Word: australia
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...meant. I grew up in Sutherland Shire, in Sydney's south, where my family - South Indians from Malaysia - had settled after immigrating in 1988. And although the Shire, as it's called, is one of the most Anglo-Saxon regions of the country, it was like the rest of Australia in its laid-back attitude to national sentiment. Sure, it was good to be Australian, but the rest of that stuff - the flag-waving, the chest-thumping - was the province of those jingoistic Yanks. When I was a teenager, the flag fluttered benignly on national holidays. There were occasions...
...Australia Day this year, for the fourth time in a row since Cronulla, violent nationalism came to the fore. The flag - my flag - was the emblem of choice for drunken nationalist outbursts across the nation; in Wollongong, south of Sydney, Australia Day violence was the worst police had ever seen, with mobs of drunken, flag-clad teenagers brawling in the streets. In Manly, in north Sydney, an 80-strong flag-waving mob harassed and assaulted nonwhite passers-by and shop owners, jumped on cars and chanted "Aussie pride...
...nationalism and somehow not noticed the way the Australian flag had become embedded with a silent message for nonwhite Australians: "You're out, and we're in." It's a message that affects a large proportion of the country. Since the removal of the last vestiges of the White Australia Policy in 1973, Australia has become markedly multiracial. The 2006 census showed that of a 20 million - strong population, over 40% were either born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas. After English, the most common languages spoken are Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Arabic and Mandarin...
...That hot afternoon at Newport showed a far different Australia: not a rainbow mosaic, but the monochromatic world of the John Howard generation. These white youths had grown up during the decade of the former Prime Minister's conservative administration - they had witnessed the tacit acceptance of Hanson and her divisive politics, and had been caught up in the panicky xenophobia that swept the nation in response not only to the arrival of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, but also to the growing visibility and affluence of Australia's nonwhite communities. All this went through my mind...
...pictures of Australia...