a contributing factor. But none of these really jump out at me as having any strong explanatory power.

There is the difference between arts funding and tax incentives. Australia doesn’t have significant tax incentives, but it spends a lot on arts funding. That seems to go nowhere. What has our arts funding done for us? Australia is a laggard in the arts. What famous original movies came out within the past 30 years? Wolf Creek? We certainly produce the talent. How many famous Australian actors are there? Who don’t work in Australia. The only thing we don’t suck at is music. We’ve been consistent with that at least.

There’s this interesting video by the creator of that indie anime catgirl parkour game about their experience with Screen Australias arts funding. And it’s a nightmare. They put so many strict requirements on the game. DEI, how it represents the country. The worst part: screen Australia wants to control your ccopyright. You need their permission to use copyrighted assets. And there are clauses which grant them leverage over your IP. So basically, an unqualified beaurocrat has a significant degree of influence over your game. It’s not really arts funding then, is it? Because it’s not for the sake of expression. You have to sign away your rights over your own creation. That’s the difference between tax incentives and government funding. Arts funding says: “you are privileged to be granted the opportunity to produce a product within our jurisdiction. Now follow our rules or else.” tax incentives say “we are so glad that you chose our state to produce your piece of work. We are privileged that you chose us and we’ll do the best to accommodate you.

What killed Australia’s game industry? Well, one reason is that the currencies flipped in 2012 as a result of the GFC. The AUD became more expensive than the USD. It became more expensive to hire Australians. I’ve heard that it never truly recovered from that. Because since then, the Australian cost of living has only gone up, as cheaper alternatives have become more viable. It’s so much more expensive and difficult to rent in Australia. Australia has relatively high wages. But, unlike the US, We don’t have the same population and subsequent concentration of expertise to make the high wages worthwhile. Australia is geographically separated, making it difficult to work with foreign teams in larger population areas. It makes it more difficult to get expertise to relocate.

Plus, there’s the culture.

Maybe Australia being so warm is a deterrent? Places like Poland and Sweden are so cold for so much of the year. And the people there are stony faced and distant. Not exactly boisterous and social. Even Croteam is from Zagreb, which is over the mountains, in the cold “eastern europe” part of Croatia, away from all the beaches. How many games come out of Spain or Italy or Greece? But Americans are loud and boisterous and jolly and they make so many games. Consider, though, how many games are made in Florida? So often they’re from Chicago, or Seattle or Maryland or North Carolina. But then again, silicon valley exists. And Texas. It might explain a little bit, but it’s not enough.

Australia, generally, is a laggard in terms of innovation. We do have a couple of important inventions in our history, like WIFI. But it’s not the best environment to put those ideas into action. Aside from the business environment I mentioned, Australian culture is not friendly to innovation. We often call ourselves “the lucky country” without realising where that phrase is from. It’s generally used in a positive context. But it’s from a book by the same name by Donald Horne. The full quote that this phrase emerges from is as follows:

“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”

So it’s not exactly glowing praise for the nation of Australia. Now, keep in mind that he’s referring to the leaders here. Not the common man. And that’s an important distinction. I think the common man can demonstrate some of these negative characteristics at times, however. By the same token, we do also produce a lot of talent. Who love leaving the country. Incurousity is a scourge in Australia. If it’s not sport or coal, Australia doesn’t care. Unless you’re kicking an inflatable ball, you’re a nobody. “tall poppy syndrome” is a term that you hear used around the world, mostly commonwealth nations. But it emerged from Australia. Which makes sense because it’s so severe here. It is the tendency to want to cut down the most successful in our society and bring them down to be equal to the rest of us. It really manifests in an intense and ubiquitous resentment. A kind of passive aggression that you face for standing out from the crowd. And I wouldn’t say it’s just about financial success. It’s about being outstanding. It’s about attracting too much attention. The reason Australians seem so “chill” is because they’re afraid of standing out. Though you hear british, irish, canadians etc. talk about this or similar terms, I would say it is actually more intense in Australia than even those countries. This is an anti-innovation culture. This is what informs the “nanny state”. It’s the desire to keep people in line. Like the culture of a prison colony. It scorns artistry.

You can see how the world views Australia by the people who choose to go there. They are often more mercenary. It seems like every single British person around 25 is moving to Australia. But when I talk to them, it reveals a lot. So often, they are simply mercenary. They only talk about the money. And the weather. Base things. They come here because it’s an english speaking country which they imagine is close enough to their own culture that they aren’t challenged at all. They come to Australia for comfort. Not to build a future. When you look at the classic immigrant stories in America, money certainly mattered a lot. But there was something more happening. There was a mythology. The American dream. It’s not just about the prosperity you could obtain, though that was certainly a key component. When they arrived at Ellis Island, one of the first things they were greeted with was a personified symbol of liberty. An idea. Often, we are told stories of people escaping persecution in the old world to come to a country with a stable political system. And which grants people freedom. Regardless of whether or not it’s true, it influences peoples attitude. It creates this national mythology. They might not have had the same sense of “national unity” or “in group belonging” that serves as the core of many European nations. Being from everywhere in the world. But they centred on an idea. A set of principles to guide the nation. Australia does not have this. There is no dreaming happening here. Because Australians don’t dream. That’s too pretentious. “Mate ya takin’ it a bit too seriously”. That indescribable core is not present. It’s only mythology is really that of the “Lucky Country”, that is: we landed on all this prosperity by complete accident. Don’t touch anything or else you’ll fuck it up. Other countries arrived where they are through thousands of years of trial and error through bloodshed and loss.

So is that simply how it has to be? Is Australia really the land of the mediocre? No, of course not. It doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. And we can change things. It just takes a lot of effort. And we need to just be brave, be honest. And be willing to face ridicule. Be willing to build without the support of your peers. Be bold and willing to lose it all to innovate. Australia was born in the shadow of the British empire. But you can choose not to live in someone elses shadow. Frankly, the country can be better. And maybe through effort and authenticity, you can better represent the things you love without that shadow hanging over you.