Patriotism is always stubbornly absent in me on days of official national commemoration.
Australia Day – Invasion Day – has always left me cold for its divisiveness, historical asymmetry and exclusivity. Anzac Day, an unofficial national day for many, has never raised a patriotic shiver in me.
I admit to feeling more than a little buoyant on particular international sporting occasions. Australia flogging England, here or there, in an Ashes Test series gives me an anticolonial glow. But not exactly a patriotic high.
But true stories of Australian multi-ethnicity that play out on sporting fields or in so many cultural spheres, stories that reinforce my faith in an Australia that would be altered irrevocably by those advocating monoculturalism (or who at best supinely equivocate about it) do make me feel patriotic.
Take the Socceroos and the football World Cup. They represented a modern nation that is built on an overwhelming rejection of the abhorrent White Australia policy.
The blind racism and profound illogicality that underpins so much of One Nation’s so-called policies on economics, immigration and social cohesion were exposed by Pauline Hanson’s absurd proposition that the Socceroos (for all their racial diversity) represent an Australian monoculture. Get her a dictionary, please.
The Socceroos embody and embrace a repudiation of the cheap nationalistic racial and religious prejudice that some One Nation officials (and others) blithely parrot. It was reassuring to see a senior federal government figure, Penny Wong, robustly debunk such fever-dream jingoistic bunkum.
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Australia’s cultural institutions are replete with (again true) stories that celebrate an enduring multicultural Australia.
While recently meandering through Sydney’s wonderful Australian National Maritime Museum (so much of which is dedicated to telling Australia’s multicultural migration story) a small exhibit stopped me in my tracks. It was a small, battered and blackened metal fry-pan with a plastic handle that was brought to Australia by a Vietnamese “boat person”, Tuyet Lu, who made the perilous journey to Darwin on a small fishing boat with her husband, former store owner Tan Than Lu (who fought for South Vietnam) and their children. They arrived in Darwin in November 1977 with few personal possessions, the pan among them.
She cooked with the pan in South Vietnam. She cooked with it on the boat for her family and other refugees. After arriving in Darwin and during six months living at Brisbane’s Wacol migrant hostel, she used the pan to cook Vietnamese food in Australia.
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Six months later, they were granted Australian asylum.
Some of us will remember the heated debate around the influx of thousands of Vietnamese asylum seekers arriving by boat from South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. The last vestiges of the White Australia policy (the first act of the Australia’s commonwealth parliament in the white federation of 1901) had only recently been removed. The Vietnamese, like many others, were viewed by some as a threat to some nebulous Australian cohesion (despite the early federation’s bitter social and political divisions over – among other things – sectarianism, conscription, women’s suffrage, racial equity and, later, the appeasement of European fascism).
Those opposing the settlement of “boat people” from Asia in the late 1970s could not have foreseen today’s proliferation of Vietnamese restaurants in just about every suburban shopping district and country high street across the land. Vietnamese cuisine is now Australian! But that is the defiant reality – the strength against occasional odds and, yes, enduring racism in some social quarters – of the Australian social and migration amalgam.
It is a fitting postscript that Tuyet Lu used her battered and blackened pan in restaurants that she and her husband came to own and run in Australia. A melting pot indeed.
Patriotism can be angry and stridently militaristic. It can also take the form of a gentle pride in the success of an experiment like multiculturalism.
It is no coincidence that those now advocating the impossibility of an Australian monoculture began political life three decades ago attacking First Nations peoples, promoting the fanciful fallacy that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (among the earth’s most disadvantaged) had it too good.
Indigenous antiquity on this continent – 60,000 years and counting of human civilisation’s unbroken connection with the land, seas and skies, and its wondrous manifestations today – has long been a bedrock of my quiet, reflective form of Australian patriotism.
This all resonates for me, hands down, far more meaningfully than militarism or boisterous we-grew-here-you-flew-herebrands of jingoistic, exclusionary nationalism.
