Woke attempts to ‘decolonise’ Australia’s past harms our future
Australians should stop apologising for our country and be proud of our heritage in order to understand where we are going, writes Clarissa Bye.
Opinion
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Last year, a young woman I know was looking for a project to do for her final year at Sydney art school.
Some of her friends were exploring their ethnic heritage, so she proposed making a series of artworks incorporating her heritage.
These would include Australian motifs including early colonial bottles and sketches based on historical photographs of Sydney. “Oh no,” her teachers said. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” the girl asked, not realising she’d fallen into a black hole of political correctness. “Well, it’s just not suitable,” was the guarded response.
She never got an honest answer, just suggestions to look at other issues, perhaps climate change.
The girl dug her heels in, persisted and, to her credit, was able to create a series of sculptures and drawings, with very little help or guidance from those teachers.
One piece was later highly commended at an art show. But it’s a sign of the times. There are unwritten rules now around these things.
You cannot celebrate your Australian heritage. The latest buzzword is “decolonise”. It started off in the universities and is now being insidiously inserted into debates about what it means to be Australian.
I was gobsmacked to read a recent story published by the Nine Entertainment company where the reporter apologised for her Australian accent.
The story was about left-wing Sudanese-Australian writer and broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied.
She left our shores to live in the UK after being criticised over her 2017 Anzac Day social media post “Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine).”
She’d also been the subject of controversy over her sharia law views and her infamous walkout on acclaimed novelist Lionel Shriver.
That was because the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin (about a teen killer) had the audacity to say writers need to be able to imagine being someone else.
To Abdel-Magied, that “drips of racial supremacy” and was part of the history of “colonisation” and appropriation.
And now she’s complaining five years later in a London restaurant she can’t stand the sound of an Australian accent.
That’s despite retaining her Aussie passport because a Sudanese one was “more of a liability than a help – it grants her visa-free access to fewer countries”. So she uses the benefits of our wonderful country that she despises.
The article quotes her: “My partner will tell you that if I hear an Australian accent, I will leave,” she says. And the journalist response — “ … prompting my instant apology” — is astonishing.
We are being groomed into being apologetic.
Abdel-Magied grew up in a prosperous civilisation with the benefits of modern medicine, education, women’s rights, property rights and so on, based on a foundation of hard-fought for democracy and free speech, defended by generations of men and women who went to war, and the beneficiary of this hates us so much she can’t bear to listen to our accent.
Unless she’s flogging a new book. It’s a bullying tactic, projecting collective guilt onto people, and it’s increasingly being unleashed on us in other walks of life.
The Greens are on board with this decolonisation business. Their official policy platform is to “decolonise” our international aid – so that instead of calling it charity (dollars that come from hardworking Australian taxpayers) it’s renamed “global justice” to atone for the “ongoing damage caused by Western imperialism”.
This rubbish Marxist view of the world is now infesting our schools. In March, a bunch of school boys at the Lewisham Christian Brothers High School were told there is a need for “systemic and legal changes necessary to decolonise these injustices and how we too can be allies and advocates for change”.
That’s from an outfit called Deadly Connections, whose approach is: ”Decolonising – we challenge the dominance, values and methods of imposed colonial systems, practices and beliefs.”
Australian flags are a no-no in this new world order. On Australia Day, an Aboriginal owned boutique media and training firm, which has received grants from the Judith Neilson Institute, published an article saying: “The Australian flag, a weapon of white supremacy, hangs from buildings, propped up in cars and even draped around sunburnt necks.
“January is a time that racism lingers in the air.” No one batted an eyelid, except indigenous man Dr Anthony Dillon, a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Catholic University, who called them out by saying “this is what professional victimisation looks like”.
The Centre for independent Studies Culture Prosperity and Civil Society director, associate professor Peter Kurti, has also sounded a serious warning over Postcolonial theory and all the recent attacks on Captain James Cook statues, saying it has the characteristics of a “millenarian cult”.
He says it imposes a false burden of guilt for actions in the distant past, it falsely paints us as racist, it campaigns against Enlightenment beliefs in reason, tolerance and liberty and “poses a serious threat to the intellectual and cultural integrity of Australian society”.
Back in 1988 almost three million of us crammed into Sydney Harbour, celebrating the Bicentenary.
It was the biggest crowd to ever attend a single event and even left-wing papers spoke about a “spirit of happiness, good fellowship and a bond of knowing everyone was out on the streets to celebrate what we’ve got”.
Can you imagine them writing that today? They’d be too busy apologising.
The lame non-event two years ago that marked the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s arrival is a sad indictment of where we’ve landed.
As Dr Kurti says: “Tearing down the past does serious damage to the present”, fanning the embers of race hatred. Our culture will wither away if we’re not allowed to be true to ourselves.
We have to stop apologising and attacking our own culture and be unafraid to wear our heart on our sleeves or our flag on our sunburnt shoulders.
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