Oi, Aussie!

I spent Australia Day this year at home with the kids, and then, in the evening, we went to a barbecue with a bunch of friends. The same group has gathered on Australia Day for the last few years at someone or other's place, but I don't think it's had anything much to do with Australia. It's just that it's a public holiday and we're usually all available. Do we talk about our country? Rarely. Do we toast the great homeland and her leader Jules? Not that I recall. Do we stand and sing the anthem together before tucking into the sausages and burnt onions? Er...no.

This week's blog task has really had me thinking about what this day means to me, and I think I can report here honestly that it means very little. Does that make me unpatriotic? Maybe. Un-Australian? Heaven forbid.

I think, like my fellow Tale-of-Three-ers, it was all a bit more meaningful in the years I spent out of the country. When I lived and travelled in Europe over 10 years ago, I loved that I was an Aussie. I was proud to tell people and got a kick out of answering all the questions about Vegemite and koalas and deadly snakes. My American friends thought the words I used were hilarious. "What a dag!" Te-he. "Shall we grab some brekkie?" Ha-ha. "He's a spunk." Guffaw. 

But what is the day about anyway? I don't want this to be a diatribe on the plight of our Indigenous people, but, hey, our national day is a celebration of invasion. By us. We're not stopping to remember the day our forefathers defeated the enemy and won back our lands from some faceless foe so that we all may prosper and populate. It's just the day we came in, took over and stomped all over the place.

Combine that with events five years ago at Cronulla and, I have to say, the sight of an Australian flag waving on a car bonnet or draped over a usually young person's shoulders leaves me feeling cold.

But that aside, and apart from the invasion thing, what else are we celebrating? It all just sounds dreadfully cliched. The lucky country. The land of opportunity. Beaches ahoy, mate. They say we're a laidback people who don't let work rule our lives. But here in Sydney, most people I know are working their tooshies off and just scraping by. And, yes, we've got all the good stuff here - high levels of stress and depression, high rates of cancer, heart disease, obesity, suicide. Are we that different from other Western countries?

The success of our sportspeople or artists overseas rouses a real pride in me. The Sydney Olympics were that good. And the World Cup in Germany changed me forever, it's true. Those are times I've really felt a patriotic fervour.

And, yes, I love this country. I love the landscapes, what little I've actually seen in person. I've spent time in places as disparate as Broken Hill and the Whitsundays Islands. I can't imagine two such different landscapes and yet it's all part of the same place. The stuff about droughts and floods, cyclones and bushfires - terrifying, deadly, but part of it all. But we don't celebrate climate and countryside on Australia Day, do we? 


I love the diversity of the people, the cosmopolitan nature of the big cities, the art, the food. My kids have a long, unwieldy surname and I love that this is a country where people like my in-laws could come and build their lives. I love so much about it, yet I'm not convinced the stuff I love is great because it's 'Australian'. And it would be fair to say a lot of the stuff I love, I hate as well. Cosmopolitan - great! Big, traffic-filled, congested, expensive - same place. Multicultural people and incredible ethnic food - swell! Flag-toting racists, detention centres, boats full of 'illegals' sinking or crashing on rocks...

And then there's the fact of my birthday being so close to Australia's 'birthday'. The two have become entangled in the routine of my January. I always get a day off work a couple of days before my birthday, the nation joins me in celebration and, like this year, someone usually bakes me a birthday cake at the Australia Day get-together. 

Perhaps it's just me...or just about me.