tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/australian-identity-12531/articlesAustralian identity – The Conversation2020-04-02T23:30:31Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1354382020-04-02T23:30:31Z2020-04-02T23:30:31ZVale Bruce Dawe, Australia’s ‘Poet of Suburbia’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325127/original/file-20200402-74900-1t3oe05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C441%2C2367%2C2540&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1563686136-105edf26f209?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=401&q=80">Lennon Cheng/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Katrina, I had in mind a prayer, but only this came,” <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A2508">Bruce Dawe</a> wrote to his infant daughter, new-born, in intensive care, her life in the balance, declaring as poets must that their poems are the best and only real gift they can give. </p>
<p>I did not know Dawe, who died aged 90 on Wednesday, but I knew his poetry from my first years of reading poems. For decades, the first contemporary poems many Australians read were his. </p>
<p>Born in 1930 in Fitzroy, a failed student after attending seven schools, he worked as a labourer like his father, a farmhand, a postman, and spent a year on the University of Melbourne campus where he became a poet and a Catholic. He joined the RAAF in 1959. </p>
<p>As well as publishing a growing list of books, he studied part time until he achieved a PhD. His teaching life at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education and the University of Southern Queensland lasted from 1969 until 1993. By then he was easily Australia’s most well-read and well-loved poet. His death this week is a significant moment for poets and readers of poetry.</p>
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<span class="caption">Poet Bruce Dawe reads Little Red Fox.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/1078/">National Film & Sound Archive</a></span>
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<h2>A skilled mate</h2>
<p>We know that poetry is somehow central to our nation’s soul, but mostly we like to keep its presence at the margins. In living memory, Les Murray and Dorothy Porter managed to bring poetry to wide audiences, but neither of them so broadly, neither of them prompting the passion of Dawe’s many readers. </p>
<p>When it comes to poetry, readers know pretty quickly what is authentic. Dawe’s poems are real enough to talk to you with one arm over your shoulder, or sit beside you, inviting you to look with them at what this whole damned creation is doing now. </p>
<p>But he couldn’t have survived as a poet by simply being genial. His poetry always held a deep steadiness of purpose in its gaze. This was his <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=qrycxyw1PB8C&pg=PA121&lpg=PA121&dq=at+shaggers+funeral&source=bl&ots=DieacFvlVE&sig=ACfU3U0VnMUKZGNC5yC5021ZT0MFwfEEug&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjUm7iv5MroAhWwyTgGHQ4_BGAQ6AEwBXoECAsQKQ#v=onepage&q=at%20shaggers%20funeral&f=false">special skill</a>. He was able to bring us in to seeing for instance how “the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry” (from <a href="https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/homecoming-36/">Homecoming</a>) when dead soldiers are freighted home. </p>
<p>He was uncannily capable of making poetry that talked plainly but still mysteriously about the most extreme of our experiences: funerals and suicides, drowned children, a mother-in-law’s glorious death falling out of her chair at a barbecue, the last nail being driven into the body of Christ (“the iron shocking the dumb wood”), the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, or the hanging of Ronald Ryan. </p>
<p>You cannot read his poems without finding some personal connection to them too; my grandmother who once held a telegram announcing her son’s wartime death, and whose home was opposite Ronald Ryan’s bloody shootout on Sydney Road, had seemed to me to have had her life marked by images in Dawe’s poems.</p>
<p>In Australia, we know there’s another job requirement for any poet worth their salt, and that is a dry and thoroughly demotic wit. Dawe’s hilarious <a href="https://mywordinyourear.com/2018/04/08/at-shaggers-funeral-bruce-dawe-analysis/">At Shagger’s Funeral</a> is just one gem that Lawson would have been proud to have chiselled out. </p>
<h2>Tests of time</h2>
<p>New themes of gender, ethnicity, identity politics, the explosion of poetry since the avant-garde experiments of <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fluxus">Fluxus</a> might seem to leave Dawe’s poetry suspended in a historical moment, but this is to say no more than what happens to every strong and distinctive poet. </p>
<p>No one wrote poetry quite like Dawe. Lots of poets took inspiration from him too, many without realising it – the vibrant “street poetry” movement in Melbourne through the 1970s and 80s, morphing into performance poetry and spoken word – each take their impulse from Dawe’s confidence in poetry’s place as a voice for, about, and from life as it’s lived by the most desperate and the most ordinary of us. </p>
<p>The bravery of his poetry, its wit and sensitivity to the world are there in one of the most stark and touching love poems you could imagine reading: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hearing the sound of your breathing as you sleep,</p>
<p>with the dog at your feet, his head resting</p>
<p>on a shoe, and the clock’s ticking</p>
<p>Like water dripping in a sink </p>
<p>– I know that, even if reincarnation were a fact,</p>
<p>given the inherent cruelty of the world </p>
<p>where beautiful things and people </p>
<p>are blasted apart all the day long,</p>
<p>I would never want to come back, knowing</p>
<p>I could never be this lucky twice … </p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from You and Sarajevo: for Gloria)</p>
<p>He has been praised for the technical achievement of blending the colloquial with the lyrical, something he often got “right”. But beyond this deftness, his poems always reach towards our most humane responses to the world. </p>
<p>We know from our present troubles as a nation, as a planet, and as a species, that we need poets as right and true as Bruce Dawe to continue this sometimes visionary and sometimes laughably inadequate work. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A mural dedicated to poet Bruce Dawe in his birthplace Fitzroy.</span></figcaption>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin John Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From humble beginnings, poet Bruce Dawe became a genial voice, capturing everyday humanity with wry focus. For many Australians, he provided a first taste of verse.Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative writing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1342302020-03-27T00:56:01Z2020-03-27T00:56:01ZAs we turn to creativity in isolation, the coronavirus is a calamity on top of an arts crisis<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/322839/original/file-20200325-168918-rk2lbs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C35%2C5928%2C3952&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1564224293316-d02d598882f1?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=750&q=80">Berenice Melis/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Some years ago, I travelled to Israel for a conference on dramaturgy. Losing my way at the train station, I was rescued by a soldier who chatted with me all the way to Tel Aviv. I dreaded what was coming. What was I doing there, he asked? In a region of endless conflict and, for this young man, daily risk, my reply seemed feeble to my ears. </p>
<p>Yet his face lit up as if I had opened a window. Dramaturgy! A subject as far away from war and ancient hatreds as it was possible to get. He would love to talk about it. And so we did.</p>
<p>We are not defined by the calamities that befall us. We are more than the sum of our hazards, hardships and heartbreaks. We are defined, as individuals and as a nation, by the positive content of our lives and, in this, even the humble craft of dramaturgy has a role to play.</p>
<p>The world can be a place of terrifying challenge. As I write, my mother is in lock-down in a Sydney care home and my brother, who barely escaped dying from pneumonia a year ago, has returned to a crowded and chaotic Britain. A common story across Australia.</p>
<p>The arts and culture we will turn to in coming months to fill our time in isolation will provide us not just with distraction, but with meaning. Today, representatives of Australia’s diverse arts institutions sent an <a href="https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2020/letter-federal-and-state-ministers-re-covid-19/">open letter</a> to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, encouraging him to … </p>
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<p>issue a public statement recognising the value of our industry to all Australians, and the debilitating impacts of COVID-19 on the arts, cultural and entertainment industries and the creative sector as a whole. This message would affirm your commitment to the livelihoods and the infrastructure that inspires the nation. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322838/original/file-20200325-168872-1wpds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Our images define us. Sunbathers on Albert Park Beach, late 1950s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museums Victoria/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<h2>Imagined communities</h2>
<p>Benedict Anderson coined the term “imagined communities” to describe how a nation takes its character from the ideas and feelings people have about it. If his concept has a critical edge, it also has an inspirational one. </p>
<p>Australian culture is not just another industry waiting to get a truckload of public subsidy to pull it through straightened times ahead. It is the living heart of our nation, the muscle that, in the face of adversity, allows us to pull together and <em>be</em> a nation, not just a mob of panicky hamster shoppers.</p>
<p>Online streaming performances and digital exhibition spaces may not be an immediate salve to the impulse to stockpile food. But they are a reminder that if, satisfying our physical needs comes first in <a href="https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html">Maslow’s hierarchy of needs</a>, the real question is what are we satisfying them <em>for?</em></p>
<p><a href="https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2020/letter-federal-and-state-ministers-re-covid-19/">Arts leaders</a> have called for targeted stimulus to a value of 2% of the A$111.7 billion industry. This figure echoes the sensible and doable proposals <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-australian-arts-need-a-stimulus-package-here-is-what-it-should-look-like-133803">put forward</a> by arts writer and academic Ben Eltham to ensure the cultural sector does not fall so deep into a financial black hole it can’t climb out when the current crisis is over. There have been welcome alterations to the <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/theatre/artists-and-companies-to-get-emergency-government-funds-to-pay-bills-20200325-p54dv9.html">Australia Council’s grant strategy</a> and <a href="https://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/covid-19/richard-watts/states-step-up-to-aid-arts-sector-as-coronavirus-impact-spreads-260075">support packages from individual states</a>, with <a href="http://statements.qld.gov.au/Statement/2020/3/24/further-assistance-for-queensland-arts-sector">Queensland leading the way.</a> </p>
<p>But let’s be real. Eight years of pointed government neglect of the sector has left it confused, desperate and thinly resourced. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/arts-need-a-covid-stimulus-package-heres-what-it-should-look-like-133803">Arts need a COVID stimulus package. Here's what it should look like</a>
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<p>ABC political commentator Laura Tingle <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-18/coronavirus-messaging-from-political-leaders-making-improvement/12067290">has seen</a> in the prime minister the signs of a new maturity. It would be timely to discover in this a more expansive understanding of Australian arts and culture. This means, above all, more respect for the institutions, large and small, that underpin it.</p>
<p>The steady acid rain of negative government attitudes to the cultural sector – the stand-out example has been its rancorous stance towards the ABC – must be reversed. In the words of Morrison himself, “just stop it”. Stop partisan undermining of the institutions that define our cultural way of life. </p>
<p>The ABC is an authoritative source of information and advice about the COVID-19 pandemic. The government should recognise and properly reward its crucial role, not just presume it. Overseas, Germany has set a new international benchmark, announcing <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/german-bailout-50-billion-1815396">€50 billion (A$92 billion) in assistance</a> for its artists and creative businesses.</p>
<h2>Culture’s intrinsic value</h2>
<p>Arts and culture make important and varied contributions to the national economy and social cohesion. But the reason they do so is because of their intrinsic value. This arises in two forms. </p>
<p>Firstly, our culture is a steady source of thoughts, feelings, stories, images and moments which coalesce and collectively define us – what the philosopher John Searle called “the background”. Culture brings us pleasure, connection, meaning and joy, and in the current situation that’s a significant contribution to our narrowing lives. </p>
<p>Secondly, and even more crucially, it is where we may find our best selves. To act in a creative way is to act generously. This is not to say that artists are better than anyone else, or that creativity is the sole preserve of the arts. It is to observe that to be creative is to give to others through a selfless impulse to share, and not just a desire to monetise that relationship as an economic transaction.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-what-the-latest-stimulus-measures-mean-for-australian-artists-and-arts-organisations-134233">Coronavirus: what the latest stimulus measures mean for Australian artists and arts organisations</a>
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<p>Australian governments have a long history of bad ideas about arts and culture. But there are moments when things have turned around. </p>
<p>Douglas Stewart’s play, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8485329?q=ned+kelly+play&c=book&sort=holdings+desc&_=1585190709446&versionId=43048517">Ned Kelly</a> premiered in October 1944, when World War II was raging, and Australia faced unprecedented hardships and trials. With costumes and set design by painter Norman Lindsay, the fact that the show happened at all was a <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ribush-dolia-8189">miracle of persistence</a> and make-do (the cast borrowed their boots from local policemen).</p>
<p>A 16-year-old schoolboy saw the play, and it shaped his choice of career. He was the historian <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clark-charles-manning-225">Manning Clark</a>, who later <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/189923856?q&versionId=206654807">wrote</a>: </p>
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<p>It was an event in my life which made me pose the question: why are we as we are? … In moments of despair, and they happen all too often, my mind takes comfort from recalling that night in Melbourne when [Ned Kelly] got me thinking about what Australia stands for. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>This</em> is what our arts and culture should mean to us, what they do mean to us, now more than ever.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/134230/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>New grants to aid the arts and culture sector are welcome. But as we look for distraction and meaning in isolation, a bigger correction is needed to how the government values Australian creativity.Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1065352018-11-18T19:00:41Z2018-11-18T19:00:41ZRethinking what it means to be Australian through art<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245219/original/file-20181113-194497-112db5b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kamsani Bin Salleh and Matthew McVeigh, Foodland, 2018, found metal sign and acrylic, 125 x 400 cm.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Janet Holmes à Court Collection </span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: Australiyaniality Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth.</em></p>
