Word: whitely
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...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. It was painted on cheeks, tattooed on backs and chests, worn as a sarong, bikini top, scarf or bandana, wrapped around shoulders and emblazoned on T shirts and baseball...
...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...
...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 race riots, thousands of youths draped in flags rampaged against nonwhites; just a few weeks later, at a large music festival in Sydney, flag-waving revelers were at it again, harassing nonwhites and prompting the event's organizer to decry...
...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 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...