ABSTRACT

The extreme egalitarianism that characterizes Australian society owes much of its origin to the country’s settlement, in the late eighteenth century, as a British penal colony established to hold convicts sentenced to transportation. Society was spilt into two distinct and antithetic classes, the aristocracy and landed gentry whose role was to govern and administer the new colony, and the convicts who were leased to the gentry as bond servants, were forbidden to own property, and whose lot, in many cases, was little better than that of slaves. From this immediate separation of interests there developed an intense class hatred, coupled with an extreme resentment against any privilege inherited rather than acquired by ‘honest labour’ (Ward, 1958). This resentment of inherited wealth and inherited power has carried over into a very real hostility towards high intellectual ability, which is covertly viewed by many Australians as an inherited, and therefore unmerited, passport to wealth and status through success in school and access to higher-level employment.