<p>Australiyaniality is an awkward name for an exhibition that has embedded within it a call to action. </p>
<p>An amalgam of ideas exploring Australia, identity, place and “Liyan” - a word borrowed from the Yawuru people of Broome that describes the “internal spiritual core of strength that keeps you strong personally and culturally” - the exhibition attempts to reframe our attitudes to this continent and the life we have built here. </p>
<p>The very awkwardness, almost un-pronounceability of the title, evokes the scale of the challenge curator Matthew McVeigh has posed. His aim is to galvanise the community to rethink what it means to be Australian. And this exhibition - featuring 27 artists - is a raucous, overwhelming, exciting and at times confusing immersion into ideas about national identity. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245222/original/file-20181113-194516-6wu4ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Matthew McVeigh, ABOriginal, 2018, neon, blood group information and Aboriginal Etymology text.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Janet Holmes à Court Collection</span></span>
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<p>One’s first reaction is awe at the sheer audacity of the visually dislocating hang. It occupies an old warehouse in North Perth, one half of which has been renovated to house the Janet Holmes à Court art collection.</p>
<p>McVeigh and ten other artists have transformed the massive northern wall of the complex into a giant pin-up board of artworks and ideas documenting the racist underbelly of our national narratives. Titled The Relativity of Historia Nullius, it includes images of dispossession, colonialization, enslavement, and neglect. </p>
<p>Some are witty, like the appropriated FOODLAND grocery chain sign. In the shape of a boomerang, overpainted with images of bush tucker, it playfully rebukes our consumerist culture. </p>
<p>Equally playful is McVeigh’s ABO, a neon work that flicks from one letter to the other. At first it seems like an ugly, racist jibe. On closer inspection we see it documents the classification of human blood types based on the inherited properties of red blood cells, to reinforce our shared humanity. </p>
<p>Other works, like Harold Thomas’ large Aboriginal flag with a clock at its centre - going in reverse - suggest the possibility of a new beginning.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245220/original/file-20181113-194485-parqet.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sharyn Egan Our Babies, 2018 (detail), sardine tins, rags, pebble gravel, card table.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Janet Holmes à Court Collection</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Sharyn Egan’s poignant Our Babies recreates the toys she made as a child out of found materials like sardine cans, rags, and pieces of gravel. These treasured objects acted as comforters when she and her friends cried themselves to sleep in a dormitory, separated from their families. </p>
<p>Most of the artworks document the disgraceful treatment of Aboriginal Australians and highlight historian Lorenzo Veracini’s notion of Historia Nullius. McVeigh describes this as the “distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based history of Australia based on race, colour descent, national or ethnic origin.”</p>
<p>This view of history undermines the human rights of all but the colonisers. As McVeigh and his collaborators suggest, it must be overthrown if we are to achieve a collective “Liyan”.</p>
<p>Throughout this large space, additional artworks by Brook Andrew, Gordon Bennett, Ann Zahalka and others explore similar issues. One of the most engaging works is Paul Caporn’s The Australian Anecdotal History Museum, a Combi Van parked in the warehouse gallery surrounded by the accoutrements of a well-established campsite. </p>
<p>In the van, a selection of objects donated by fellow artists and friends is displayed, each with an anecdote detailing its personal significance to the donor. Some wax lyrical, others are bluntly descriptive. Together, they reinforce the idea of the personalisation of history and the human proclivity to assign objects with a special power or meaning.</p>
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<span class="caption">Paul Caporn The Australian Anecdotal History Museum 2018 (from a distance).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Janet Holmes à Court Collection</span></span>
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<p>This project is an attempt to open up a dialogue and to move the debate outside the confines of a gallery and into the mainstream.</p>
<p>For this reason, some of the bold graphic works like FOODLAND and ABO could perhaps be released from the gallery and harnessed for use on billboards, in social media, and through established media channels. The Australian Anecdotal History Museum could, for instance, take to the roads and tour through shopping centres.</p>
<p>As a contributing curator, McVeigh has pulled together a group of works that develop his thesis and expand on his own artistic practice. Not surprisingly, it is a partisan view with a heavy emphasis on the ongoing mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians and a nod toward the problems of integration faced by other groups, such as the Indian community. </p>
<p>By tackling such a vast subject with a limited lens and an emphasis on the problems we face rather than sign posts toward a more positive future, it’s possible viewers will leave the gallery with a sense of despondency at the overwhelming task ahead. </p>
<p>Still, as McVeigh announces in his manifesto pasted up on the entry wall: “The works are not a means to an end, a solution to instantaneously fix injustices and imbalances. They will be, however, about working towards providing a way forward to reach a new collective consciousness.” </p>
<p>In the wake of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, this exhibition reminds us that the responsibility lies with every Australian to nurture their “Liyan” and create a just and equitable country we can all call home.</p>
<p><em>Australiyaniality is at the Holmes à Court Gallery, 10 Douglas Street, Perth, until November 25.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106535/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ted Snell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This Perth exhibition is a raucous, overwhelming, exciting and at times confusing immersion into ideas about national identity.Ted Snell, Professor, Chief Cultural Officer, Cultural Precinct, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/969082018-08-16T20:19:03Z2018-08-16T20:19:03ZFriday essay: where is the Great Australian Opera?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231264/original/file-20180809-30473-1n8hf61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Peter Coleman-Wright and Merlyn Quaife during a dress rehearsal of Bliss in 2010: it is one of few important local operas over the past three decades to have been staged a second time.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tracey Nearmy/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Having a national identity is like having an old insurance policy. You know you’ve got one somewhere but you’re not sure where it is. And if you’re honest, you would have to admit you’re pretty vague about what the small print means. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>-Novelist William McIlvaney</p>
<p>In 1986, the Adelaide Festival staged an operatic adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning writer Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss, a pivotal work in the Australian literary canon. The opera, with music by a leading figure of the classical music avant-garde, Richard Meale, and libretto by acclaimed novelist and poet, David Malouf, was conceived in the period leading up to the Bicentennial celebrations in 1988. It certainly tapped into the zeitgeist.</p>
<p>The 1980s saw increased questioning of the notion of Australian identity as well as an emergence of a focused contestation of Australian history that later morphed into the “History Wars”. Some saw Voss as a possible contender for the title of “The Great Australian Opera”. </p>
<p>Voss might be seen as a watershed in the evolution of Australian opera - a large-scale work tackling critical social and political issues. In the three decades since then, contemporary operas have tackled an eclectic range of topics, from book adaptations, including Tim Winton’s <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-arts/3329-cloudstreet-state-opera-of-south-australia">Cloudstreet</a> and <a href="https://www.victorianopera.com.au/season/the-riders">The Riders</a>, to the <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/lindy-opera-australia-20021028-gdfrli.html">Lindy Chamberlain case</a> and the murder of Maria Korp by her husband in <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/opera/midnight-son-20120517-1yt8a.html">Midnight Son</a>. This varied subject matter has demanded an equally eclectic musical idiom.</p>
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<span class="caption">Lindy Chamberlain (right) as the second inquest views evidence from the Chamberlains’ car in Alice Springs, December, 1981. An opera of her story, Moya Henderson’s Lindy, was produced in 2002 but has not been staged since.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Museum of Australia</span></span>
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<p>It is difficult to identify a distinctive Australian operatic “voice” as such, either in the choice of subject matter for libretti, or in the musical means employed. Australian composers have been caught up in the many currents that have engulfed classical music during this period.</p>
<p>One of the major issues confronting Australian opera composers is the lack of repeat productions of their works. Of nearly 20 important operas premiered in this period only two, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/sep/03/bliss-opera-review">Bliss</a> (based on the Peter Carey novel) and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/31/the-eighth-wonder-review-sydney-opera-house-hosts-the-worlds-first-silent-opera">The Eighth Wonder</a>, have received a new staging. </p>
<p>Second productions, while not as “glamorous” as a premiere, are important for composers to refine their work. The “one production” phenomenon is not unique to Australia, but it results in a lack of a canon of local works.</p>
<h2>Tackling difficult subjects</h2>
<p>The policy of the major opera companies in commissioning new resource-intensive works, while not completely discarded, seems to be in decline. Much of the innovation and excitement of new opera is to be found in the small regional and city-based companies that might do only two productions a year. Frequently one of these is a new work, often by a composer new to opera. This could lead to more Indigenous opera being staged, but perhaps not the grand, sweeping works of the past.</p>
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<p>It seemed that <a href="https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/richard-meales-voss-thirty-years-on/">Voss</a> might have been the catalyst for a new wave of operas that would tackle difficult and often controversial subjects. This has happened to some extent, but not in any systematic sense. Ironically, Voss is possibly the most talked-about but least read of canonical Australian novels.</p>
<p>Two other iconic Australian literary works adapted as operas are Ray Lawler’s play, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), and Tim Winton’s novel, Cloudstreet (1991). Both reflect the tensions of the increasing urbanisation of Australia, while the dominant myths of an early, predominantly rural, pioneering and almost exclusively white history are increasingly seen as problematic, exclusionary and inadequate to embody a new reality. </p>
<p>Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy’s <a href="https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/work/mills-richard-summer-of-the-seventeenth-doll">Doll</a> was premiered in Melbourne in 1995 to a mixed reception. Controversy dogged Mills’s large-scale Batavia (2001) as well, with the <a href="http://chrisboyd.blogspot.com/2006/08/opera-australia-batavia-by-richard.html">critical reaction</a> prompting a defence of the work by librettist Goldsworthy in newspapers and other outlets. No such controversy surrounded George Palmer’s version of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/16/cloudstreet-review-opera-version-of-tim-wintons-classic-revels-in-australianisms">Cloudstreet</a> (2016), couched largely in a music theatre idiom. </p>
<p>There seems to be a kinder reception for the more recent operas. This was particularly so for the highly successful adaptation of John Marsden and Shaun Tan’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/18/the-rabbits-review-triumphant-adaptation-of-a-deeply-tragic-story">The Rabbits</a>, by singer Kate Miller-Heidke, with libretto by Lally Katz, in collaboration with composer Iain Grandage, whose own operatic adaptation of Tim Winton’s The Riders was acclaimed in Melbourne in 2016. The Rabbits draws on musical theatre, opera and pop, and had sold-out runs in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, as well as a CD release.</p>
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<p>But contemporary opera has not shied away from difficult and controversial subjects. Gillian Whitehead’s Bride of Fortune (1988) dealt with the subject of post-war Italian migration to Australia in a highly effective, and moving manner. Andrew Schultz’s Black River (1989) tackled the subject of Aboriginal deaths in custody. It was later made into an award-winning film (1993) by Kevin Lucas. </p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/pecan-summer-review-20160913-grf3kq.html">Pecan Summer</a> (2010), by Deborah Cheetham, deals with the Stolen Generations. Cheetham has used the opera as a means of training many Indigenous performers, and its final moments, which incorporate parts of Kevin Rudd’s parliamentary apology, are some of the most powerful in recent opera. </p>
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<h2>Permission to fail</h2>
<p>The Eighth Wonder, with libretto by Dennis Watkins and music by Alan John, was premiered in 1995 in Sydney. Appropriately, as the subject matter is the building of the Sydney Opera House; this production was revived during the 2000 Olympic Games.</p>
<p>In 2016, a completely new production was staged on the steps of the Opera House. The orchestra and chorus were housed inside as the audience watched outside, with the building looming in the background, the sound provided through state-of-the-art headphones. This was a vividly meta-theatrical experience.</p>
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<p>Brett Dean’s Bliss (2010) also enjoyed a second production after initial performances in Sydney, Melbourne and Edinburgh. Conductor Simone Young staged the work in Hamburg, where she was music director. (Incidentally, Dean’s Hamlet (2017) was critically acclaimed in the UK and Adelaide, and is slated for productions at the New York Metropolitan and in Europe.)</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/brett-deans-hamlet-demonstrates-the-power-of-opera-as-an-art-form-93003">Brett Dean's Hamlet demonstrates the power of opera as an art form</a>
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<p>It seems opera in Australia is consistently moving away from works on an epic scale to those that do not require the large resources that were available in the past. But what some of these smaller-scale works sometimes reveal is a lack of understanding of the fundamental and essential theatricality of the art form.</p>
<p>Robert Fink, in <a href="http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195335538.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195335538-e-049">After the Canon</a>, notes: “the enduring vitality of opera will derive not from well-wrought musical structures, but from its continued ability to involve audiences in the emotional spectacle of a well-staged drama”.</p>
