Social Trends | Karen Kissane

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.

HE tangled web that some women weave begins when they discover they are pregnant. Perhaps they had an extramarital fling; or one relationship ended the same month that another started; or they were raped or coerced into the kind of sex that few would call consensual.
The result: one pregnancy, two potential fathers, and the beginnings of a dark and painful secret.
Why Women Don’t Tell is the title of the latest paper in a study that talks to men and women who have dealt with doubts about who is the father of a child. Most of the women who were uncertain of their child’s paternity did not intend to commit “paternity fraud”, researcher Dr Lyn Turney, of Swinburne University of Technology, said.
They just found themselves in a position where they could not be sure and kept their uncertainty to themselves.
The longer it went on, the harder it became to confess, mostly because they did not want to damage the relationship between their child and their partner.
“You just have to see them together to see how much they love each other,” one woman said. “And love’s an intangible thing and it’s something that grows with you . . . It takes a long time . . . And since the day (she) was born, that’s it, he’s Dad.”
The interviews with more than 50 people found that even when the social father suspects – because the child does not look like him, or friends have dropped hints, or there were unexplained tears or whisperings at the time of the child’s birth – he rarely takes any action while the relationship is happy.
It is when the relationship breaks down, and he finds himself financially supporting a child with whom he no longer lives, that he pursues paternity testing.
“For both men and women, the common (trigger for testing) is child-support payments,” Dr Turney said.
The issue of “paternity fraud” hit the headlines earlier this year with the case of Liam Magill.
Because of bureaucratic errors, Mr Magill had to pay child support well above the legal percentage over eight years for three children. DNA tests proved that two of the children conceived during his four-year marriage were not his own.
Mr Magill, 54, was awarded $70,000 by the Victorian County Court in November 2002 after he sued his former wife for damages and economic loss for deceiving him.
But his ex-wife, Meredith (Pat) Magill, 37, successfully appealed against the decision. Her defence argued that in putting his name on birth notification forms, Mrs Magill had not intended to assert that he was the biological father.
The Victorian Court of Appeal ruled Mr Magill had not relied on statements in the forms in any respect other than the children’s names. Mr Magill is now appealing to the High Court.
The case launched a blaze of publicity, with claims the incidence of “cuckoo chicks in the nest” is between 10 per cent and 30 per cent of all children.
Dr Turney and her colleague, Professor Michael Gilding, say there are no reputable studies that back those figures, and that the most reliable estimates suggest the true incidence is between 1 per cent and 3 per cent of children.
Dr Turney said the women in her study, reported on in the Journal of Family Studies, did not fit the “moral panic” stereotype of unfaithful, manipulative partners. Many were young, naive and sexually inexperienced.
“The pregnancies usually resulted (from) one-off encounters that occurred at the margins of monogamous relationships,” Dr Turney says.
“They did not involve infidelity or deception, as the women were either free of a relationship or minimally attached to dying, old, or embryonic new relationships.”
But the women feared their new relationships would not withstand revelations about a prior sexual encounter.
One woman had unplanned sex with a long-time friend, the first since the death of her husband a year earlier; several days later she met a new man who then became her partner. “I found that I was pregnant so I just assumed it was the second chap because I’d continued sleeping with him,” she said.
Some reported being “in denial” and choosing the course of least resistance: not telling, and not deciding whether to terminate the pregnancy. All the women blamed themselves.
One woman who did tell her partner about a single sexual episode during a brief separation was knocked to the floor and kicked until a rib broke.
Some women reported conceiving while trapped in abusive relationships in which they were forced by their husbands to have sex with other men.
“I got, ‘If you love me, you will do this for me’,” one said. The paternity of resulting children was accepted by such husbands only until the relationship ended.
Either side can use paternity – or lack of it – as a dirty tool in Family Court battles. In an earlier paper, Dr Turney reported that men told of some mothers pursuing testing so that their ex-husbands could be made legally a “non-father”, often losing custody and access. “There is a child out there who loves me and was ripped away from me,” said one man. “I miss him every day.”
Some men who had testing done secretly were shocked that their ex-partners then refused them access to a child they no longer wanted to pay for.
Women in the study reported having to force testing upon errant partners who denied paternity for tactical reasons, trying to delay the onset of child support payments. They felt humiliated at the suggestion that they had had other sexual partners.
Some professional women did not want money but for the father to have an emotional relationship with the child.
According to one, “I thought that, when he had incontrovertible evidence there, that it might enable him to make a bond with the child”.
Dr Turney said the cases in her study suggested that the realities of paternity uncertainty were complicated. There needed to be an acceptance that such cases were “mistakes due to the human condition”. “It’s a really complex situation for both men and women,” she said.
For further information about the study or if you have a paternity story, phone 1800 007 166 or email lturney@swin.edu.au.
DESPERATELY SEEKING DADDY
Up to 5000 paternity tests are conducted in Australia a year – about 0.25 tests for every 1000 people. In the US, there are 340,800 tests annually – 1.2 tests per 1000 people.
Between half and two-thirds of tests are initiated by men or parties acting on their behalf (eg: a man’s parents or his new wife).
On average, 25 per cent of tests are conducted with the consent of one parent only. These tests were overwhelmingly “motherless tests” – the mother was the parent who had not consented.
With “motherless tests”, only 10 per cent confirmed the man was not the father.
SOURCE: PROFESSOR MICHAEL GILDING, SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

First published in The Age.