Latest outfit flags trend in patriotism

AUSTRALIA DAY 2006
Sales of the Australian flag are up. Karen Kissane finds out why.
IT WAS a hot Friday night and the half-a-dozen young people were as drunk as lords, cheerfully so, as they ambled along Fitzroy Street in St Kilda.
Two of the men had Australian flags tied around their necks like capes. They were a bit too drunk to notice that the national emblem was dragging on the pavement behind them, a grubby casualty of the trend towards patriotism as fashion accessory.
Patriotism is spiking. The Australian flag is outside more public buildings and suburban homes than ever before, according to Melbourne’s oldest flag manufacturer, Evan Evans. Sales have increased three-fold in the past five years, with the most notable rise among private rather than corporate buyers.
The flag can be seen fluttering on everything from taxi roofs to construction machinery. It is also being employed by younger generations in a more personal way: wrapped like a blanket or shawl around tennis fans, painted onto faces at the cricket and on the almost-bare bottoms of G-stringed demonstrators in Washington protesting against sheep mulesing.
Melbourne University historian Professor Graeme Davison said: “I was pondering the significance of wearing the flag as an article of apparel versus raising and saluting the flag, as we used to do. Doesn’t it mean that the nation is no longer an object of veneration, external and above oneself, but an aspect of personal identity, at the service of the self?”
Perhaps this explains what happened at the Cronulla race riots in Sydney, where “Skip” men wrapped themselves in flags and called themselves “Sons of Anzacs” while rounding on people of Middle Eastern appearance. Prime Minister John Howard refused to criticise them – “I would never condemn people for being proud of the Australian flag” – but Treasurer Peter Costello labelled their actions a desecration: “The Australian flag represents . . . what is good about our nation, and it is not something to be wrapped around you as you are battering somebody in the street.”
Where is the rise in patriotic fervour coming from? And, perhaps more importantly, where is it going?
Bruce Merrett of Abel Flagpoles and Flags said sales had been steadily rising for three years. “Since September 11, patriotism has increased probably four-fold,” he said.
Jim Hilbert, managing director of Carroll and Richardson Flagworld, said his company’s sales this month were at a 40-year high and 50 per cent higher than at this time last year. “We don’t understand why. Maybe it’s to do with the Cronulla incident or the Commonwealth Games, or the terrorism-cum-Bali scenario, where people are turning to patriotism to express their feelings.”
Mr Hilbert has noted the rise in interest among young people. “There used to be a phenomenon with the boxing kangaroo flag, but now kids are wanting to put Australian flags over their shoulders.”
Professor Davison suggested the Australian flag has risen in prominence as that other obvious focus of loyalty, the image of the monarch, has declined. “It is also reinforced by a culture in which logos, brands and icons are ubiquitous.”
Two Eltham Secondary College girls at the tennis this week, Bonnie McLeod and Amy Voisey, both 15, bought flags and wore them even though no Australians were playing in the Open that day. “We just wanted to get dressed up and have a bit of fun,” Bonnie said. “And you are making a statement that you are proud to be Australian.”
Dr Elizabeth Kwan is a Canberra-based historian whose book Flag and Nation – “which looks at the changing relationship between Australians and their national flags, plural” – will be published in May. She points out that Australians have fought under several different flags: Britain’s Union Jack, a red ensign, and the blue ensign we now know as the national flag, the status of which was formalised by Prime Minister Robert Menzies only in 1953.
Dr Kwan attributes much of the current rise in patriotism, especially among the young, to the activity of conservative lobby groups and policies of the Federal Government. She said the Flag Amendment Bill, passed in 1996, had made it more difficult for future governments to change the flag. The Howard Government had also declared a National Flag Day (September 3), she said, allowed a video that portrays the virtues of the current flag to be distributed to schools, and insisted that schools install flags and flagpoles and have regular ceremonies around the flag.
Dr Kwan said Americans’ preoccupation with their flag, “Old Glory”, began in the 1880s as their cities were flooded with non-English-speaking immigrants. She wonders whether the same thing might be happening in Australia, as our migrant intake has shifted from mainly Anglo-Saxon to larger numbers of people from Asia and the Middle East.
“Groups pushing the anti-change-to-the-flag line have an attitude of hanging on to what they see as the old Australia, an Anglo-Saxon Australia,” she said.
Professor Davison says a key question is: What does the flag represent?
“If it unambiguously represented civic virtues or values of liberty, justice, fairness etc, it would be harder to appropriate it in a racist or sectarian cause,” he said. “But if it is just the badge or logo of my mob, as against yours, then it can acquire more of a tribal rather than properly national significance. I think that perhaps something of this kind is now going on, and it is assisted by the difficulty in a post-imperial but not yet republican context of assigning definite civic qualities to it.”
For citizens such as Bonnie and Amy, the flag and its symbolism are fine just as they are. Amy said: “I think it’s good because it says we don’t mind being friends with other people, having alliances and stuff.”