<p>The Artistic Director of Opera Australia, Lyndon Terracini, claims in a recent newspaper interview that since 1973, the Australia Council has commissioned “well over 160 operas or musical theatre pieces” but “not one of them has entered the repertoire” (that is, had a second production).</p>
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<span class="caption">Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini (right) poses for a photograph with a cast member during a preview of their production of Shostakovich’s The Nose outside the Sydney Opera House in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Moir/AAP</span></span>
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<p>If not completely accurate, this remains a depressing statistic, and one might speculate that Fink’s point is relevant here. Many, perhaps most, of these works suffered from a lack of an innate sense of theatre due to the composers’ inexperience, ignorance or perhaps a touch of arrogance about the nature of opera and its particular demands.</p>
<p>Relevant to this is that composers be allowed to fail – how many of the great opera composers of the past succeeded with their first work? Almost all had a long and often frustrating apprenticeship. Writing interesting and well-crafted music is just one aspect of the operatic art. But the chance to try out new works – the way in which Broadway musicals were refined – is too expensive for the major companies today. Second productions do not have drawing power of a premiere.</p>
<p>Timothy Sexton, the previous Artistic Director of State Opera of South Australia, describes the recently-premiered Cloudstreet as being marketed as a music theatre work: “It straddles that middle line between a musical and what people think of as opera.” He sees part of the problem as audiences being “reluctant around Australian operas because they’re exposed to them less than Australian theatre, visual art or pop music”. This is an issue that continues to dog new opera. </p>
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<p>In America, argue Canadian academics Linda and Michael Hutcheon, contemporary American opera is no longer an elitist form of high art; it openly seeks to be accessible to a wider audience, while still remaining an art form. This has meant regional opera has expanded enormously, as has opera in colleges and universities. In fact, opera in the US and perhaps even in Europe is arguably the healthiest of all the forms of classical music today. This is perhaps in part because it has embraced its popular roots and broken down the barriers once set up between opera and Broadway musicals, cinema, jazz, and even rock music. This is yet another way in which, for opera, what’s old is new again.</p>
<p>While their view might be somewhat optimistic, the range of new American opera is, on any level, impressive. Although a much smaller country operatically speaking, this is not true for Australia. The <a href="https://www.arts.gov.au/sites/g/files/net1761/f/national_opera_review_final_report.pdf">National Opera Review</a> of 2016 painted a picture that has some positive aspects, although the financial situation for some of the major companies was not encouraging. It also highlighted the lack of imagination in the planning of repertoire, as well as a dearth of new opera. Opportunities for local performers were seen as shrinking, as was the breadth and range of the repertoire.</p>
<h2>Linking funding to new work</h2>
<p>Opera is part of broader cultural politics, and the future of opera in Australia is an aspect of a wider political and cultural debate. Funding is a crucial issue for the development of the art form. All of the arts are being squeezed, and opera is certainly not immune, <a href="https://theconversation.com/does-opera-deserve-its-privileged-status-within-arts-funding-84761">often receiving criticism</a> for receiving the largest proportion of funding of all the major performing arts. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/does-opera-deserve-its-privileged-status-within-arts-funding-84761">Does opera deserve its privileged status within arts funding?</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<p>The <em>quid pro quo</em> for this support should be the consistent commissioning of new Australian work. Perhaps part of the funding could be quarantined for this purpose, as well as some judicious revivals of earlier works. It is good to see Opera Australia bringing back Brian Howard’s adaptation of <a href="https://opera.org.au/whatson/events/metamorphosis-sydney?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzMmU57Pr3AIVWraWCh1dpg6xEAAYASAAEgLZEfD_BwE">Kafka’s Metamorphosis</a>, a challenging work first seen in 1983.</p>
<p>One response to a lack of new opera by the larger organisations has been the growth of small companies such as Chamber Made, Sydney Chamber Opera, Pinchgut, and Victorian Opera, most of whom operate on very tight margins. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231826/original/file-20180814-2894-3n12eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Helen Sherman (Poppea) and Jake Arditti (Nero) in Pinchgut’s 2017 production of Poppea.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brett Boardman</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Sydney Opera House, one would like to think, will continue to present opera, but the national company, Opera Australia, is unlikely to enjoy substantially increased funding. There is always the danger of becoming a tourist attraction and not the vibrant, innovative and agenda-setting institution that it has been at times. </p>
<p>The opera scene in Australia might well become an entrenched two-tiered one in which the standard repertoire works, including many more musicals, with an occasional new opera, are presented by Opera Australia and the other federally-funded, state-based opera companies, sometimes in co-production, while the bulk of the new work, on a much smaller scale, will be found in the newer, small companies. (However, OA’s just-announced 2019 season certainly gives cause for renewed optimism with a new opera by Elena Katz-Chernin based on the life of artist Brett Whiteley; a William Kentridge production of Alban Berg’s 1925 masterpiece, Wozzeck; as well as performances of the renowned German composer, Aribert Reimann’s 1984 operatic version of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata; all fascinating works.)</p>
<p>Australia is a hybrid postcolonial society, and this hybridity is reflected in its cultural production. It is vital for the health of opera that new work is presented and revived.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96908/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Halliwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Australian operas have been written about many pressing topics - from the Stolen Generations to the Lindy Chamberlain case - but few have been staged a second time. What is going wrong?Michael Halliwell, Associate Professor of Vocal Studies and Opera, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/904502018-01-23T19:10:31Z2018-01-23T19:10:31ZAnthems, ‘ranthems’, and otherwise loves: nationalism in Australian poetry<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202924/original/file-20180123-182955-16vulc3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dorothea MacKellar's My Country, with its paen to a sunburnt landscape, excoriated Australians for their nostalgic love of English 'grey-blue' countryside and English weather.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Wassell/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A young woman of 23, Dorothea MacKellar (1885-1968), had a poem published in the London Spectator in 1908, titled Core of My Heart. She was the daughter of a wealthy pastoral family, educated privately, a graduate of the University of Sydney. She is said to have written the first draft of the poem in 1905 in response to the breaking of a prolonged drought on the family cattle and tobacco farming property, Torryburn, near Maitland in NSW. The poem was also written in protest against the anti-Australianism of many Australians at that time, excoriating them for their nostalgic love of English “grey-blue” landscapes and English weather. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202915/original/file-20180122-182962-107zx8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dorothea Mackellar.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Later, she re-titled the poem My Country and its second stanza remains the best known most quoted stanza of poetry in Australia, beginning with that belligerent, youthful and anthemic cry of “I love a sunburnt country”. She declared she could not share a love of “coppice”, “field”, “ordered woods” or “soft dim skies” because “My love is otherwise”. </p>
<p>She was in effect working to create not only pride at being here in such a raw and dramatic and vast place, but to make a new vernacular against the prissiness of English idioms of paradise. She even declared, defiantly, a love for the “stark white ring-barked forest” so common to Australia’s landscapes. We have forgotten how much of a rant this anthemic poem was in its time. It was a poem openly turning truisms on their head, giving a new generation its new native voice.</p>
<p>And of course, the poem exaggerated its argument, and opened itself to ongoing arguments over what it might mean to be in Australia, to be Australian, to find an identity in triumphant harmony with this place.</p>
<p>Kevin Gilbert (1933-1993), born on the banks of the Lachlan (Kalara) River at Condobolin, the youngest of eight children, found himself on the receiving end of, as he put it, “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2794050-inside-black-australia">White Australia’s apartheid system</a>”. In hospitals, Kevin Gilbert and his people were confined to verandahs and given blankets with “Abo” stamped on them. In his New True Anthem, he found his own moment of protest in the undiminished arguments over nationalism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Despite what Dorothea has said<br>
about the sun scorched land<br>
you’ve never really loved her<br>
nor sought to make her grand<br>
you pollute all the rivers<br>
and litter every road<br>
Your barbaric graffiti<br>
cut scars where tall trees grow<br>
the beaches and the mountains<br>
are covered with your shame<br>
injustice rules supremely<br>
despite your claims to fame<br>
the mud polluted rivers<br>
are fenced off from the gaze<br>
of travellers and the thirsty<br>
for foreign hooves to graze<br>
a tyranny now rules your soul<br>
to your own image blind<br>
a callousness and uncouth ways<br>
now hallmarks of your kind<br>
Australia oh Australia<br>
you could stand proud and free<br>
we weep in bitter anguish<br>
at your hate and tyranny<br>
the scarred black bodies writhing<br>
humanity locked in chains<br>
land theft and racial murder …<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s not so much MacKellar he had in his sights, for she was a fellow poet of protest, and a fellow poet in love with the land, but it was the profiteers, the racist systems, polluters and exploiters of every kind he wanted to expose. How that word “grand” has been mis-used and degraded, how far we are from being “proud and free”. No punches are pulled in this anti-anthem, and all the necessary questions are asked. Kevin Gilbert’s poem participates in the tradition of the corrective poem of insult, adopting the anthem as an anti-starting point.</p>
<h2>Anti-anthems</h2>
<p>Alec Hope (1907-2000) similarly used the moment of Australia’s commitment of troops to the Second World War to write his famous poem, Australia, allowing himself to speak over the top of Dorothea MacKellar to paint Australia as “drab green and desolate grey”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,<br>
The river of her immense stupidity<br>
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.<br>
In them at last the ultimate men arrive<br>
Whose boast is not: ‘we live’ but ‘we survive’.<br>
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.<br>
And her five cities like five teeming sores,<br>
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state<br>
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate<br>
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is nothing in Australia to celebrate and very little to admire in European modernism. Our only hope (Hope?), he ends gloomily, from a place we might call “love-hate”, is to remember that from such deserts as we have in abundance, prophets do come.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202760/original/file-20180122-110094-6eg8bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And now, the new voices of new poets come to this troubled tradition and make a claim to a voice, a language, an imagery that might wake us up to who we are and where we might be going. Omar Musa, raised as a Muslim, whose heritage is Irish-Malaysian, inspired by his poet father and the example of Muhammed Ali, is more famous as a novelist, a rapper, a slam performer and a You Tube sensation than as a poet to be read in a slim volume of verse. </p>
<p>His new book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34665919-millefiori?from_search=true">Millefiori</a>, is a solid and powerful and sometimes heartfelt incursion into poetry publishing, a book quickly read, but one that needs to be lived with and read over a number of times if the inner voice is to come through and the imagery work on its reader.</p>
<p>The longest poem in the book is Ranthem, an anti-anthemic poem in the tradition of Dorothea MacKellar’s and Alec Hope’s outspoken, youthful defiance and Kevin Gilbert’s hard won anger:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The people tell me love it or leave it. Fuck that.<br>
How about love-hate it and stay? I’ll carry the flame.<br>
They try to disqualify everything that I say<br>
Cos I’m a big brown brother with an Arabic name.<br>
They call me ungrateful and unpatriotic.<br>
Sheeeeit! That attitude is straight idiotic.<br>
If loving your country means wanting change for the better<br>
That means criticizing the ugly<br>
Side of society ASAP.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>We need this kind of poetry to be published, to be happening, to be out there provoking us and projecting images of ourselves that might push us, in Musa’s phrases, to be “nuanced, shift the lens, be brave and consider again”. There might be more accomplished poets, more worthy commentators, but it’s clear that this one’s got a voice that says a lot of what needs to be said just now, and we’re interested. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BI5pqv0tOzg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Musa comes to his poems as both himself and, like Hope and MacKellar and Gilbert, as a voice made by a generation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But do I have the right to commentate at all?<br>
A middle-class Aussie man, that’s a lot of gall.<br>
Cos this isn’t about me, so maybe adding my voice<br>
Is just making the debate more cloudy …<br>
but part of me feels it’s way worse if I don’t say shit.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can’t help but admire the ways he catches phrases and phrasing, but you listen too to what he’s saying, hearing the reframing of the whole country going on inside those Ranthems.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90450/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin John Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There’s a fine tradition of Australian poetry harnessing the corrective power of insult. In doing so, it prompts us to face hard questions about our history and identity.Kevin John Brophy, Professor of Creative writing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/740842017-04-09T20:01:15Z2017-04-09T20:01:15ZAustralian politics explainer: the White Australia policy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162559/original/image-20170327-18980-m9wbgz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 'White Australia' ideology was commercialised and used to sell things from soaps and games to pineapple slices.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/library/media/Image/id/761.">Multicultural Research Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Conversation is running a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/australian-politics-explainer-37192">series of explainers</a> on key moments in Australian political history, looking at what happened, its impact then, and its relevance to politics today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-truth-is-our-successful-multicultural-society-is-built-on-secure-borders-20160519-goz3ro.html">has repeatedly claimed</a> that Australia is the world’s most successful multicultural nation. While the sentiment has bipartisan support today, for more than half a century after Federation Australia boasted not of multiculturalism, but of its monoculture. </p>
