第13届（2025）“FASIC杯” 全国澳大利亚研究翻译比赛要求和原文
The 13th (2025) “FASIC CUP” Australian Studies in China Translation Competition
非常重要！请认真阅读以下参赛要求：
1. 用所在学校和译者姓名的方式命名翻译文档，如：北大_王小蒙。译文里不得出现译者的任何信息，译文需使用宋体字体、小四字号，单倍行距，无需附英语原文。
2. 9月15日22:00点前把译文用word文档以附件形式发至电子邮箱australianstudies@bfsu.edu.cn，逾期不能参与评奖。
3. 在邮件主题栏注明：2025澳研翻译比赛+所在学校名称+译者姓名。
4. 在邮件正文里注明译者姓名、学生证号、身份证号、所在学校、本人联系电话、电邮地址。提供所在学校澳研中心负责人或所在院系负责人信息（姓名、联系电话、电邮）即视作得到参赛支持，无需另附参赛证明；没有提供所在学校澳研中心负责人或院系负责人信息的，不能参与评奖。
5. 参赛译文需独立完成，机翻和雷同译文不能参与评奖。
6. 奖项共设一等奖两名，奖金每人 800 元人民币；二等奖四名，奖金每人 500 元人民币；三等奖六名，奖金每人 300 元人民币；特别鼓励奖若干名，奖金每人 100 元人民币。所有获奖者都将得到获奖证书。
翻译原文
from Mark McKenna, The Shortest History of Australia, Black Inc., 2025
In The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne described Australia as ‘one of the first modern suburban societies’. From as early as the 1830s, Australia’s middle classes sought to build their homes within easy reach of Sydney and Hobart. Throughout the nineteenth century, as migration drove rapid urban growth, the suburbs were seen by British emigrants as an antidote to the vice and disease-ridden areas of the inner city, where most of the poorer classes lived – a healthy, beautiful, almost bucolic alternative to industrial squalor.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as the suburbs expanded faster than social and cultural services could keep pace, critics mocked their monotonous newness, soulless atmosphere and mindless conformity. But the suburbs’ plainness and regularity disguised their cultural and social diversity, particularly in the wake of postwar migration. Rather than ‘little boxes’ of conventionality, Australia’s suburbs, as political economist Hugh Stretton pointedly argued in the 1970s, were ‘free, private and self-expressive’. They were also home to backyard cricket and football, contests of utmost seriousness that later informed baby boomers’ nostalgia for their suburban childhoods.
Today, 70 per cent of Australians live in the suburbs. This is where the daily reality of the country’s multicultural society is lived out. The largely peaceful ease of social relations in the demographic heartlands of Australia’s major cities – a kind of miracle, given the country’s history of racism – is testament to the success of suburbia (despite its shortcomings) and migrants’ willingness to embrace the economic opportunities and social and democratic institutions of their new home. The measure of Australian democracy’s success is not only the relatively ordered and respectful operation of its political institutions, but also the egalitarian tenor of everyday life in the streets of its suburbs and cities.
Half a century since the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government in 1975, the old verities have vanished. The nation that Australians once imagined as white, Christian and British has become one of the world’s most diverse, multicultural and liberal democracies. The Indigenous cultures that White Australia was determined to eradicate are now fundamental to the nation’s identity. A previously rigid and protectionist economic mentality has given way to an open, free trade economy. China is Australia’s most important trading partner – at once a source of economic prosperity and widely seen as a potential threat to national security.
Australia’s alliance with the United States remains the linchpin of its defence. Since the end of the Vietnam War, Australia has followed the United States into wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), while the US military presence in northern Australia has expanded significantly. At a time when two thirds of Australia’s trade was with Asian countries, AUKUS – the 2021 trilateral security agreement between the United States, Britain and Australia –hinges on the well-worn strategy of clinging to the Anglosphere. Although Australia sees itself as a middle power exercising its own influence in the Indo Pacific – a mentality strengthened by the Keating government’s pivot to Asia – its deepest and most valued alliances remain true to its British colonial origins.
The nation’s population has doubled since the mid-1970s. Modernity has so swiftly and relentlessly altered the face of Australia’s cities and suburbs that earlier generations would barely recognise them. Private education and private health care, which drive increasing social segregation, are increasingly seen as superior to public alternatives. And for the first time in recent history, amid rising social inequality and as anthropogenic climate change threatens the future of humanity, the belief that life will be better for future generations is fading.