First published in The Age.

Still jobs for the boys, Guv’nor?

The new governor is a good bloke, but still just another of the blokes.
MELBOURNE has racism. You often hear it from taxi drivers. It can show itself coarsely in the oaths of cricket crowds or delicately in the poisonous patter of dinner parties. The veils of Muslim women can be torn off in the street, and they and their children can be spat upon by strangers.
But Melbourne is also a town that turned out in great numbers to support one of its wayward sons who came from an ethnic background, Nguyen Tuong Van, the Vietnamese-Australian drug runner recently hanged in Singapore. A town, like a race, is as complicated and contradictory as the individuals who make it up.
Melbourne is now a place where several of the most eminent citizens are men from ethnic backgrounds. The Premier, Steve Bracks, comes from a Lebanese family; the Lord Mayor, John So, is Chinese-Australian; and the head of the AFL (probably the most prominent role of the lot in such a footy-mad city) is Greek-Australian Andrew Demetriou. This week it was announced that our new governor will be Professor David de Kretser, a renowned scientist who migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia when he was nine.
It is an impressive line-up in the tolerance-and-diversity stakes. It sends powerful messages about the kind of place Melbourne is – or wants to be. Migrant parents can have some faith in the prospects for their children. Institutional racism is, at worst, muted, and public discourse is civil. The media treated de Kretser’s family history as a heart-warming tale of migrant triumph, not as cause for disdain.
This city has its racial tensions – ethnic soccer riots come to mind – but we have seen nothing like Sydney’s race-based pack rapes of Australian girls by gangs of Lebanese-Australian youths. The week of the Cronulla riots, both Skip and Lebanese young people in Melbourne received text messages urging them to gather at beaches to fight. They ignored them. It was the rival text messages urging a peace rally that won a turnout. Melbourne is a more tolerant place than Sydney.
Researchers suggest this is partly because Sydney has developed closed ethnic enclaves but Melbourne’s ethnic communities are more mixed up together and more scattered among WASP communities.
That’s just another way of saying that migrants in Melbourne don’t feel as “locked out” as those in Sydney. As the world saw with Paris, it is that sense of being shut out – literally, in terms of living in a ghetto, and metaphorically, in terms of not having opportunities – that fuels racial violence.
So it’s a good thing that our Premier continues to attend to multiculturalism, one of several reasons he chose de Kretser. Racism is like a disease; it requires regular vaccination and the maintenance of herd immunity to keep it at bay.
All of this makes it almost shabby to pick holes in Bracks’ appointment of de Kretser, who seems a lovely man and an excellent candidate. I feel like Oliver Twist, asking timorously, “Please sir, can I have some more?”
Because this most worthy line-up of eminent citizens might be ethnically diverse but it is still strikingly monochrome in one respect: it has no women. Is it true to tell migrants that anything is possible in this new land? Or must we in all honesty confine that promise to their sons?
The argument that there aren’t enough women with appropriate professional backgrounds doesn’t wash any more. Science, academia and the professions now have many women in their 50s, and not a few in their 60s, who have the qualities Bracks said he was looking for: independence of mind, an ability to relate to the broader community in a non-partisan way, and humility.
In New Zealand, the Prime Minister (Helen Clark), the Governor-General (Silvia Cartwright) and the head of the largest company (Theresa Gattung, Telecom) are all women.
Cartwright once said she thought intelligent women wanted three things in life – marriage, children and career – but that most could have only two of the three. This, of course, is because behind almost every great career man with a family is a woman who runs it for him. The great career woman is less likely to find a partner whose own sense of purpose is linked to supporting her.
Public appointments of men with ethnic backgrounds are not new. What would break the mould is a qualified woman who was also a single mother, or who had spent years away from a high-powered career to raise her children, or who even – mercy on us all – never married at all. Maybe she could be a woman who also represents multiculturalism or indigenous Australians.
Because women will never “have what it takes” as long as part of what it “takes” is a wife.

First published in The Age.