<p>In 1925, Prime Minister Stanley Bruce reassured a worried public that Australia’s racial makeup was <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/153840401?searchTerm=98%20white%20British%20population%20department%20of%20information&searchLimits=">98% British</a> and that this was unlikely to change. The means of maintaining this racial and cultural homogeneity is loosely termed the White Australia policy. </p>
<p>Immediately following Federation in 1901, policies were designed to keep Australia white and British. Non-racial language was used to minimise international condemnation, but the xenophobic concern was plainly evident. Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2012-2013/ImmigrationDebate#_ftnref20">explicitly stated</a> his belief in white superiority:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races – I think no-one wants convincing of this fact – unequal and inferior.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The White Australia policy was in place for seven decades after 1901 and had a profound impact on the newly federated Commonwealth.</p>
<h2>What happened?</h2>
<p>The White Australia policy was not a single government directive but a series of acts with a common goal: to achieve and maintain a white, British national character. The <a href="http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime/immigration-restriction-act/">Immigration Restriction Act</a>, <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-15.html">Pacific Island Labourers Act</a> and the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2004C06062">Post and Telegraph Act</a> (all passed in 1901) formed the initial legislative foundation.</p>
<p>The Immigration Restriction Act in particular epitomises the spirit of the White Australia policy, and its hypocrisy. It never mentioned the words “white” or “race”, but the parliamentary debates – and its application – make clear it was a tool of racial exclusion. </p>
<p>The act’s most infamous feature was a dictation test. Migrants could be asked to write 50 words in any European language. Officers could manipulate the test to exclude any undesired person. </p>
<p>The most famous example was Jewish communist <a href="http://www.nswbar.asn.au/docs/webdocs/BN_032014_kisch.pdf">Egon Kisch</a>. Fluent in several European languages, he was arrested after failing to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Scottish Gaelic. </p>
<p>Between 1901 and 1958 (when it was dumped), only around 2,000 people ever took the test. Despite the non-racial terminology, its purpose was understood. As a direct result, non-whites largely avoided coming to Australia, and overseas shipping companies did not issue tickets to people likely to fail the test.</p>
<p>The White Australia policy received bipartisan support, but was gradually dismantled by both sides. Conservative governments introduced the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ma1958118/">Migration Act</a> in 1958 and its significant modification in 1966. </p>
<p>Driven partly by the “<a href="http://slwa.wa.gov.au/wepon/settlement/html/populate_or_perish.html">populate or perish</a>” doctrine, non-Europeans were allowed to come to Australia based on skills and suitability rather than race. Eventually they were offered the same pathway to citizenship as Europeans.</p>
<p>The progressive Whitlam government symbolically buried the last remnants of the White Australia policy in 1973. The <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/rda1975202/">Racial Discrimination Act</a> made it illegal to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” someone because of their race. Those words are from Section 18C of that act, which the current government is <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-21/australians-share-experiences-with-racism-after-18c-changes/8374372">seeking to amend</a>. </p>
<h2>What was its impact?</h2>
<p>The legal mechanisms of the White Australia policy were tied to a widespread belief in the superiority of British civilisation and the white race generally during this era.</p>
<p>The masthead of the popular Bulletin magazine read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Australia for the White Man. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The object of the White Australia board game was to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… get the coloured men out and the white men in. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>There were White Australia theatre productions, songs, pins and badges, soaps, and even a White Australia brand of sliced pineapple in syrup. It was as much a cultural as political phenomenon, and it could not be simply extinguished with an act of parliament. </p>
<p>The acceptance of large numbers of Vietnamese refugees under the Fraser government was seen as a litmus test of whether the White Australia policy was really gone.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162452/original/image-20170325-12142-7g93v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162452/original/image-20170325-12142-7g93v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162452/original/image-20170325-12142-7g93v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162452/original/image-20170325-12142-7g93v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162452/original/image-20170325-12142-7g93v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162452/original/image-20170325-12142-7g93v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162452/original/image-20170325-12142-7g93v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The White Australia Game was registered in 1914 and was popular throughout the 1920s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Migration Heritage Centre</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What are its contemporary implications?</h2>
<p>Both major parties have endorsed multiculturalism for nearly half a century. Even in this era of Trumpian populist politics, it is inconceivable that Australia would ever return to race-based immigration policies.</p>
<p>But if the White Australia policy is dead, has the White Australia ideology survived? </p>
<p>In the 1980s, the <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/17491110">Garnaut report</a> made the economic case for greater Asia literacy. However, the region was – and <a href="https://theconversation.com/have-attitudes-to-asia-changed-in-60-years-not-as-much-as-youd-think-16697">still is</a> – viewed by many with suspicion. In 1996, Pauline Hanson warned parliament that Australia risked being “<a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/pauline-hansons-1996-maiden-speech-to-parliament-full-transcript-20160914-grgjv3.html">swamped by Asians</a>”. </p>
<p>In the lead-up to the 2001 election, Norwegian container ship the <a href="http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/defining_moments/featured/tampa_affair">MV Tampa</a> rescued 438 asylum seekers and attempted to enter Australian waters. Prime Minister John Howard refused to accept them, causing a tense diplomatic stand-off. The widespread support for Howard, which arguably helped him secure election victory, has been <a href="http://researchdirect.uws.edu.au/islandora/object/uws%3A37989">seen by some</a> as evidence of a lingering White Australia mindset. </p>
<p>Academics <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/sg/academic/subjects/sociology/demography-social-statistics/white-australia-woomera-story-australian-immigration-2nd-edition?format=PB&isbn=9780521697897">James Jupp</a> and <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/news/Reviews/The-Long-Slow-Death-of-White-Australia/2005/05/19/1116361670087.html">Gwenda Tavan</a> have argued that the White Australia ideology is still shaping Australian immigration policies in the 21st century, especially in regard to refugees. The bipartisan commitment to offshore processing and the re-emergence of Hanson’s One Nation party following the 2016 election lend some weight to this view.</p>
<p>The dictation test was undoubtedly political spin to justify a racist agenda. A century later, similar charges have been levelled at the “stopping deaths at sea” defence, which is used to justify the current “<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-21/q&a:-malcolm-turnbull-defends-tough-asylum-seeker-policy/7527990">harsh</a>” treatment of predominantly non-white asylum seekers. </p>
<p>As a policy, White Australia is gone. But as an ideology, it arguably lingers on. There certainly is a minority who want to “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/oct/19/reclaim-australia-in-asios-sights-intelligence-chief-tells-senators">reclaim</a>” an imagined idyllic Australia of yesteryear, with its white monoculture. </p>
<p>An <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/02/26/multiculturalism-good-australia-say-85-australians">overwhelming majority</a>, however, agree with the prime minister. Multiculturalism is here to stay.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74084/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benjamin T. Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While contemporary Australia is proud of its multicultural status, the White Australia policy shows this wasn’t always the case.Benjamin T. Jones, Australian Research Council Fellow in the School of History, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/704802017-01-27T04:31:17Z2017-01-27T04:31:17ZIn Australia, land of the ‘fair go’, not everyone gets an equal slice of the pie<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154488/original/image-20170126-30397-10ei227.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Australian political leaders love to talk about the 'fair go', but in truth we are moving away from it on many measures.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is part of a series examining Australian national identity, especially around the ongoing debate about Australia Day.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Australian politicians, interest groups and political and social commentators have long drawn on the idea of the “fair go”. In fact, despite their ideological differences, Australia’s last four prime ministers have all used the term at some point. </p>
<p>In government and opposition, Labor leader Kevin Rudd referred to the fair go, particularly when <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1899860.htm">criticising</a> the Howard government’s WorkChoices industrial relations reforms. </p>
<p>In December 2011, <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/julia-gillards-speech-in-full-20111201-1o9yu.html">Prime Minister Julia Gillard</a> also argued that “we are the people who hold onto mateship and the fair go”, citing Labor’s support for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and health spending in support of this claim. </p>
<p>The idea of the fair go is not unique to Labor, either. <a href="https://theconversation.com/slanguage-and-dinky-di-aussie-talk-in-elections-59967">Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser</a> used the term in campaign speeches, and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull also made reference to the fair go when discussing tax reform in 2015. <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/politics/prime-minister-malcolm-turnbull-has-promised-tax-changes-will-be-fair-in-a-melbourne-speech/news-story/db4ad7c0ccc40df3cd7ee716c76b7616">He stated</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have a very unique culture in Australia and we have a very good mixture of capitalism and free market, but we also have a culture of fair go, of looking after each other. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The idea of the fair go also figured prominently in debates over the <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-13/budget-winners-and-losers/5433178">2014 federal budget</a>, which was attacked for placing a disproportionate burden on lower-income families. </p>
<p>Given the term is used by such different politicians in a range of contexts, it is impossible to associate the idea of the “fair go” with any precise meaning. It generally stands for whatever the person using the term regards as fair or just, although it generally has an egalitarian flavour. </p>
<p>However, even political theorists who devote themselves to analysing political values and concepts differ over what an egalitarian approach to fairness and justice requires. At the most basic level, most egalitarians agree that justice and fairness demand that all citizens have their basic needs met. So ending poverty, for example, is an important egalitarian goal. </p>
<p>Equality of opportunity is also regarded as another important requirement of justice. This means that all citizens should have the same chance to develop their natural abilities, regardless of their backgrounds. For example, it is wrong if a child from a working-class background is disadvantaged because the schools she has access to are worse than the schools to which affluent children have access. </p>
<p>Some egalitarian political theorists take the idea further, arguing that justice and fairness requires a more equal distribution of social resources, not just equal opportunities. </p>
<p>There are a variety of different reasons for this. Some defend the idea because of the beneficial social consequences it has. Others challenge the distinction between “natural” and “social” forms of inequality, arguing that we should be concerned about inequalities resulting from differences in our natural abilities, not just our social environment. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most influential approach in the post-war period is <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts-93">John Rawls’ difference principle</a>, which states that inequalities are only justified if “they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged”. This means that we should aim for equality in the distribution of social resources, but not to the point that we damage the economy and actually leave the poorest citizens worse off than they were before. </p>
<p>How does Australian society match up against these goals? For a start, there is an ongoing problem with poverty in Australia, with <a href="https://crawford.anu.edu.au/pdf/events/2013/8801/Whiteford-Australia-Inequality-and-Prosperity-final.pdf">recent research</a> suggesting that the relative poverty rate has been between 10% and 14% of households since 2000 (where the poverty rate is set at 50% of median income). </p>
<p>Around 5% of households were suffering from what is known as “deep exclusion”. Australians with a long-term medical condition or disability were particularly vulnerable, as were indigenous people. People lacking a year 12 qualification and those in public housing also had higher levels of deep exclusion. </p>
<p>Equality of opportunity is usually tested by focusing on whether children end up in a different income category from their parents. In the literature, this is usually measured through intergenerational earning elasticity, which “<a href="http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=319647066160018;res=IELHSS">benchmarks adult children’s earnings</a> with their parents’ earnings after controlling for demographic characteristics”. </p>
<p>There are major methodological challenges in measuring intergenerational elasticity in an Australian context. There are also relatively few studies on the topic.</p>
<p>However, <a href="https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/10440/716/1/Leigh_Intergenerational2007.pdf">a 2007 study</a> by Andrew Leigh found that Australia had a higher level of mobility than the US. As he put it in his 2013 book, “in the United States, the heritability of income is similar to the heritability of height. But in Australia, income is only about half as heritable as height”. A <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.1839-4655.2016.tb01236.x/full">2016 study</a> reached broadly similar conclusions to Leigh, finding that Australia has “a relatively large amount of income mobility”.</p>
<p>But doing relatively well internationally is still a long way from saying there is equality of opportunity. Being half as heritable as height still suggests the playing field is a long way from level. </p>
