Just for Men (and for the women who want to sneak a look). If you find it interesting, do leave a comment and pass it on.
Making No Apologies for Mateship
But what does the term mean? Well, you’ll hear Englishmen use the term “mate” to refer to a male friend, just like men do in Australia; but ‘mateship’ is something uniquely Australian and implies much more than a male version of friendship. Sadly, it is quickly going out of fashion due to pressures of political correctness and ignorance of what the term actually means. Like so many other things masculine it has been shoveled into the category of “toxic” and “misogynist” simply for being male. It is suffering the same fate as pretty much all things distinctly male.
Mateship is all about the content of male character expressing itself in a rich and self-giving masculine code – one that demands a “fair go”; one that demands trust, selflessness, and sharing whatever you have no matter how small. As writer Paul Sheehan observed, mateship was how Australians survived the senseless cruelty of POW camps in the war:
“The core of this success was an ethos [or character] of mateship … which not only survived the dehumanizing duress of the death camps but shone through as the dominant Australian characteristic”.
War veteran Hugh Clarke, in his account of Australian prisoners of the Japanese, couldn’t recall any occasion when an Australian died alone without someone looking out for him in some way. That’s mateship.
The Australian writer Henry Lawson, well known for his stories about mateship, describes it as,
“the instinct that irresistibly impels a thirsty, parched man, out on the burning sands, to pour out the last drop of water down the throat of a dying mate, where none save the sun or moon or stars may see”;
and the creed that embraces and looks out for, “an old mate’s wife, sons and daughters” with a taken for granted generosity.
Mateship has been one of the hallmarks of Australians, to be found through all generations and all experiences. Uniquely conceived in the struggle for survival of convicts, gold miners, bushmen and diggers, it has distinguished Australian men in theatres of war, drought and fire, flood and storm. It’s how they have excelled in human compassion and sacrifice, in the most difficult conditions that men can face.
The current cultural whim of trying to erase all history that can’t be simply shoehorned into the naive ideologies of contemporary culture, sneeringly targets mateship as now irrelevant. But to whom is it irrelevant? – except to those who take sport in heaping contempt on men, and any kind of masculinity that isn’t bootlicking and self-apologetic.
When you bother to try and understand its meaning, mateship affirms things of critical importance for our modern society, a society rapidly losing shared and deeply held values like loyalty, fairness, respect, generosity, courage, self-sacrifice and deep bonds of friendship. With such values considered outdated baggage that needs to be disposed of, little wonder our culture is fracturing due to shameless self-interest, presumed entitlement, victimhood, corruption, and spite. Mateship describes what has been and will hopefully remain exceptional and distinctive about Australian manhood – as well as offering a model of what it means to be a man for other men far distant from Australian shores. It may survive, but only if we proudly practice it and unapologetically defend it.