By thinking females who have lived in other Western countries and compared their men to Australian men.
Quote:This sexist idealogy--namely, agressive masculinity--originated when the first settlers of the British "convict colony" -- 586 men and 192 girls and women ("damned whores") -- landed in Botany Bay and embarked on a run of drunken hellraising, with the male convicts chasing the female convicts. As a result of this night, and many others that followed it, colonial reformers later called for the migration of "good and virtuous women" from Britain to Australia to serve as wives, mothers and, as mentioned before, "God's police--a force for moral improvement." Thus, to this day, women in Australia represent, in the eyes of Australian men, both sex objects and "promoters of morality."
In addition to the way in which they perceive their female counterparts, another hinderance in the evolution of sexual roles and masculine behaviour has been the way in which men perceive their male counterparts. The tradition of "mateship"--the reliance of a man on his "pal"--stems from Australia's history of the "lonely, womanless and often dangerous life in the bush or outback." Often, pairs of convicts who settled into the remote bushland to run a farm and raise livestock grew "mutually dependent on one another to the point of homosexuality." As Robert Hughes writes in The Fatal Shore, "The feeling of reliance on one's mate would lie forever at the heart of masculine behaviour in Australia."
Other events which contributed to this sense of masculinity, as well as this idea of mateship, include the wars in South Africa, Korea, and Vietnam, in which Australian men gained a reputation as "roughhouse brawlers on and off the battlefields."