<p>There has also been an increase in income inequality over recent decades. While there are different ways of measuring income inequality, the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-31847943">Gini coefficient</a> is one of the most common measures. A country with a Gini coefficient of 0 has complete equality in incomes, while a country with a Gini coefficient of 1 has complete inequality. </p>
<p>In Australia, the <a href="http://www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2013/Economic-Roundup-Issue-2/Economic-Roundup/Income-inequality-in-Australia">Gini coefficient</a> in disposable household income was 0.309 in 1995 but 0.334 in 2010. Going back further, the increase in inequality is even more marked – the Gini coefficient in 1980 was 0.2.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.oecd.org/australia/49177643.pdf">In 2011, the OECD reported</a> that according to 2008 figures, “the average income of the top 10% of Australians was … nearly 10 times higher than that of the bottom 10%”. Australia is once again more equal than the US, but more unequal than the OECD average.</p>
<p>So although politicians claim to place a great deal of importance on the idea of the fair go, there are still significant ways in which Australian society seems to depart from this idea.</p>
<p>Given the reforms the Coalition tried to get through (for the most part unsuccessfully) in the 2014 budget, and the recent <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-16/government-to-change-centrelink-debt-recovery-program/8185366">scandal over Centrelink</a>, it seems likely that the “fair go” will continue to be under political pressure in the years to come, whatever the rhetoric.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Catch up on other pieces in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-australian-national-identity-35033">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas Barry is a member of the NTEU.</span></em></p>Although politicians claim to place a great deal of importance on the idea of the fair go, there are still significant ways in which Australian society seems to depart from this idea.Nicholas Barry, Lecturer, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/704072017-01-26T19:12:59Z2017-01-26T19:12:59ZNo longer tied to Britain, Australia is still searching for its place in the world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153191/original/image-20170118-21143-rku7mf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is part of a series examining Australian national identity, especially around the ongoing debate about Australia Day.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>It is worth noting that Australia Day commemorates the dumping of a cargo of the outcasts of Britain on the shores of the Australian continent. It was not an act of escaping religious oppression, as in the case of America, or the founding of a new political order, as in France.</p>
<p>British Australia was the creation of an imperial decision. This meant that strong links to Britain, and the British monarchy, continued well into the 20th century. There were occasional republicans who advocated a so-called independent Australia, particularly in the 19th century, but, if anything, enthusiasm for the British Empire increased in the first half of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Australians were Australians, but they were also British. There was the proud boast that Australians were more “British” than the inhabitants of London. This, of course, was probably true given that London attracted people from all over the empire and was cosmopolitan in a way that Australia was not.</p>
<p>The early settlers were British in a very Australian way. Australianness was embedded in their Britishness; the two were not in conflict. In celebrating Australia Day they were celebrating themselves and their peculiar Australian way. Such celebrations could not be construed as indicating a desire to be rid of the monarchy or the empire.</p>
<p>The “cultural cringe” may be important for Barry Humphries and other literary figures who attended Melbourne private schools but, as <a href="http://www.cis.org.au/app/uploads/2015/07/op45.pdf">Len Hume has argued</a>, ordinary Australians of the first half of the 20th century had a lively popular culture, including great comic figures such as <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rene-roy-mo-8181">Roy Rene</a> and <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lower-leonard-waldemere-lennie-7251">Lennie Lower</a>.</p>
<p>Moreover, Australians felt a great deal of solidarity with their British cousins. Consider the following quote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Australians know that our future is linked with Britain, not only by ties of race and kinship, but because of hard, practical reasons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No, the speaker was not Robert Menzies but <a href="http://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/original/00000015_0.pdf">Ben Chifley</a> in 1948. </p>
<p>Witness the massively popular reception of the new monarch, Queen Elizabeth, when she visited Australia in 1954. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153189/original/image-20170118-21141-1mqpqgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153189/original/image-20170118-21141-1mqpqgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153189/original/image-20170118-21141-1mqpqgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153189/original/image-20170118-21141-1mqpqgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153189/original/image-20170118-21141-1mqpqgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153189/original/image-20170118-21141-1mqpqgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153189/original/image-20170118-21141-1mqpqgm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Queen and Prince Philip wave from the royal tram in 1954.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1950, Britain was still taking 38.7% of Australia’s exports, which dropped to 26% by 1960. Even in the 1950s, a strong connection between Australia and Britain made a lot of sense.</p>
<p>By that time, though, it had become clear that the British Empire was no longer a going concern, and that Britain’s time as a significant world power had come to an end. The old relationship between Australia and Britain was changing, and Australia was turning its political allegiances more to the US and its trade to Asia.</p>
<p>There was no reason before the second world war to presume that, 25 years later, there would no longer be a British Empire and that Britain would be seeking to “join Europe”.</p>
<p>I think that it can be argued that it came as a shock and that the history of Britain over the past 50 years can be understood, at least in part, as an attempt to deal with its loss of “greatness”. Last year’s Brexit vote indicates that the British have not yet come to terms with their new place in the world. </p>
<p>The shock of the post-war decline of the British Empire was also great for Australia. Cut adrift from empire, it had to refashion and remake itself. It most certainly continued to have a political, social and cultural heritage derived from Britain, but it was moving away and increasingly forming its own, separate identity. </p>
<p>Trade ties were diminished and large numbers of immigrants from many parts of the world arrived, reshaping the country. The bonds of solidarity with Britain so obvious to Chifley in 1948 would only puzzle a young Australian in 2017.</p>
<p>Again, like Britain, much of the history of Australia over the past 50 years has been an attempt to come to terms with the end of empire. Many solutions have been proposed, and tried, ranging from the new nationalism of the Whitlam years, to multiculturalism, to the idea that Australia is part of Asia. Or even a mixture of all three. And then, of course, there is the continuing issue of the place of Indigenous Australians.</p>
<p>Australia has still not worked out its place in a post-imperial world. It knows that it cannot be another US; Australia doesn’t possess the resources to support 300 million people. It knows that the ties with Britain will only get weaker over time. There appears still to be much anxiety about where we belong, when what is needed is a clear, sober and realistic approach to the past and the present.</p>
<p>Australia Day celebrates the origins of British Australia and, in a sense, can be understood as an imperial creation. In more recent times, it has become a celebration of Australian popular culture, marked by barbecues and the donning of clothing marked by the Australian flag. Is this a sign that the day has lost its relevance?</p>
<p>Perhaps one of the most attractive elements of Australian history since 1788 is the fact that so many of its people, at least in the early days, were the cast-offs of British society who had to make their way in an alien world that they were forced to call home. </p>
<p>Perhaps because of this, Australia developed a vigorous popular culture from the bush ballads to The Bulletin and beyond. There is a lot to be said for celebrating Australian ordinariness, which surely goes beyond its imperial roots.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Catch up on other pieces in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-australian-national-identity-35033">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70407/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gregory Melleuish receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is on the Academic Advisory Board of the Menzies Research Centre.</span></em></p>Having moved so far from its origins in 1788, perhaps Australia Day should now be a celebration of Australian ‘ordinariness’.Gregory Melleuish, Professor, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of WollongongLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/702782017-01-25T19:54:56Z2017-01-25T19:54:56ZAustralia Day, Invasion Day, Survival Day: a long history of celebration and contestation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153763/original/image-20170122-7318-1o8bkpv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Founding of Australia. By Capt. Arthur Phillip R.N. Sydney Cove, Jan. 26th 1788, Algernon Talmadge R.A, 1937.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://archival-classic.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemLarge.aspx?itemID=404568">State Library of NSW</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is part of a series examining Australian national identity, especially around the ongoing debate about Australia Day.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Alongside the celebration, Australia Day also has a long history of commemoration and contestation, and this year is no different. In Western Australia, Fremantle council’s proposal to hold an alternative and culturally inclusive citizenship ceremony on January 28 was condemned by the federal government. The council was eventually <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/09/fremantle-council-backs-down-australia-day-citizenship-ceremony">forced to reinstate it</a> to January 26.</p>
<p>Meat and Livestock Australia’s promotion of eating lamb on Australia Day continues to be controversial. Indigenous groups have been scathing about a TV advertisement that shows European invaders providing chops for a BBQ on the beach.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LX__i-zeaWs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>And following the recent removal of an Australia Day sign showing two smiling young girls in hijabs, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jan/19/australia-day-billboards-with-girls-in-hijabs-to-appear-nationwide-after-campaign-raises-130000">a successful crowdfunding campaign</a> will support the erection of this image on billboards across the nation.</p>
<p>Every year, the Australia Day holiday raises questions about our national identity and history. Colonisation, multiculturalism, social and cultural diversity and inclusion are at the heart of such debates. They ask us questions about what it means to be Australian – and “unAustralian”.</p>
<p>Like all national days, the significance attached to Australia Day has changed over time and the day has its own history. In May 1787, the British Admiralty sent the First Fleet carrying convicts and marines, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, to found a penal colony at Botany Bay. </p>
<p>Amid a gale, on January 26, 1788, Phillip was rowed ashore at Sydney Cove, raised the Union Jack and proclaimed British sovereignty over the eastern half of the continent. The formal establishment of the Colony of New South Wales, and Phillip’s role as governor, followed on February 7.</p>
<p>In early colonial Sydney, almanacs began referring to “First Landing Day” or “Foundation Day”. Successful immigrants – particularly ex-convicts – held anniversary dinners on January 26. In 1818, Governor Lachlan Macquarie formally marked 30 years as a colony with a 30-gun salute (a practice followed by his successors) at Dawes Point. Foundation Day continued to be commemorated, and an annual regatta in Sydney Harbour soon became its main attraction.</p>
<p>Other colonies commemorated their own imperial foundations. In Van Dieman’s Land – later renamed Tasmania – Regatta Day in early December jointly acknowledged the landing of Abel Tasman in 1642 and its separation from New South Wales in 1825. In Western Australia, Foundation Day on June 1 celebrated the arrival of white settlers in 1829. South Australia’s Proclamation Day was held on December 28.</p>
<p>In 1888, a week-long program in Sydney marked the centenary of British occupation. Anniversary Day — as it was then known — was a holiday in all capital cities except Adelaide. In Sydney, thousands attended the unveiling of a statue of Queen Victoria and the opening of Centennial Park. Representatives from all Australian colonies, and New Zealand, visited their “sister colony” to join the celebrations.</p>
<p>With 60% of the non-Indigenous population in Australia now “native-born”, the idea of a national day was gaining greater momentum. But views on what was being remembered on January 26 remained mixed. </p>
<p>Many felt that NSW’s convict origins were best forgotten. And there was little for Indigenous Australians to celebrate. The NSW governor, Henry Parkes, recognised that the day was a reminder to the Aborigines of how the British had “robbed” them.</p>
<p>The inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 strengthened the idea of a foundational holiday, and the <a href="http://www.federationstory.com/australian-natives-association-established/">Australian Natives Association</a> took up the cause. In 1905, Empire Day was introduced on May 24, the late Queen Victoria’s birthday, to signal the continuing strength of imperial ties in the newly federated nation.</p>
<p>On July 30, 1915, an Australia Day was held to raise funds for the first world war effort. But Australia’s <a href="http://www.gallipoli.gov.au/battle-of-the-landing/description-of-the-landing.php">landing at Gallipoli</a> earlier that year was to launch the commemoration of another national day: Anzac Day on April 25.</p>
<p>This date was first commemorated in London in 1916. By 1927 the day was a national holiday in all Australian states. During the 1920s, the Australian Natives Association continued to lobby for a national Foundation or Anniversary Day. </p>
<p>In 1935, all states adopted a common date and name for Australia Day, January 26. By the 1940s a national public holiday was in place.</p>
<p>The sesquicentenary of British colonisation was widely celebrated throughout Australia in 1938, particularly in Sydney. The re-enactment of Phillip’s landing and hoisting of the British flag at Sydney Cove was followed by an extensive pageant with motorised floats that demonstrated a march to nationhood. There was no representation of convicts, although the initial float depicted precolonial Aboriginal society. The white organisers had brought Aboriginal people from outside Sydney to perform.</p>
<p>In Sydney, over 100 Aborigines gathered at the Australia Hall for an Aborigines Conference to mark the “Day of Mourning and Protest”. </p>
