Post Australia Day

Today is the 27th of January. Yesterday was Australia Day. In the past Australia has managed to get itself a bad reputation as the day that bogans come out to play, either getting completely drunk by 10 in the morning and then working up to pickled from there, gang bashing other Australians that happened to be of a different cultural or racial background as your group, or both. This year by all accounts, it seemed to be that people went out, had a few drinks with mates, had some fun down at the beach, but didn't cause trouble, and so it was a lot nicer than it has been in the past (think last year in Manly). The question that has to be asked in light of these sorts of things happening is, what is the national identity that Australia actually has? There is a stereotype of being either Crocodile Dundee, or Farmers, or Surfers and Beach bums that we have overseas. While this might not be completely accurate, we tend to play to these stereotypes. But is this our national identity. It used to be an identity as a convict nation but we've grown past that and while we might, albeit counter-intuitively, be proud of that, it isn't what we are anymore and thus can't be what we base our national identity on. So what is it that we can identify ourselves as?

I would argue nothing. We can't identify our nation as anything besides a group of Australians. Our country has moved beyond anything that would hold us together in any capacity except for the fact that we are currently from Australia where ever we may have been from in the past. It used to be that we were a country based on our 'belonging to' and then later, our loyalty to England. If you say that you are loyal to England these days you are dismissed as an idiot or put in the same group as the whinging poms. Looking historically at England, it is an amalgam of virtually every east European nation. Even the language is an amalgam of Greek and Roman with a few others added in for good measure and Australia now is like that, a 'bitsa' of a country, with no more loyalty to 'the Motherland' than a dog has to the petshop.

The only thing that we can Identify ourselves as, our national identity, is Australia. We need to embrace this instead of being afraid of being ourselves or trying to keep the status quo that ran away for the last time fifty years ago.