For all the achievements and failures of Australian governments over the past half century, after the day to day noise of their time in office subsides, the things they are remembered for – the larger, transformative policies that endure in the popular imagination – come down to a handful of signature reforms. The Hawke government’s deregulation of the economy and its Prices and Incomes Accord (1983) laid the basis for four decades of economic growth. Today, Australia’s trade dependent economy is, on some measures, the thirteenth-largest in the world, close to the size of Russia’s. Average adult wealth places Australia among the world’s five richest countries. The standard of living and quality of life in its major cities rank high against international benchmarks. Australia is resource rich, with vast mineral and energy reserves that enabled the Rudd Labor government (2007–2010) to protect the country from the worst impacts of the global financial crisis in 2008, and Australians have become at once more prosperous, more educated and more politically polarised.
Historians have often remarked that during times of crisis and change – the World Wars and Great Depression, the influx of non-British migrants from the 1950s, the ideological and political divisions over the Cold War and Vietnam – Australia’s institutions and social and political stability were severely tested, yet remained resilient. It’s also true, however, that the durability of those institutions has been tied closely to their capacity for change. In 1975, Labor MP Joan Child was the only woman in the House of Representatives. In 2025, women comprise well over half of the Albanese Labor government’s MPs. But the representation of women in conservative political parties is low, and levels of sexism, misogyny and domestic violence in Australian society remain high.
Over the last half century, however, one question has continued to gnaw at Australia’s soul: how to tell the truth about the nation’s history and find what Indigenous leader Noel Pearson has called ‘a rightful place’ for First Nations Australians? As more and more evidence has emerged of the injustices and outrages Indigenous Australians have suffered at the hands of white Australians since the invasion of the continent in 1788, Australia’s major political parties have embraced starkly different interpretations of Australian history. In 1993, at Redfern Park in Sydney, Prime Minister Paul Keating spoke in confessional tone of the nation’s responsibility for murder, dispossession and the removal of Indigenous children, as if to take the first step in ‘reconciliation’, a process formally put in train in 1991 together with a concerted push for an Australian republic.
In 1997, with the release of the Bringing Them Home report into the ‘Stolen Generations’ of Indigenous children taken from their parents, and the establishment of National Sorry Day soon afterwards, the language of moral disquiet, shame and atonement reached a climax. The nation’s media were deluged with stories of the personal tragedies suffered. Gradually, church groups, state parliaments and many individual citizens, prompted by the commemoration of Sorry Day every 27 May, apologised formally to Aboriginal people. ‘Sorry books’ were passed around work places, filling the public culture with the language of contrition. Only the Howard government remained steadfast in its refusal to offer an apology.
In February 2008, Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd finally apologised on behalf of the nation to the Stolen Generations. In content and tone, Rudd’s speech sounded an admission of responsibility for two centuries of ‘mistreatment’, described by The Sydney Morning Herald as ‘a nationwide emotional release . . . a gesture of atonement for the full disastrous history of indigenous relations since 1788’. The Christian spirit of Rudd’s speech, with its talk of ‘healing’, the end of ‘denial’ and a nation that had been ‘wrestling with its own soul’, was as much a cry for absolution, for an end to the country’s anxiety over its history, as it was an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Another decade would pass before substantial progress was made on constitutional matters.
In May 2017, after a prolonged, nationwide deliberation, First Nations representatives convened at Uluru in central Australia and produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a ‘Voice enshrined in the Constitution’, and a ‘Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement making between governments and First Nations and truth telling about our history’.
After the incoming Albanese Labor government committed to implementing the Uluru Statement in full on election night in 2022, a national referendum was held on 14 October 2023. Following a rancorous and conflict-ridden campaign submerged in lies and misinformation and in which the Liberal and National parties opposed the proposal, 61 percent of the Australian electorate voted ‘No’ to recognition in the form of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament. An overwhelming majority of Indigenous Australians voted ‘Yes’, making the defeat of the proposal even more confronting.
In the heat of a polarised referendum campaign, a proposal that originated as an attempt to deliver fairness and justice for Indigenous Australians was represented as one that threatened fairness and equality for the non-Indigenous majority. ‘No’ campaign literature claimed that voting ‘No’ would prove that Australia was ‘not a racist country’, when racism vented through social media undoubtedly contributed to the referendum’s defeat. The result confirmed the stark divide apparent twenty-four years earlier in the republic referendum. The Australian Capital Territory and inner-city areas in Sydney and Melbourne voted in favour of the proposal, while outer-suburban and rural areas saw resounding ‘No’ majorities. Most Australians appeared to accept the No campaign’s argument that the Australian constitution was the nation’s ‘rule book’, which should not be altered to give one group of Australians ‘special treatment’.
As Australia approaches the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the British at Sydney Cove in January 1788, it has yet to recognise First Nations Australians in a just and substantive way. An indifference remains, a failure to imagine what history looks and feels like for those on the other side.