<p>Jack Patten, of the Aborigines Progressive Association in NSW, chaired the meeting; other leaders present included William Cooper of the Australian Aborigines League in Victoria. Speeches protested against “the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years”, and asked for new laws to grant citizenship and equality to Aboriginal people.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153772/original/image-20170123-30982-yg87q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153772/original/image-20170123-30982-yg87q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153772/original/image-20170123-30982-yg87q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153772/original/image-20170123-30982-yg87q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153772/original/image-20170123-30982-yg87q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153772/original/image-20170123-30982-yg87q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153772/original/image-20170123-30982-yg87q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aboriginal Day of Mourning, 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/defining_moments/featured/Day_of_Mourning">National Museum of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the second half of the 20th century, the federal government began to take an increasingly prominent role in organising Australia Day. It established the National Australia Day Committee — which became a <a href="http://www.australiaday.org.au/about-us/national-australia-day-council/">federally funded council</a> in 1984. </p>
<p>The council aimed to promote national unity and was boosted by the preparations for the Bicentenary in 1988. Australia Day celebrations in Sydney included the arrival of tall ships from around the world, and a re-enactment of the landing of the First Fleet in Sydney. A huge protest march of over 40,000 Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Sydney disputed the “celebration of the nation” as a day of white invasion. This drew national and international attention to Indigenous rights in Australia.</p>
<p>Public participation in Australia Day events — including concerts, fireworks and other community gatherings — has increased since the 1990s. Most Australians welcome the public holiday, which has come to mark the end of summer and the return to school.</p>
<p>But the day has continued to be one of Indigenous protest, with <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-26/australia-day-invasion-day-protests-aboriginal-indigenous/7115086">Invasion Day</a> and <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2016/01/20/whats-survival-day">Survival Day</a> rallies held across the nation. </p>
<p>Elsewhere in the world, foundation days commemorating European colonisation are similarly contested. In the US, for instance, the national institution of Thanksgiving marks the autumn feast of the Pilgrims, but Native Americans have long considered it a “national day of mourning” and a celebration of cultural genocide.</p>
<p>Any decision to change Australia Day to an alternative date or disband it altogether would need to be made by the combined federal and state governments.</p>
<p>That seems unlikely to happen. Suggestions from time to time that Australia Day be moved to another date have met with little enthusiasm. </p>
<p>It should be noted, though, that in the frenzy surrounding the <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/1914-1918/">centenary of the first world war</a>, Anzac Day has increasingly come to be seen as Australia’s more significant national day.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Catch up on other pieces in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-australian-national-identity-35033">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70278/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Darian-Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The marking of our national day has long been fraught, and this year is no exception.Kate Darian-Smith, Professor of Australian Studies and History, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/716312017-01-25T19:54:33Z2017-01-25T19:54:33Z‘Australian’ enough to be a hero?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154131/original/image-20170124-16083-q716yy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Is Nick Kyrgios too difficult – and different – to become an Australian hero?
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Joe Castro</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Australia Day is one of the primary times when people make the pledge of commitment, becoming Australian citizens during a citizenship ceremony. It may also be one of the only times when people consider their concept of national identity – their Australianness. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.border.gov.au/Citizenship/Documents/our-common-bond-2014.pdf">resource book that potential citizens use to prepare for the citizenship test</a> claims that “sport has both characterised the Australian people and united us”, citing the heroic figure of the cricketer Sir Donald Bradman.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1271&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1271&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154187/original/image-20170125-23862-1k6ijf4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1271&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Mortlock Library of South Australia, File</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Heroes embody the values and norms of a particular society and athletes continue to be considered heroic. However, an examination of Bradman and other heroes, reveals much about the nation’s identity and who is accepted as “Australian”. </p>
<p>The Don, described in this citizenship book as “an Australian sporting legend”, is often presented as a naturally talented “boy from the bush”. Throughout his career, he was portrayed as an underdog from the country, battling against his more advantaged, city-born superiors or the English. </p>
<p>The battler from the bush narrative is an image known to many Australians. It <a href="http://www.cricket.com.au/news/feature/phillip-hughes-country-boy-to-baggy-green-dream-andrew-ramsey/2014-11-27">features prominently in the stories</a> surrounding many athletes and is not just confined to sport. It can be found in many aspects of <a href="http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-bush">Australian culture</a> and fits into the pattern of <a href="https://anafleisher.wordpress.com/short-essays/gilgamesh-a-heroes-journey/">ancient hero myths</a>) that tell of a boy facing various trials before returning triumphant. </p>
<p>Previous Australian mythical types include the bushman, the digger, and surf lifesavers. All are typically Anglo-Celtic, masculine “mates”, heroically struggling to overcome adversity. Women and those who do not match these types have largely been excluded, unless, perhaps, they are shown to be suitably larrikin in their nature. </p>
<h2>Loveable larrikins</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154186/original/image-20170125-23872-14mi8xm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kevin Sheedy at the launch of ‘Back to Gallipoli’, an exhibition that re-creates the scene of the trenches at Gallipoli.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Julian Smith</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kevin Sheedy, the former Essendon and GWS GIANTS head coach, is a legendary figure within Australian football. Sheedy is a roguish character who often divides opinion and displays disrespect for both authority and his ‘social superiors’. In the media, he is often presented as a larrikin. </p>
<p>His working-class, Anglo-Celtic (Irish) background further position him as a suitably Australian hero. Athletes such as Shane Warne and Dawn Fraser have also been portrayed in a similar manner. Both Warne and Fraser were outstanding athletes but they were also involved in controversy and are loved (by some) for <a href="https://au.sports.yahoo.com/racing/a/18193809/larrikin-warnie-makes-appearance-at-ascot/#page1">their irreverent behaviour</a>.</p>
<p>Again, the larrikin is not just an Australian narrative and it also draws on wider, mythological accounts of heroes. It can be equated with the “clever hero” or the “trickster”, and has been described as the triumph of brain over brawn. </p>
<p>Such heroes are not against creating controversy but often offset potential offence through the use of humour and wit. This hero type has been traced back to medieval European folklore tales around <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Reynard-the-Fox-literary-character">Reynard the Fox</a>, and is embedded in many Western societies.</p>
<h2>Breaking the mould</h2>
<p>Nick Kyrgios’ behaviour has clearly positioned him as a larrikin. However, when off-court incidents brought his <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-being-a-sporting-role-model-isnt-as-simple-as-most-people-think-61979">attitude and conduct into focus</a>, his Australianness has also been questioned, <a href="https://theconversation.com/double-fault-nick-kyrgios-dawn-fraser-and-reputations-under-the-spotlight-44409">as his parents were born overseas</a>. </p>
<p>The larrikin continues to be primarily associated with the Anglo-Celtic ideals and ethnicity remains a significant factor in Kyrgios’ acceptance (or lack of) by some fans. </p>
<p>Kyrgios is not the only athlete who has not been accepted as sufficiently “Australian”. Others who do not look or sound like the traditional Anglo-Celtic Australian type have been abused and attacked. Even outstanding athletes, such as Adam Goodes, Cathy Freeman and Israel Folau during his time in the AFL, have not been accepted by all fans. </p>
<p>Hero narratives, strongly influenced by concepts of national identity, follow existing, mythical patterns. In Australia, they are usually representative of a narrow definition of traditional Australianness. Those who fall outside of this Anglo-Celtic, masculine type are not always honoured. </p>
<p>If a society’s heroes are an indicator of its values and beliefs, then our definition of national identity may need some work. The acceptance of dominant Anglo-Celtic, masculine narratives needs to be challenged, allowing a culturally diverse community to be embraced.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71631/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Parry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Examining our sporting heroes reveals much about ideas of national identity and who is accepted.Keith Parry, Lecturer in Sport Management, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/710102017-01-25T03:17:15Z2017-01-25T03:17:15ZChanging Australia Day is pointless – and there is much to celebrate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152823/original/image-20170116-16952-1y7v6tu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some Aboriginal people and a number of other Australians see Australia Day as a day of mourning.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is part of a series examining Australian national identity, especially around the ongoing debate about Australia Day.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>January 26 is fast approaching. This is a day most Aussies look forward to: a day off work with friends and family, food, fun, and laughter. However, if previous years are anything to go by, that day, whether you call it “Australia Day”, “Survival Day”, “Invasion Day”, or whatever, is likely to be the source of some debate. </p>
<p>Those opposed to Australia Day, mainly for the date on which is celebrated, do so because of the historical significance – the British invasion and the destruction it brought. </p>
<p>Consequently, some Aboriginal people and a number of other Australians see Australia Day as a <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-26/australia-day-invasion-day-protests-aboriginal-indigenous/7115086">day of mourning</a> – as first marked in 1938 – while others simply believe it is <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-day-nationalism-walks-in-the-footsteps-of-ugly-precedents-21951">offensive to Aboriginal Australians.</a>. Darumbal woman Amy McQuire, for example, describes the <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-13/'disgusting'-australia-day-lamb-ad-again-stirs-controversy/8180374?site=indigenous&topic=latest">“real pain felt on this date”</a>. </p>
<p>As such, the City of Fremantle, while not opposing Australia Day celebrations, is having a <a href="http://www.fremantle.wa.gov.au/celebrate-australia-one-day-fremantle">“culturally inclusive alternative”</a> event two days later.</p>
<p>I certainly don’t see what happened at the time of the invasion as worthy of celebrating – nobody does. But I celebrate on January 26 with thousands of others for a quite different reason – because Australia is a great country to live in. </p>
<p>I agree with <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/fremantle-axes-australia-day-celebrations-changes-to-january-28/8057116">Aboriginal elder Robert Isaacs</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It [Australia Day] brings the community together, it brings the Australian people together and it celebrates the good this country has provided for everyone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In response to my words “Australia is a great country to live in”, some will immediately retort: “Well, it’s not so great for many Aboriginal people.” I agree, and this should never be forgotten. But how will protesting about the date and Australia Day help those Aboriginal people most in need?</p>
<p>Celebrating on a particular day does not have to be tied to historical events, even if its origins are rooted in those events. Consider the celebration of Christmas Day. Though traditionally it had religious significance (and still does for some), for many people there is no religious meaning.</p>
<p>Today many Australians celebrate Christmas for other reasons: family; end of another hard year; food and drink; and summer holidays. Like Christmas Day, Australia Day is a holiday where most can relax and socialise, and reflect on matters that are of importance to them.</p>
<h2>Smokescreen</h2>
<p>I respect people’s right to mourn and even to claim that Australia Day celebrations are causing them grief, insult, and suffering. However, I question the motives and sincerity of those claiming to be upset because of injustices committed in the past by what boils down to what one set of my ancestors did to another set of my ancestors. </p>
<p>Why do I not see them upset by the injustices committed by Aboriginal people against other Aboriginal people today? The high rates of violence in the Aboriginal population, <a href="https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-are-indigenous-women-34-80-times-more-likely-than-average-to-experience-violence-61809">particularly against women</a>, are well documented – and widely known – yet there is comparatively little outrage. Why?</p>
<p>Protesting about the day, I believe, is a smokescreen to obscure the real problems that many Aboriginal Australians face today. In addition to the problem of violence there is poor health, community dysfunction, unemployment, child neglect, and poor school attendance.</p>
<p>These problems will not be solved by changing the date of Australia Day or giving it a new name. For those objecting to Australia Day celebrations, I encourage you to consider the aforementioned problems and ask yourself: “How will changing the name or the date help those who are suffering most?”</p>
<h2>A time to reflect</h2>
<p>While I see Australia Day as a day of celebration, it is also perfectly legitimate for people to take time to reflect on past injustices associated with the invasion. Australia Day can be a day of remembrance and reflection, as well as celebrations. Aboriginal academic Chelsea Bond <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-day-i-dont-feel-australian-that-would-be-australia-day-36352">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I march in remembrance for those who lost their lives simply defending their own land and people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She does this without bitterness. </p>
<p>While some claim it to be a day of mourning, for me and for many others Australia Day is an opportunity to celebrate living in this fantastic country. It does not have to be one or the other – we can reflect on the past, with particular attention given to the injustices endured by Aboriginal people since the invasion, and celebrate what a great country Australia is today.</p>
<p>Australia has changed almost beyond recognition in regard to Aboriginal people in recent years. We should acknowledge this and celebrate what a great country Australia is – and work together to make it even better. </p>
