James Morrow: Class, not race, is the real reason for anti-Australia Day push
The push is on to shut down the simple, unifying Australia Day ritual of a beer and barbie by sniffing ‘Well, go ahead if you must, but it seems awfully divisive’. It’s worth asking how we got to this point, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Is there any other nation on the planet that has allowed its national day, indeed its entire modern history, to be so comprehensively talked down and ruined as Australia?
France has a massive party on Bastille Day every year despite the terrors of the French Revolution which followed.
In the US, where I spent nearly the first three decades of my life, Independence Day is celebrated by all.
This even though the 4th of July was not all that liberating for America’s slaves, who would have to wait nearly a century and live through a civil war before winning their own freedoms.
Yet here in Australia, which also has a history that is to say the least difficult, the push is on to shut down the simple, unifying ritual of a beer and barbie by sniffing, “Well, go ahead if you must, but it seems awfully divisive.”
Let us start out by acknowledging that of course Australia’s past, like so many other nations’, is complex.
Despite our success as a modern and prosperous democracy we could have done and can continue to do better by Aboriginal Australians.
But even so, it is remarkable to note what is happening.
In the past week we have seen hotels that once had massive parties deciding to treat Australia Day as “just another day” to Kmart banning Australia Day merchandise from its shelves to middle management minions at a major cruise line telling crews not to put up the flag for passengers on the 26th.
Contrast this to the mood in 1988 when Australia celebrated – yes, celebrated – the 200th anniversary of the First Fleet.
On January 26, 1988, the Daily Mirror, then an afternoon newspaper before it was folded into this masthead, proclaimed in a large type banner headline the words “SO PROUD: 200 TODAY”.
A separate box read simply “Happy Birthday Australia”.
The front page was dominated by a photo of Sydney Harbour showing it so thick with boats anchored to watch a ceremonial re-enactment of the First Fleet that you could practically walk across the water, deck by deck.
Now you are hard pressed to find Australia Day bunting for the backyard and big corporates are telling workers that if they don’t want to celebrate on Thursday they can work through and take another day instead.
Talk about your false choice: How many strivers are going to risk taking the day off and risk being marked down by HR as a troglodyte?
It is worth asking how we got to this point.
Obviously the progressive capture of major institutions like schools and much of the media, particularly the ABC, is a big part of this.
In these places the Australian disdain for overly showy patriotism has morphed into a general belief that nothing good happened from the First Fleet to Whitlam, and that every subsequent period of Coalition government has threated to throw us back into a new dark age.
And speaking of the Coalition, while this so-called long march has been going on since the 1960s it is worth noting that the right side of politics has never thought much to turn it around.
When the Coalition was last in power, then-education minister Alan Tudge said all the right things about the politicisation of our classrooms.
But crucially he never managed to fix teacher education or blow up the national curriculum and start again by buying Singapore’s maths and science program off the shelf while re-writing the history bits so kids don’t wind up totally hating Australia.
Scott Morrison and his communications minister Paul Fletcher, meanwhile, bizarrely decided to give more money to the ABC despite its hit squad treatment of their government and other conservatives.
Party politics, however, only go so far here.
Much more has happened structurally, under the surface, to get us where we are today.
No one likes to discuss it but class – in the sense of attitudes more than assets – has driven much of this shift against Australia Day.
It was in the Howard era that the first real murmurings of discontent with Australia Day started to appear amongst those who would sneer knowingly about “flag-draped bogans” with slabs of VB.
Many of those same “bogans” would turn out to be Howard’s battlers who, to hear their haters tell it, had the bad taste to take advantage of an economic boom to build businesses and better their lives.
This phenomenon was famously lampooned via shows like Kath & Kim and described on the ABC and in broadsheet metropolitan papers as, essentially, a bunch of tradies somehow striking it rich and buying V8s and McMansions and flat screen TVs.
Particularly for those loaded up with HECS debt in economically precarious jobs, buying into this fight became a way to push back against a vulgar, unintellectual nation they felt wasn’t rewarding them properly for their genius. Having the “right” attitude to Australia Day just became part of the uniform.
Now, many of these same people are in elite roles and have become cultural tastemakers who despite being in the minority (most Australians still want to observe the day Thursday) have an outsized influence on how the rest of us act.
Seen in this light, Australia Day becomes not just when we mark our progress from convict colony to global success story, but also when we embrace our anti-authoritarian traditions and enjoy ourselves when the wowsers, prudes and bluenoses much preferred we didn’t.
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