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The image that Australia projects to the world is quite rightly that of a healthy and robust democratic nation with vast natural, cultural and intellectual wealth. A great problem of communicating something as complex as national identity is that it is so often reduced to a matter of gross and overly simplistic caricature. Few Australians either look or sound anything like Steve Irwin or Crocodile Dundee. Australians are as likely to resemble Indians, Japanese, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Polynesians or Kenyans as they are to look anything like white European Anglo-Caucasians. The diversity of cultural and religious traditions, structures and beliefs in the Australian community is profound.
Australia does well to project a positive self-image to the world. We have a lot to be proud of. We also, unfortunately, have much to be sorry for. Homelessness is a significant problem. Social injustice and the iniquities of wealth and poverty are as marked as anywhere else in the world, if a little less extreme in their relative severity than some other places. Racism is still rife in this country and the anger and resentment which in successive generations finds new targets and victims is still alive and well. At one point in our history the Chinese were victimised despite their hard work and valuable social contributions. At other times it was the Greeks, the Italians, the Vietnamese and in ignorance of similar hard work and socially constructive activity. More recently the Lebanese and various Muslim peoples have been on the sharp end of the racist prong. It seems as though classic Anglo-Saxon Australian self-identity is fundamentally insecure about it’s own (200 year) history and place in the world and feels compelled to belittle others in an attempt, as though through some form of compensatory psychological transference, to make themselves sturdy and complete in their own eyes. Whether the sought-for psychological completeness and wholeness actually exists (or can ever exist) is a matter of some philosophical contention and one could easily interpret such a jingoistic patriotism as indeed being the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Australia’s greatest shame, however, lies in our treatment of our Indigenous peoples - the original inhabitants. Australia is of course not the only country to have brutalised it’s indigenous peoples but now, under the new Rudd Labour Government, some of our serious mistakes and past crimes are beginning to be addressed.
RSS 
Conservative whites ruling the roost ? Yes, but that’s just the plutocratic underbelly of capitalism in a country of largely Anglo origin and God only knows about what to do about that - look at the mess that America is in terms of unequitable wealth distribution.
I live in Canberra, population 320,000 - capital of Australia. Catholic and protestant divides are never something I have really come up against. At all. In the bush there is much more racism - like in Western Queensland, for instance. The Aboriginal issue is huge but that covers so much, how to put it in so few words. I am actually studying the issues currently and am very well aware of them.
I guess I was having a brief look at the way(s) in which Australia’s national (identity) insecurities manifest through a racism whose target may change but the song remains the same. Australian identity,that is - predominantly White Australian identity is thoroughly grounded in a handful of concepts - the tragic Gallipolli landings of WW1, the myth of the outback, the colonial/convict inception of the nation, the sporting prowess of our sports teams. A country with such a brief White history is generally flailing wildly for anything upon which to stake it’s self-identity. Although the notional target of racism has always changed, the Indigenous Australians have always suffered the worst oppression.
The issues the Aboriginals have are largely due to the racist policies of previous governments (including the immediate last government we just got rid of). Aboriginals were not actually recognised as full citizens (with the right to vote) until a 1967 referendum.
Mainstream Australia has ”Australia Day” but many Indigenous Australians and their supporters call it ”Invasion Day”.
For a large part of the Twentieth Century (until the early 1970’s) Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and communities and forced into foster care or Christian missions. They are known as the ”Stolen Generation”. Members of my family have been affected by this. Indeed as I am of Scottish extraction I feel a great deal of affinity with the Indigenous Australians as the English treated the Scots as they treated the Indigenous Australians, just 500 years earlier.
The Rudd Labour Government performed a monumental act of official Apology to the ”Stolen Generation” this year to the Indigenous Australians which has gone a long way to initiating a process of healing for the wrongs committed in the past.
The issues are huge. The space is limited. For what it’s worth, I am on the lower rungs of the socio-economic system here, but not the lowest.
I used to have a pen friend who made me like the country so much.
Recently, I have had reasons to take a deeper look at Australia and what I saw was appalling.
In due course, I will publish some of them here.
The fact that the country is so far away seems to be the reason why some of its leaders think they can do whatever they like and the rest of the world will hardly notice.
Well the global village is gradually exposing Australia just like it has exposed the rest of the pretentious countries of the world.
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File Type: ImageI am studying Community Development at the moment. Something I recently wrote about the treatment of indigenous peoples:
It appears to be a global phenomenon that where a people have been brutalised and alienated from their own self-identity, they: 1) suffer a significant detachment from and conflict with the dominant culture in which they are now embedded; and 2) large numbers of such peoples continue to be brutalised, isolated and disempowered by institutional and political processes of the dominant culture.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/hopes-dreams-lofty-promises/2007/05/12/1178899159711.html