<p>January 26 is Australia Day – our Australia Day. Let’s celebrate together, allowing others the freedom to express what it means to them. We can celebrate the achievements of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, and the successes achieved together.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Catch up on other pieces in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-australian-national-identity-35033">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71010/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anthony Dillon receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Protesting about Australia Day is a smokescreen to obscure the real problems that many Aboriginal Australians face today.Anthony Dillon, Lecturer, Faculty of Health Sciences, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/705272017-01-24T19:18:39Z2017-01-24T19:18:39ZThe Australian history boom has busted, but there’s hope it may boom again<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152782/original/image-20170116-11837-3ut1kn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 1850s gold rush in Victoria brought an influx of prospectors from China, seeking their fortunes.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Museum of Australia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the first in a series examining Australian national identity, especially around the ongoing debate about Australia Day.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Last month, my wife and I took our ten-year-old daughter to Sovereign Hill, that colourful re-creation of gold-rush Ballarat. Now almost half-a-century old, it remains a deservedly popular tourist attraction. It has also moved with the times. </p>
<p>There are many more knick-knacks for sale than I recall from my childhood – things have moved well beyond personalised wanted posters and boiled sweets – and it seems more representative of the history it purports to depict. The Chinese camp is striking. The creek is kept well supplied with gold specks for the latest generation of prospectors.</p>
<p>Then there is the evening sound-light display, Blood on the Southern Cross, which tells story of the Eureka Stockade. It is an impressive example of technical virtuosity and storytelling. </p>
<p>But as we sat watching Bentley’s Hotel being burned down, I couldn’t help but think of the overseas visitors in the audience, many of them, I presume, from places with histories soaked in blood. What did they make of “our own little rebellion”, as one historian has called it? Surely some must have wondered what the fuss was all about.</p>
<p>In 1982 <a href="http://www.patrickofarrell.com/">Patrick O’Farrell</a>, a history professor at the University of New South Wales, wrote an article for Quadrant with the intriguing title “Boredom as Historical Motivation”. It was a meandering effort, but O’Farrell did eventually get around to his own field, Australian history. He wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This has, as a body of knowledge, a marked capacity to produce intense boredom, and thus to spawn the historical malfunctions that boredom generates among its practitioners.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you consider that he was writing at a time when Australian history had made its way into every nook and cranny of the national culture, O’Farrell’s judgement seems odd. In the 1980s Australian history was flourishing in schools and universities. Genealogy was booming. </p>
<p>Australian history books did well and on occasion – as with Robert Hughes’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Shore">The Fatal Shore</a> – spectacularly. Peter Carey’s <a href="http://petercareybooks.com/all-titles/oscar-and-lucinda/">Oscar and Lucinda</a>, mainly set in colonial New South Wales, won a Booker Prize. </p>
<p>Historians – a few of them at least – were seen frequently in the media. TV mini-series screened on a bewildering variety of historical topics. The First Fleet re-enactment would soon be sailing into Sydney Harbour for the Bicentenary of 1988, Coca-Cola logo and all.</p>
<p>O’Farrell had an answer: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The recent swing to interest in Australian history may be, to some extent, a sign of social malaise and vigour, of the narrow superficiality and materialism now dominant in men’s lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While I doubt that the early 1980s was notably more inclined to such vices than any other era, we can now more easily recognise the context that produced the Australian history boom. It was part of a declaration of independence associated with the end of the British Empire in the 1960s. There were similar developments in Canada, New Zealand, India, the Caribbean and even, arguably, within Britain itself, with the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism.</p>
<p>That era of post-imperial “new nationalism” is well behind us, but what has this meant for Australian history? It is surely still a major presence in the public sphere. Conservatives, probably even more than in the 1980s, worry over what is being taught in schools and universities. Manning Clark’s Akubra has given way to Peter FitzSimons’ red bandana. Geoffrey Blainey will be quoted in the paper on home-grown Muslim terrorism rather than, as in the 1980s, on Asian immigration.</p>
<p>If all of this suggests continuity – and one example of such continuity is surely the media and publishing industries’ promotion of the Great White Man as National Historian-cum-Prophet – there are also some obvious changes. </p>
<p>The space for a critical history has shrunk. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/whats-wrong-with-anzac/">criticised</a> “the militarisation of Australian history”, but the rise of Anzac is possibly as much a symptom as a cause of this shrinkage. </p>
<p>Certainly, popular war stories, whether of the sentimental or the ripping Aussie yarn variety, do carry a great deal less lead in the saddlebag when it comes to finding publishers, audiences and other forms of public recognition. But this narrowing of focus is part of a larger shift.</p>
<p>The rise of Australian history from the 1960s to the 1980s coincided with the rise of a critical social history, stimulated by international influences (especially British, American, Indian, French, Italian), that gave voice and agency to women, Indigenous people, the working class, immigrants, and ethnic and sexual minorities. </p>
<p>That presented the face of Australian history with a strangely divided personality. It fostered a sense of national distinctiveness and belonging, even as it drew attention to diversity, exclusion and discrimination and cast a critical eye over national stereotypes. </p>
<p>My feeling is that this was, and remains, a powerful creative and intellectual tension – I am thinking here of its presence in the work of <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/history/Australias-War-1914-18-Edited-by-Joan-Beaumont-9781863734615">Joan Beaumont on the first world war</a>, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-forgotten-rebels-of-eureka">Clare Wright on the women of Eureka</a>, and Stuart Macintyre on the <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/australias-boldest-experiment/">bold experiment of post-war reconstruction</a>: all award-winning authors and books of recent years.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, for those of us working in universities, there is the problem of getting bums on seats. The space occupied in the 1980s media by the Great White Male Historian-Prophet is increasingly now the property of international relations scholars, anti-terrorism specialists and security experts – although they’re still usually white blokes. </p>
<p>History, like several other humanities and social science disciplines, bleeds enrolments to international relations, which many students see as more “relevant” to their world and a smoother pathway to a “global” career – as well as being more in line with their increasingly mobile lives and cosmopolitan identities.</p>
<p>All the same, I was interested in the conversation I overheard between a young woman and a sales assistant in a Ballarat bookshop. The woman – probably in her twenties – had clearly enjoyed the Chinese camp at Sovereign Hill: did the store have anything on the Chinese in Australia? </p>
<p>The assistant couldn’t really suggest a title; clearly, the large collection of popular military histories on the shelf wasn’t going to be much help. The last time I spotted her she was thumbing through a copy of Geoffrey Blainey’s latest.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Catch up on other pieces in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-australian-national-identity-35033">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70527/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank Bongiorno does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Historians may not be the media stars they were in the 1980s, but understanding our history remains vital to understanding ourselves.Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/667722016-10-11T19:07:56Z2016-10-11T19:07:56ZSpeaking with: Alanna Kamp about the erasure of Chinese-Australian women from our history books<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141055/original/image-20161010-2619-7bcpvq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chinese Australians have been in Australia for more than a century, but they are invisible in our records.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/The Conversation</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We tend to think of Australia as having a largely European population in the years dominated by the White Australia policy. But the truth is Chinese-Australians have been contributing to our national character since the 1850s.</p>
<p>Women – and women from non-European backgrounds in particular – have often been excluded from both research and our historical records thanks to patriarchal attitudes to women’s work. And the hidden histories of Chinese-Australian women during the era of the White Australia policy – many of whom are still alive today – have a lot to tell us about the realities of migration and Australian culture.</p>
<p>Dallas Rogers speaks with the University of Western Sydney’s Alanna Kamp about her research on the forgotten lives of Chinese-Australian women in the 20th century, the silence in our census records about their experiences, and why it matters for our understanding of Australia’s national identity.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/speaking-with.../id934267338">Subscribe</a> to The Conversation’s Speaking With podcasts on iTunes, or <a href="http://tunein.com/radio/Speaking-with---The-Conversation-Podcast-p671452/">follow</a> on Tunein Radio.</em></p>
<p><strong>Music</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><p>Audioblocks - <a href="https://www.audioblocks.com/stock-audio/che-thang-theme.html">Che Thang Theme</a></p></li>
<li><p>Audioblocks - <a href="https://www.audioblocks.com/stock-audio/china-town-full-1a.html">China Town</a></p></li>
<li><p>Audioblocks - <a href="https://www.audioblocks.com/stock-audio/spooky-tension-gong.html">Spooky Tension Gong</a></p></li>
<li><p>Free Music Archive - <a href="http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/The_Contessa/When_The_Guests_Have_Left">“When the Guests Have Left” by Blue Dot Sessions</a></p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66772/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dallas Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dallas Rogers speaks with Alanna Kamp on how racism and sexism has excluded lives and experiences of Chinese-Australian women from our historical record.Dallas Rogers, Lecturer in Urban Studies, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/492342015-10-19T19:03:15Z2015-10-19T19:03:15ZYoung and free? Why I declined to sing the national anthem at the 2015 AFL Grand Final<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98772/original/image-20151019-25117-1minkpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Our national anthem tells us we are young and free. Blindly, many Australians continue to accept this. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Julian Smith</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s every performer’s dream. To stand in front of the largest live audience you are ever likely to see and perform the national anthem. Last month I was invited by the AFL to sing Advance Australia Fair at the 2015 Grand Final. I knew it was honour to be asked but I simply can no longer sing the words “for we are young and free”.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong: I wanted to find a way to make it OK. I told the event organisers that I was available to perform but I made it a condition of my appearance that I would be permitted to replace the words “for we are young and free” with “in peace and harmony”. </p>
<p>To their credit the AFL gave my request consideration but decided that they were not able to openly support this change of lyric. So I made the only decision I could make – I turned down the opportunity to sing the national anthem in front of more than 90,000 people at the ground and potentially millions more watching on TV.</p>
<p>People aware of my career will know that I have sung the anthem for significant occasions in the past. So why not now?</p>
<h2>The silence around Indigenous culture</h2>
<p>Let me be clear: it was an honour to be asked. The problem is, as an Indigenous leader I simply can no longer sing the words “we are young and free”. For that matter, as an Australian with a strong desire to deepen our nation’s understanding of identity and our place in the world, I believe we can and must do better.</p>
<p>Over the past half-century Australians have come to realise much about the persistence, sophistication and success of Aboriginal Australia. The 1967 referendum, the <a href="https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications/bringing-them-home-stolen">Bringing Them Home Report </a> (1997) and the <a href="http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/our-people/apology-to-australias-indigenous-peoples">Apology to the Stolen Generations</a> (2008) have all caught the nation’s attention and raised awareness of our shared history. </p>
<p>But many people have remained content to leave it there, to settle for what little information they received during school years. For such people, most of Australia’s Indigenous cultures remain unwrapped, unacknowledged and unexplored. </p>
<p>They are content to know that Indigenous culture exists without troubling themselves to find meaningful engagement. More worryingly, though not surprisingly, many still toil at a kind of all-consuming denial, which demands an extraordinary amount of commitment and energy to maintain. </p>
<h2>Not so young and free</h2>
<p>Our national anthem tells us that we are young and free. Blindly, many Australians continue to accept this. </p>
<p>But it’s not true. Setting aside for a moment 70,000 years of Indigenous cultures, 114 years on from Federation and 227 years into colonisation, at the very least, those words don’t reflect who we are. As Australians, can we aspire to be young forever? If we are ever to mature we simply cannot cling to this desperate premise.</p>
<p>How much better would it be if were to finally acknowledge the nuanced and sophisticated society discovered by those who arrived 230 years ago was deliberately and systematically overlooked? What if the next person to sing the anthem at the AFL Grand Final were to reach beyond the Western imperial history and harness the power of 70,000 years of accumulated wisdom and knowledge?</p>
<p>If it is time for Australia to grow up then how is this to be done? I believe that as a nation we can’t mature until we value, understand and embrace the fact that we alone in the world can lay claim to the longest continuing culture.</p>
<p>In terms of our national anthem I have written and spoken about the need for change for some time.</p>
<h2>A new song</h2>
<p>In 2009 I was privileged to help launch alternative lyrics penned by Australian legend Judith Durham in consultation with Muti Muti singer songwriter Kutcha Edwards.</p>
<p>The words are as inclusive as they are beautiful. Please take the time to read the words below and imagine the day when we can write (or sing) the next chapter in our nation’s development. </p>
<p>I believe one day we will sing these words at grand finals and other important events and that they will serve to bring us together.
