These are not quolls but one of them is a marsupial. This is a kangaroo and an emu, the native animals on Australia’s coat of arms. It’s Australia Day today (or Survival/Invasion Day for Indigenous Australians) so i’m going to do a special post and let slip a bit of uncharacteristic national pride at the same time in the form of guarded optimism.
I hope for a lot of things about this country of mine, because it’s far from a finished product. I suspect we’re even having some minor culture wars amongst ourselves, though maybe i’m just properly tuned into them for the first time.
Like our National Anthem says, we are young and free. (I’m not so sure we’ve earnt the right to rejoice about it, but then our national anthem was written by a Scottish bloke.) Contemporary Australia – the version with white folks in charge – is young. It’s younger than my own dad, by my estimation, and neither he nor i are that old.
Australia was still led by people who considered themselves the leader of a British outpost in the south seas until the mid-1960s. The White Australia policy and the infamous dictation test for immigrants wasn’t retired until the 1970s out of necessity to accomodate refugees from the Vietnam War in 1975 – a slim two years before i was born. Indigenous Australians didn’t even show up on the census until 1967, which i think every Australian agrees in hindsight is a bit shit.
We’ve only had a couple of generations since Australia had any sort of chance to come into its own. A lot of the old guard are still present and accounted for – the kind of people who say their own parents would be mortified if the flag were to change. If they were still alive.
With respect to absent parents, Australia is for alive people and not dead ones. Even if those dead people are zombies.
So i have a lot of hope for where this nation could go next, once enough of the old guard have been quietly forgotten about.
I hope that the paranoid white Australian entitlement complex goes back to the lunatic fringe where it belongs and that the spiritual legacy of John Howard is exorcised and purged from our national consciousness quickly and completely.
I hope white Australians rediscover their sense of humour and playfulness instead of continuing to turn into the paranoid pisshead white trash of Asia. Maybe it’s just a few of us but it’s a visible few of us.
I hope white Australia can reconstitute its national character from what it’s for, not from what it’s against, and thus work out what it is instead of what it isn’t.
I hope reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and other Australians achieves cultural critical mass and in doing so strengthens every single one of us here. I hope white Australians can put down proper, genuine, lasting roots in this land instead of tearing it apart like we have somewhere else to go or somewhere else to belong. We don’t. Indigenous Australia recognised that for the land to take care of you, you have to take care of it. White Australia’s yet to catch up with that idea because European-descended people have that cultural DNA of conquest and pillaging. (This is why Europeans climb Uluru and Anangu people don’t.)
I also hope we can finally weed out and extinguish whatever’s left of our legacy European tendency towards imperialist exploitative dickishness towards other cultures.
I hope more white Australians dig into their country’s history, and accept like i do that the failure of British supremacism in Australia has been good, and that the USA’s economic and cultural neo-colonialism needs a far stronger answer from us with respect to military bases and our national sovereignty than it’s currently getting. I hope Australia wakes up to the notion that progress is not a case of simply copying what the USA does, or worse, doing what the USA tells us to do.
I hope all Australians (and not just white Aussies) make more of our own cartoons and TV and movies, and i hope we don’t just get used to the sound of our own accent and voice but actually seek it out and enjoy it. I hope we establish a strong culture for ourselves in media that count while still being actively curious about the rest of the world like we are now.
I hope i’m personally making some of those cartoons and that they have quolls in them and that they’re good. I’m working on it. Honest.
I hope we can roll back the extinction of our indigenous animals and strengthen the presence of Indigenous languages and culture; begin living with more of our native fauna as pets in preference to destructive environmental vandals like rabbits, cats and ferrets; understand enough of our respective local traditional languages to appreciate a Welcome To Country as it’s traditionally spoken. That’s a lot to hope for, but i may as well hope big while i’m at it.
I hope we find a flag one day that stands for Australia, only Australia and uniquely Australia, not some paleolithic colonialism that was conceived in the days of the White Australia policy with a quarter of it given over to venerating some other country. I hope this new flag has a kangaroo and not a Southern Cross on it, because the Southern Cross is in the sky of every nation far enough south to see it. (Check out New Zealand’s flag if you don’t believe me.) The Southern Cross is not uniquely Australian. It’s just.. southern. Our flag as it is says we’re.. like.. British but.. south, and it just ain’t so. But a big kangaroo in mid-hop? That’s us and only us. Unmistakably.
And then we can eat what’s on our flag as well as what’s on our coat of arms. I mean, fancy being told by some Tea-Party-worshipping monarchist dropkick (two lines of thought i find borderline treacherous to the cause of an independent Australia) that eating the animals of the Australian Coat of Arms is disrespectful, especially when said monarchist has an accent which even sounds like he resents having been born in the colonies and not back in Old Blighty. (Weirdly, he sounds too English even for contemporary England, which makes him an even more hilariously tragic colonial throwback.)
I’d tell David Flint to go back to where he wants to have come from but time travelling airplanes haven’t been invented yet.
Anyway.
Have an awesome 26th of January, one and all. See you again with another local beastie on Monday.
