Lowering our standards with a tired old flag

The Age (Melbourne) ^ | 27th December 2005 | Peter Maddock

[naturalman1975]

Jack of the Union Jack? Let's choose a proper ensign for Australia.

FOR me, the nightmarish recent events in Cronulla have condensed into a recurring hallucination of red, white and blue. The national flag blurs across heads, biceps, marching standards and car bumpers, then suddenly morphs into red and black flashbacks of the Nuremberg rallies.

The flag in not too subtle a fashion was deployed to demarcate belonging and exclusion, owner and Auslander, "grew here" and "flew here" — in short, an Australian caste system.

The Prime Minister's response was: "Look, I would never condemn people for being proud of the Australian flag." But can modern, progressive Australians continue to be proud of the ethnic chauvinism all too easily read from its iconography?

Today, do the crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick adequately symbolise who we are, even where we are? Are we still down under in the British Antipodes, the lost white tribe of the Pacific? Or, has our post-World War II history meant that we have and continue to become something else? Indeed, a place where such colonial symbols fail to stir any primordial response in an ever-growing number of patriotic Australians.

Immigration levels in globalising post-industrial Australia are as high as they ever were during our industrialisation, and so our population continues to ever diversify. Already the Aussie Who's Who includes names such as Lowy, Bracks, Malouf, Chang, Viduka and Ierodiaconou (go, Lydia !). Moreover, many indigenous Australians have fought and broken the shackles of colonial untouchability, becoming household names due to excellence in political, academic, cultural or sporting pursuits.

Our future requires sensitive pluralist management, but I fear the Howard Government has fostered just the opposite. Its creations that most readily come to mind are Pauline Hanson, queue-jumpers, detention camps, Un-Australians, mainstream Australia, and if you don't like it here, then clear off.

I know many in the Government desire full independence from the Crown and a change of flag; some even maintain the Liberal vision of a harmonious, tolerant, multicultural Australia. However, such voices have been drowned out by the punitive reactionary discourses of the neo-conservatives. Culture wars, history wars, pride in the Union Jack, gay bashing, trade union bashing, Muslim bashing, these are the messages coming through the loudest and clearest. Messages of protect-what-you-have-got and if-it's-not-broke-don't-fix-it, not ones desiring inclusion and evolution towards a collective identity more representative of what we have become.

The events in Cronulla demonstrate that Australian society is at the crossroads. The present path offers the prospect of continuing turf wars, increased gang and police presence on the streets, racial vilification and the suffering of the innocent. On the other hand, intent to travel the opposing direction might be as easy as making the symbolic gesture of changing the flag. Right now, it would most certainly help to disarm the white supremacists.

My patriotism is coloured green and gold, and so I was most struck by their chromatic absence on the streets of Cronulla and the preponderance of the Anglo-Celtic tricolour. Not even an ironic '80s green and gold Union Jack.

So again I ask, are we the proud progressive people who belong to the land of the wattle, or are we still merely a cringeful colonial backwater, where apartheid will grow ever louder as the message of our flag?

Like many Australians, I am in shock, very afraid and want leadership towards a better future.

But my most immediate fear is for my Sydney friends of Jewish, Cypriot and Indian antecedents. Will the bigots target them for being of Middle Eastern appearance? Even I look a bit swarthy over summer.

Dr Peter Maddock is a lecturer in anthropology at Monash University.

[naturalman1975]

Australian Flag at Australian Embassy Bombing, September 9 2004

Our flag bears the stars that shine at night
In our southern sky of blue
And there's a little old flag in the corner
That is part of our heritage too,
It's the English, the Scots and the Irish
Who were sent to the end of the earth
The rogues and the schemers, the doers and dreamers
Who gave modern Australia birth.

And you who are shouting to change it
You don't seem to understand
It's the flag of our laws and language
Not the flag of some far away land
Though, there's plenty who'll tell if you ask them
How when Europe was plunged into night
How that little old flag in the corner
Was a symbol of freedom and light.

It doesn't mean we owe our allegiance
To some forgotten imperial dream
We've got the stars to show where we're going
And the old flag to show where we've been

It's only an old piece of bunting
It's only an old coloured rag
But there's thousands who died for its honour
And fell in defence of our flag.

[toddlintown]

Leave your flag alone.

[Ninian Dryhope]

Too bad Australia has the same sort of liberal, foolish, leftist professors as we have. Maddock is an idiot.

[fallujah-nuker]

Keep your flag, loose the Moslems instead.

[magslinger]

Keep the flag! It has something the US flag sadly lacks, crosses.

[Dont Mention the War]

Has there been a national flag redesign in modern history that hasn't turned out to be a disaster? Look at South Africa's:

They say it represents the two races coming together and moving forward in harmony.

I say "When's Amtrak getting their royalty check?"

[abercrombie_guy_38]

Sounds like my kind of Australia.

I've been there before and love the country. How dare Maddock bring up such an assinine suggestion. A different design on the flag will do very little to create the kind of liberal utopia he wants. If thinks Muslim bashing is bad, he hasn't seen anything yet.

[Cicero]

This guy ought to leave Australia and go somewhere else that suits him better.

[Sterm26]

Better the Union Jack than the Crescent.

[Joe 6-pack]

"My patriotism is coloured green and gold..."

It's for sale??

[Frank_2001]

LMAO!:)

[inquest]

Oh yeah, that's exactly what Australia needs - some New Age, multi-culti, PC, "We Are The World", kumbaya symbol on its flag. I'm sure that'll bring peace to the country...

[fallujah-nuker]

Amen!

[Gritty]

Maybe a Union Jack with a superimposed star and crescent would please the author's taste a bit more, assuaging his horror at Neanderthal white Australian racists who reject having their heretofore peaceful society bullied by "youths" in a multicultural death trap?

[antaresequity]

There is always an ulterior motive about these things...its an attempt to get a culture or society to redefine itself and these movements typically have initiators and advocates that are dissatisfied with current 'state' and have had little success in changing that state 'normally'.

The advocates are big on symbolic victory if they cannot achieve a real victory, or cannot seem to convince the status quo that their message is 'more' valid.

The efforts to remove the stars and bars from southern flags is perfect example...

Its all about symbolic and incremental change...these people are a corrosive on the fabric which binds a people.

I have no use for these people and their none sense.

Be weary Australia...

[VanDeKoik]

Total foolishness. The Aussie flag is as close to perfect as any flag on this planet can be. In color, placement, and symbolism, it has few flags that can approach it.

A number of US state flags can use the hand of the person that designed it.

[Moose4]

Leave the Southern Cross alone. The last time we had a flag redesign here in the United States, the legislature in Georgia decided to sneakily change the state flag to remove the old Confederate St. Andrews Cross...and wound up creating the most hideous design ever seen, one often called "King Roy's Placemat" (after Roy Barnes, the governor), and one that lasted less than two years before being replaced by another, better design.

I love the Aussie flag. The problem, this pinhead professor needs to realize, isn't the Australians...it's the Lebanese Muslims that refuse to BECOME Australians.

}:-)4

[oldleft]

[FierceKulak]

FOR me, the nightmarish recent events in Cronulla have condensed into a recurring hallucination of red, white and blue. The national flag blurs across heads, biceps, marching standards and car bumpers, then suddenly morphs into red and black flashbacks of the Nuremberg rallies.

This guy has PTSD over something that he never experienced, so everything he has to say is suspect to me.