Australia, it’s time to sing a new song: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Australia, celebrate as one, with peace and harmony.<br>
Our precious water, soil and sun, grant life for you and me.<br>
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts to love, respect and share,<br>
And honouring the Dreaming, advance Australia fair.<br>
With joyful hearts then let us sing, advance Australia fair.<br> </p>
<p>Australia, let us stand as one, upon this sacred land.<br>
A new day dawns, we’re moving on to trust and understand.<br>
Combine our ancient history and cultures everywhere,<br>
To bond together for all time, advance Australia fair.<br>
With joyful hearts then let us sing, advance Australia fair.<br> </p>
<p>Australia, let us strive as one, to work with willing hands.<br>
Our Southern Cross will guide us on, as friends with other lands.<br>
While we embrace tomorrow’s world with courage, truth and care,<br>
And all our actions prove the words, advance Australia fair.<br>
With joyful hearts then let us sing, advance Australia fair.<br> </p>
<p>And when this special land of ours is in our children’s care,<br>
From shore to shore forever more, advance Australia fair.<br>
With joyful hearts then let us sing, advance … Australia … fair.<br></p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49234/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Deborah Cheetham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s every performer’s dream. To stand in front of a huge live audience and perform the national anthem. So why did Deborah Cheetham decline the chance to sing at the 2015 AFL Grand Final?Deborah Cheetham, Associate Dean, Music, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/333012014-10-23T02:21:13Z2014-10-23T02:21:13ZTake back the stars and wear the Southern Cross with pride<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62577/original/ttrhky78-1414024279.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hip-hop artist 360 caused a stir this week with his comments on the Southern Cross.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Australian hip-hop artist and rapper 360 (Matt Colwell) caused an uproar earlier in the week when <a href="http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/qanda/FA1307H038S00">he said on Q&A </a> that he identified the Australian flag and the Southern Cross with racism. </p>
<p>360 announced he would like to see more proud Australians wearing the Aboriginal flag on Australia Day. Why? Because the Australian flag has become synonymous with hate. </p>
<p>There was <a href="http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/rapper-360s-claim-he-identifies-the-australian-flag-with-racism-has-led-to-threats-of-violence/story-e6frfn09-1227097687821">an angry response</a> on social media: many took issue with the accusation that the nation’s flag had become the standard for racists and bigots. If we look a little closer at the Australian flag, and particularly at those seven shining stars, we might find symbols that can unite us anew.</p>
<p>The Australian flag is made up of the Union Jack, the Commonwealth star and the Southern Cross. The flag’s design was chosen in 1901 from a series of entries in a competition held following Federation. It was first flown in Melbourne on September 3 1901.</p>
<p>The Southern Cross is an easily identifiable emblem for all Australians and in Aboriginal Australian astronomy, the Southern Cross has had many different meanings. </p>
<p>For more than 40,000 years Aboriginal people have looked up at the night sky and its stars. The first Australians’ way of being in the world has been shaped by their relationship with the skies. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62580/original/mnybmjsz-1414024655.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Southern Cross, seen from rural New South Wales.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Wick</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Five stars make up the Southern Cross - Alpha, Beta (also known as Mimosa), Delta, Gamma and Epsilon Crucis, also sometimes called Intrometida. </p>
<p>For the <a href="http://www.guringai.com.au/">Guringai</a> people in New South Wales, the cross marks the head of the Emu in the Sky; Alpha Crucis symbolises the shape shifting spirit Dharramaalan and the Crux his emu wife. </p>
<p>In Western Australia there are Aboriginal communities who believe the Southern Cross is the deity <a href="http://www.gadimirrabooka.com/dreamtime.php">Mirrabooka</a>, a giant sky possum, sitting in a tree. </p>
<p>In the central Australian desert the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aranda_people">Aranda</a> people believe the four stars of the Southern Cross are the immense talon of a great flying eagle, with Gamma Centauri being his leg. In the Torres Strait, many islanders believed Gamma Centauri is the handle of Tagai’s Fishing Spear, with the Cross forming a trident. </p>
<p>And as the Southern Cross is arguably the most recognisable constellation in our night sky, it seems a fitting emblem for uniting all Australians with a sense of national identity. After all, we all live under the same stars. </p>
<p>With that in mind I would like to note how intensely and personally disenchanted I am, along with 360, that such a seemingly perfect symbol of our unity has been all but hijacked and turned into a sign of racism and xenophobia. </p>
<p>The 2005 Cronulla race riots ushered in the beginning of a series of racially motivated gang attacks and denominational clashes in Australia. The Southern Cross was worn like a badge signifying whiteness. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62581/original/x9rtgp6j-1414024814.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A crowd gathers in Cronulla in 2005.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Paul Miller</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When I was a child I was bullied for having fair skin and identifying with my Aboriginal heritage. </p>
<p>After spending some time hunting stingrays with family on the coast of the Northern Territory, I came back to Melbourne with stories of my walkabout. People started bullying me, calling me “spear chucker”. </p>
<p>Last year I was tattooed with the image of a spear, because I wanted to reclaim that name. I believe we, as a country, collectively need to take similar steps to reclaim our constellation. We need to tattoo the Southern Cross on our national identity as a symbol of unity and peace.</p>
<p>A quick Google search of the Australian flag returns a substantial quota of images that are brazenly pro-racist. If we can concede that our flag and our constellation have been appropriated by a racist few, and have thus had a wide-reaching effect on our national identity, we can begin to undo some of those damages. </p>
<p>Our stars are associated with hate but they’re not synonymous. I propose we collectively meet those who have hijacked the constellation as a symbol of hate with a movement of reclamation. It’s time for all Australians to start wearing the Southern Cross with pride.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33301/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Myles Russell Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Australian hip-hop artist and rapper 360 (Matt Colwell) caused an uproar earlier in the week when he said on Q&A that he identified the Australian flag and the Southern Cross with racism. 360 announced…Myles Russell Cook, Lecturer, Design Anthropology and Indigenous Studies, Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/322062014-09-26T00:59:51Z2014-09-26T00:59:51ZHow do we teach what it means to be Australian?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60089/original/2wybbmwc-1411689080.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A real national conversation about democratic values will be inclusive and challenging – not fear-mongering.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Is Azfar Ahmad/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Events in the Middle East that have both shocked and horrified us seem to have opened the doors to anyone who wants to criticise Islam, raise concerns about multiculturalism and romanticise an age when Australians was made up of “real Australians”.</p>
<p>In yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald, for example, we find Paul Sheehan <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/signals-of-jihad-in-australia-have-been-building-for-years-20140924-10lhon.html">re-writing history</a>: claiming that the Cronulla Riots in 2005 were the result of one-way Muslim thuggery and part of a growing “jihad” against Australia.</p>
<p>The Age’s National Affairs Editor, Tony Wright <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/victoria/black-day-for-black-flag-after-teenage-terror-suspects-bloody-end-20140924-10letn.html">took the position</a> that the shooting death of Numan Haider was an open and shut case because he waved an ISIS flag some weeks before. Regardless if any links are established between this young man and extremists, it seems that Haider’s religion is enough to remove any presumption of innocence. </p>
<p>We can also find Kevin Donnelly in the Fairfax press <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/how-to-teach-what-it-means-to-be-australian-20140924-10labb.html">lamenting</a> the loss of Australian identity from the 1950s due to the rise of multiculturalism. Donnelly attacks post-modernism, cultural relativism and the inability for us to be able to label things as “Un-Australian”, and demands that we spend more time teaching what it means to be Australian at schools.</p>
<p>Donnelly presents a shopping list of cultural grievances that he feels post-modern cultural relativists have allowed to flourish in Australia: child brides, female genital mutilation and religious intolerance. </p>
<p>While the article could be mistaken for a caricature of an anti-immigration leaflet, it does raise an important question: how do we teach what it means to be Australian and democratic values?</p>
<p>To answer, let’s begin by highlighting how we should not teach it. </p>
<p>Donnelly praises the Howard government’s Discovering Democracy program that delivered civics education between 1997 and 2004. He claims it was derided and abandoned because it was “conservative”. Actually, the program was an abject failure not because it was “conservative”, but because it was badly planned, designed and implemented.</p>
<p>Just how much of a failure? While the federal government provided A$31 million of funding between 1997 and 2004, national testing of students in 2004 demonstrated that 92% of Year 6 students and 60% of Year 10 students <a href="http://www.whitlam.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/82776/whitlam_discussionpaper.pdf">failed</a> to acquire the minimum proficiency levels required.</p>
<p>After more than seven years of Discovering Democracy, the program failed to register any discernible understanding of Australia’s democratic institutions.</p>
<p>There are many reasons why this program failed but I will list three: </p>
<p>1) It treated young people as “citizens-in-waiting”. That is, it removed any sense of agency by claiming citizen rights could only be accessed when you turn 18. This failed to recognise the active political role that young people play in our society: from volunteering to political organising around issues they consider important.</p>
<p>2) It presented a sanitised view of democracy. Democracy is messy and Australian democracy is full of mistakes, errors and wrong turns as well as successes that need to be celebrated. Young people need to wrestle with these complex discussions and be allowed to form opinions not always favourable to mainstream society.</p>
<p>3) How do we teach democracy in the undemocratic setting of the classroom? There is a hypocrisy here that makes the celebration of democratic values somewhat hollow. </p>
<p>Studying democracy is not about rote learning that Australia has two houses of parliament, the constitutional, the head of state or anything else. It is about immersing oneself in democratic values and activism, and being encouraged to challenge the <em>status quo</em>.</p>
<p>If we are serious about teaching Australian democratic values in schools, then we need a project based curriculum that allows the students to not only celebrate Australia, but feel uncomfortable about the darker elements of our history: the displacement and murder of Australia’s Aboriginal people; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy">the White Australia policy</a>, the illegal invasion of Iraq and so on. </p>
<p>Teaching democracy is about complexities, successes and failures – ones we have made in the past and ones we are making now. As citizens of a democracy we should be both celebrating the openness of our society as well as challenging our government to justify itself: from its surveillance strategies to its flaunting of the United Nations Conventions on Refugees. </p>
<p>I know what I think it means to be Australian and I feel comfortable sharing this with the many young people in my lecture room. But as part of that, I challenge them to disagree with me and form their own opinions after considering various positions. The results are not always what I expect or agree with. </p>
<p>Unless we take a warts and all view of history and democracy that is open to challenge, then young people will interpret the kind of civics education that Donnelly proposes for what it is: propaganda.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32206/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Arvanitakis receives funding from Australian Research Council and the Office of Learning and Teaching. </span></em></p>Events in the Middle East that have both shocked and horrified us seem to have opened the doors to anyone who wants to criticise Islam, raise concerns about multiculturalism and romanticise an age when…James Arvanitakis, Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.