Oi, don't hate Australia Day, it's all right to be proud

LIKE Christmas carols played in October, it seems people start hating Australia Day earlier and earlier each year.

It's not just a day at the beach, but a celebration of national...

LIKE Christmas carols played in October and hot cross buns hitting the shelves in January, it seems people start hating Australia Day earlier and earlier each year.

This year, Australians had barely shaken off the cobwebs from New Year's Eve before the annual festival of self-flagellation around our national day began. For weeks now legions of academics, pundits, and comment thread trolls have been stalking the landscape, looking to stamp out any sign of pride in Australia's post-settlement heritage with all the enthusiasm of Queenslanders going after cane toads with a six-pack and a nine iron.

Writer James Morrow calls for an end to the negativity around Australia Day

First there was the confected controversy over a supermarket's Australia Day T-shirts, the moniker "Australia: Established 1788" being "racist" and "culturally insensitive" according to Twitterists who, remarkably, managed to get the shirts pulled from shelves. Putting aside the objection of pedants who suggest that the shirts would have more accurately read "New Holland", apparently the mere mention of the arrival of the First Fleet is too radioactive to touch - or print.

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Then, of course, there was the reignition of the so-called Culture Wars, touched off by Education Minister Christopher Pyne's announcement of an inquiry into the national curriculum. (It is only a culture "war" when a conservative asks for input into things, of course). While about broader issues than Australia Day, Pyne's push for a greater focus on our civilisation's Western roots prompted the predictable calls that the government is trying to whitewash our country's - to borrow one critic's words - legacy of "racism, slavery, genocide and social inequality".

"It is as if a large swath of Australia's intellectuals never got past that adolescent stage where it is cool to diss one's parents"

No one is safe, not even Sam Kekovich. Lately the former footballer's annual ads urging Australians to show their patriotism by eating lamb on Australia Day have come under the microscope with the ABC's opinion website hosting an article questioning the "carno-nationalism" (yes, really) of the ad campaign. As an example of the revolutionary rethink called for by the nation's broadcaster, the site also helpfully reminded readers that our second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, was a vegetarian.

Somehow, though, grilled asparagus spears for Australia Day doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

To be fair, those on the other side of the equation - the loud minority of flag-draped postcode nationalists who wouldn't be able to name Australia's first prime minister on a bet - are just as noisome as their inner-city counterparts.

Australia Day shirts have been withdrawn due to racism claims.

But as a migrant who has lived in Australia for more than a dozen years, this annual ritual of self-abnegation is bizarre. It is as if a large swath of Australia's intellectuals never got past that adolescent stage where it is cool to diss one's parents and have since transferred their door-slamming distaste for "dad's dumb rules" to the country as a whole.

Yet despite this annual exercise in promiscuous anti-patriotism, Australia Day is worth celebrating, on many levels, beyond being just an extra chance for a day at the beach.

It is no disrespect to Australia's indigenous people who, we are rightfully reminded, have lived here for tens of thousands of years, to mark the achievement of Captain Phillip and the First Fleet. After all, in very short order and against some incredible odds men and women of foresight and vision built a modern, progressive, largely peaceful democracy in a historical blink of an eye at a far-flung corner of the earth.

The day is also a good metaphor for a population that is almost entirely composed of migrants and their descendants. It is fashionable to look at being Australian as simply a matter of dumb luck, a "hiccup of fate that means we get to live in Australia rather than Somalia" as one journalist put it recently, but this ignores the very conscious effort that went into, at some point along the line, the decision to call Australia home.

But while the perpetually angry ideological enforcers stomp around looking for signs of right-deviationist thought like bit players in a bizarre, weak-chinned pantomime of Mao's cultural revolutionaries, most Australians rightfully reject the collective guilt being foisted upon them.

James Morrow writes about food and culture at prickwithafork.com

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