I think what people mean when they talk of 'lack of culture' is that Australia and other 'young' nations (young by European standards, of course), lack the old buildings that European cities have. And it's true, they do
I think it is even more multi-layered than that.
No one can deny there are more buildings, more art, more religious buildings and artifacts and more known and published history in Europe. Why would they?
The issue is complaining about the ‘lack of culture - as defined by European aspects’ in a young country.
Particularly, with an indigenous population who had completely different values to those European values when it came to power, recording history and creating monuments, who then had those Europeans take the resources and what artefacts etc back to Europe instead of ensuring the wealth was retained in the country (to create more of what people are complaining about the country lacking) they just took and so on.
And then miss the other layers of just which countries the companies still are taking the profit from those investments are from and are those companies investing the profits back into cultural infrastructure.
Then there is also the discussion on how muliticultural Australia is today. What is the use of comparing it against European culture?
And again consider that many of those other cultures coming into Australia do not have the funds to create the ‘cultural’ aspects that Australia is being judged to be deficit in. Most Australians I know who have parents or grandparents from other countries didn’t arrive with money to invest in building monuments, new theatres, galleries or any such thing. Quite the opposite.
So again, the cultural richness is in other measures rather than by European standards. And no, I wouldn’t go around saying those new immigrants haven’t contributed to Australia’s culture by any measure.
Then there is the population. A city of the size of Sydney, with travel so far other countries, cannot sustain a program of professionally run events that London can. It is bizarre to make any such comparison.
Still, there are other events or places of cultural richness to be found, they might not be to the taste, the grand scale or the standard demanded but they are there on offer to be appreciated if you know where to find them.
The layers to this discussion are numerous. And don’t just apply to Australia and UK but to other countries settled by other European countries as well.
I appreciate the results of the wealth of those settled countries, every time I walk around a European city. I don’t go back to Australia and complain about the lack of scale of ‘European’ cultural aspects, because I understand why it is the way it is.