The old Australia Day-ja-vu

By Christopher Bantick

There can be few images more crass than Australians parading with bobbing corks on their hat brims. It's Australia Day and these jolly swagmen apparitions are set to reappear.

This is an Australia that exists in the imaginations of romantics given to hum Waltzing Matilda. For Henry Lawson, these up-country chums soon went widdershins in Australia's crushing isolation. In the company of jumbucks, they went mad with loneliness.

Australia's preoccupation with simplistic national symbols borders on being infantile. The nation's young country status revisited annually on Australia Day in mantras of achievement - chanted by ruddy-faced civic leaders in community breakfasts - is anachronistic and increasingly irrelevant.

The bush ethos is a haven when uncertainty exists. Australia's iconic figures remain outdoors men (women rarely make the cut). They are cricketers, footballers - a race of athletes, no less, as the British Gallipoli correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett described them.

Australia makes much of its Akubra-wearing mateship tradition. It is touted every year that there is something quintessentially Australian about being a mate. But cobbers in Australia are no different from American, English, German or just about any other nationality where companionship is configured through mutual dependence.

Such easily defined national symbols remind us of what we like to believe our antecedents to be and what we like about ourselves. The truth is we are some far distance from the lucky country.

When A. A. Phillips declared in his famous 1950 Meanjin essay The Cultural Cringe that Australia regarded its literature as inferior to that produced overseas, he hit a national nerve.

Phillips was right for his time. Thankfully, Australia no longer cringes away from its writers and artistic community. This has been replaced by a suspicion of outsiders. The new cringism is to be found behind the fences of border protection.

Australia is increasingly and worryingly more bellicose and jingoistic about expressing its national identity. This is not just in Aussie green and gold shirts at sporting events. The Cronulla riots reflected much about national contemporary identity that Australia actively encourages.

Where is the difference between a boozed-up sunburnt ocker who drapes himself in an Australian flag at Cronulla and wistful backpackers similarly attired at Anzac Cove?

The December Sydney beach riots were an ugly example of mateship gone awfully wrong. The aggressive racial Australianness expressed at Cronulla flows from the same wellspring of national pride heard in the cheering crowds at any international event where Australia is represented.

Even so, the xenophobia that has typified much of Australian history and was the dark undercurrent at Cronulla, is now part, for a significant number of Australians, of what it means to be Australian. This is borne out in the acceptance of mandatory detention and in suspicion displacing charity towards asylum seekers.

Australia Day should be a day - perhaps more so this year with the Cronulla riots in mind - where Australia's diversity is celebrated. Multiculturalism is the success story of Australia. It is what unambiguously defines the nation. But is Australia still the country of the fair go?

Children these days are growing up in a very different, less open, society than when I grew up in the 1950s. Curiously, even with high postwar levels of Mediterranean migration, there was less need to ostentatiously show what being an Australian meant. Those simple days were measured out with Vegemite on crusts at the school tuckshop and singing the national anthem on Monday mornings.

Back then, there were no wire fences in the desert keeping new arrivals from the rest of Australian society. Never did I think I would have to explain to my young son why people were locked up in camps. Never did I think I'd feel ashamed as an Australian when there was so little that apparently could be done to save Nguyen Tuong Van. Or so utterly shamed that Australia remains for many indigenous people a Third World country where children are born into unspeakable disadvantage.

The barbecues and festivities on Australia Day need to be put in perspective. Recognising identity is one thing. Rock concerts, parades and legions of flag-wearing, stubby-guzzling mates are the distillation of a culture that cringes from looking beyond irrelevant symbols of itself.

Christopher Bantick is a Melbourne writer.