chrstoph

Well friends,

Greetings to you on this happy australia day, or rather, your own particular version of it. I just watched a particularly interesting australia day commentary on abc where the presenter went around to interview many facets of Australians: the convict descendents, the proud british descendents, the native aborigines, immigrant Iranians; the one thing that I found was that whenever the australian flag was involved, I invariably attached a dislike for the people involved.

For somehow, friends, I have become a card carrying flag hater. Never given to overt displays of nationalism at the best of times, I have become almost obsessed with the degree with which people misrepresent flags in order to rally around a particular idea. In this case, we have a flag which is basically a defaced version of the British naval ensign. Showing all of the verve and imagination which could have come from the same marketing genius who sold meat pies back in the 50´s (meat pies, they´re meat, and they´re pies, and they´re Australian... eat them!), we looked up in the sky and decided that the southern cross would be a great symbol of us. Don´t get me wrong, I think the southern cross is a great constellation, and worthy of much discussion, but thinking about it logically, ... pretty much all of the southern hemisphere could lay claim to it, so its hardly ´uniquely australian´.

Basically what the federation star being under the union jack says to me is this: Australians still think of themselves as being under the British rule. The southern cross is saying, yeah, we´re basically a southern hemisphere version of the British. This, considering all of our multicultural heritage, seems completely anomolous to where we are moving as a country, and to re-embrace a flag which holds those ties seems quite illogical to me, especially considering its exclusion of any non-british Australians (and yes, surprisingly, they do exist in much larger numbers than the White Australia policy could ever have imagined!).

So, historically, people say we´ve fought under the australian flag in World War 1, World Ware 2, all these wars, all these brave soldiers fighting under the flag. We can´t possibly change it, can we? WW1 we were fighting under the Union Jack. WWII we were fighting under the Union Jack, with a small portion fighting under the (then unoffical Australian Flag). Indeed, the Australian flag as we know it today was only ratified in 1953, a far cry from those who would have us believe that it has been a part of Australia since federation.

My beef is as follows:

1. The flag is divisive
2. The flag is not indicative of its population
3. It promotes an us vs them mentality
4. Its backwards, not forwards looking.
5. It offends me in its complete unoriginality.

There are probably people out there that will even hate me for holding such a harsh view on the flag, but this will just go to further my claim that its all about the us and them. And nothing about Australia and its future prosperity.

chris
god save the queen!