Politics & Power Quote by Geoffrey Rush

Rush turns a mundane inventory of national habits into a quiet indictment: pools, coastlines, surf culture. The details aren’t decorative; they establish a default setting where the body is the passport to belonging. “Every school has a swimming pool” lands like infrastructure as ideology, a built environment that trains kids into a single, admired kind of competence. He’s not romanticizing athleticism so much as naming how it can become a cultural sorting system.

The pivot is the phrase “at that particular time,” which does two jobs at once. It acknowledges change is possible (this isn’t eternal Australia), while also refusing to let the past off the hook as mere nostalgia. Rush is describing a moment when “artistic bent” wasn’t just uncool; it was legible as deviance. Outsider status here isn’t aesthetic, it’s social and familial, enforced at home before it’s enforced at school.

Then he sharpens the blade: “reading or ideas or playing the piano” grouped together as if intellectual curiosity and softness are interchangeable offenses. The list is tellingly ordinary, even wholesome, which makes the punishment feel more absurd and more brutal. And “your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically” is doing the real work. He doesn’t say “people,” he says “your dad”: masculinity as a domestic regime, policed through shame and gendered slurs. The “basically” reads as performative shrug, the way someone recounts an old wound while pretending it didn’t hurt. The subtext is clear: a culture that worships the surf can still drown its sensitive kids.