Word: flags
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...those blue-sky, Sydney summer afternoons early last year when I first realized something had gone awry with the Australian flag. The date was Jan. 26, 2008 - Australia Day. I'd just returned to Sydney as a freelance journalist after some years in New York City and was having lunch at a pub in the beachfront suburb of Newport when an uneasy, skin-prickling moment dawned. Around me were hundreds of young white men and women, many of them drunk, chanting the national war cry - "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi oi oi!" Almost all were sporting the Australian flag...
...husband, a white Australian who grew up in Sydney in the 1970s, was bemused. It would have been "absolutely unthinkable" for him, or any of his friends, he said, to have gone out to a pub wearing a flag or chanting nationalist slogans as young men. I knew what he 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...
...Australians never used to have to say it. Pride in the country was largely unmentioned, taken for granted. In recent years, however, there's been a surge of racially tinged nationalism, particularly among the young and coalescing around the Australian flag, which has become the symbol of a new tribe of über-patriots up and down the land. In 1997, anti-immigration politician Pauline Hanson draped herself in an Australian flag for one of the country's most notorious campaign photos - a testament to her "Australianness," and specifically her white Australianness. In December 2005, during the infamous Cronulla Beach...
...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...
...years away, I'd missed this rise of ultra-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...