Yay for Australia Day

Regular readers may recognise the sarcasm in the title above. I am patriotic about being Australian but it's a love like that of a parent who is not reluctant to chide their child. We need to find another date to acknowledge a common day of celebration.

The solution to finding a day to celebrate Australia through a national public holiday can be solved by becoming a republic. Then we can celebrate the day that came to be.

Australia Day

Each passing year it seems like Australia Day merchandise gets increasingly nationalistic. "Aussie Pride" shorts? To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, it seems you won't go broke underestimating the taste of the Australian public.

I've commented on Australia Day before but these items in a Woolworths catalogue make me wonder how much tackier it's going to get.

Artist Bernie Slater has taken aim at these sort of products before and the image below is one of his works.

Aussie flag burqa

Another great piece by Rosa Pascoe, whose Month in Unsolicited Advertising was posted a little while back.

More nationalistic bullshit

What's so Australian about Coke?

Merde in Australia

I've written elsewhere about the irony of the foreign-made Australia-branded junk that appears in catalogues in January but another side of this trend is the patriotic packaging that is becoming more common in our supermarkets.

It seems the foreign-owned food companies are those most likely to promote this misguided nationalistic marketing of their products, such as the US-owned Kraft renaming Vegemite as Australia.

Another example, this packet of chips. Smith's are owned by Pepsico. Dunno why they don't just call them Freedom Fries like Maccas did in the US after 11/9.

Australia Day

January 26 is Australia Day by virtue of being the date the First Fleet landed in 1788 and it's undergone a transformation in the last couple of decades. For a long time it was significant to me because it was the date of the Big Day Out concert in Sydney and I recall that when The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy played in 1993 they described it as Invasion Day and the label sorta stuck for a while.



Sometime in the late '90s I noticed this trend at the Big Day Out in Sydney for people to wear the Australian flag as a cape. If I were more patriotic I think I'd find this fashion to be disrespectful but, judging by the crass Australian-themed consumerism in my letterbox recently, there must be a number of people grateful this now exists as a product.



Frankly I'm amazed at the amount of stuff branded with the national flag and/or some underwhelming patriotic slogan. The irony is that most of it probably isn't manufactured in our country, so buying Australian must mean supporting some sweatshop somewhere else and contributes to our trade deficit or something.



I am grateful that the print advertisements for the public holiday that started under the Howard government have stopped though. They had these meaningless statements about the public holiday inferring a right to eat meat products prepared in a carcinogenic manner or a right to wear thongs. At many levels these seemed offensive since it was an example of Australians taxes being spent on trivial advertising and our country doesn't actually have a bill of rights.



Don't get me wrong, I love being Australian and living in this country but fervent nationalism should have no part in it.

I am grateful to have met Storry Walton, who shared with me a story of how his grandparents taught him to distinguish between love and pride for your country. They said you should love Australia like you would your child because it meant recognising your country can be wrong and require criticism, whereas pride was blind in allegiance.

Storry told me that as a child in Perth his Irish grandparents wouldn't stand for the national anthem. They said they'd seen enough death caused by national pride and felt strongly enough about this that they endured abuse for this belief.