Patriotism in Australia

Patriotism has quite a bad reputation in Australia. For example, at the 2007 Sydney Big Day Out, a music festival held on Australia Day, organisers argued that waving the Australian flag was symbolic of racism and needed to be banned. According to promoter Ken West,

"The Australian flag was being used as gang colours. It was racism disguised as patriotism and I'm not going to tolerate it." (1)

The Australian belief that patriotism is inherently racist is quite different from the American experience. For example, at the 1969 Woodstock music festival, Jimi Hendrix performed a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, the American national anthem. Due to American patriotism, Hendrix was able to walk on stage as a black musician, and walk off stage as an American legend.

For Americans, (and for most of the world) patriotism isn't the negative cultural trait that it is for Australians. Americans see it as a value in which people don't ask what others can do for them, but what they can do for others. It is a value that brings people together, and can hasten social change. It is a value that saw them gain independence from minority British rule. It is a value that allowed the likes of Martin Luther King to frame his dream into that of the American dream, and become a national hero in the process.

One possible reason for the lack of patriotism in Australia is that 80 years of Convict transportation is not conducive to the formation of national pride. Because the Convicts reside at Australia's urban foundations, any attempt by an individual Australian to connect themselves to history also results in a connection to undesirable criminality.

Another explanation for Australia's lack of patriotism is that the British, then Australian governments, have intentionally implemented anti-patriotic polices in order to keep the Australian population fragmented and so maintain their control over it. The British, and all those that worked with them, definitely had good reason to fear an American style revolution riding on the back of patriotism. There is some circumstantial evidence that some Convicts joined with Pelumwuy, an Aboriginal warrior, to overthrow the British. Had the partnership between Convicts and Aborigines prospered, it could have emerged as a very significant threat to British rule in the fledging colony. The British derailed the partnership by preventing some Aborigines from having contact with Convicts, locating Convicts in places where they were most likely to suffer attacks from hostile Aborigines, and denouncing any Convicts adopting aspects of Aboriginal culture.

In 1805, Irish Convicts staged what has been known as the Vinegar Hill rebellion. While strong in spirit, the Convicts' hand-held weapons were no match for well-trained British soldiers trained at putting down uprisings.

Memories of Vinegar Hill survived until the Eureka Rebellion of miners in 1853.Vinegar Hill was the password into the stockade, and it was being used to unite a diverse range of immigrants with no loyalty to the British. One of these was Italian miner Raffaelo Carboni, who called on the crowd, "irrespective of nationality, religion and colour", to salute the Southern Cross as the "refuge of all the oppressed from all the countries on earth".

Like the Convicts before them, the miners were no match for well-trained English soldiers skilled at putting down uprisings. Even though the uprising was crushed, its memory lingered and continued to be a rallying point of national pride. In 1888, the Bulletin publicly advocated making the anniversary of the uprising Australia's national day:

' Australia began her political history as a crouching serf kept in subjection by the whip of a ruffian gaoler, and her progress, so far, consists merely in a change of masters. Instead of a foreign slave-driver, she has a foreign admiral; the loud-mouthed tyrant has given place to the suave hireling in uniform; but when the day comes to claim their independence the new ruler will probably prove more dangerous and more formidable that the old.' Rather than 'the day we were lagged', Australia's national day should be December 3, the anniversary of the Eureka rebellion, 'the day that Australia set her teeth in the face of the British Lion'.

In 1880, Ned Kelly was on the verge of starting a revolution. Officially, his last stand was a plan to rob banks and take hostages that could be exchanged for his mother. In truth, it was intended to be a revolutionary spark. Police would be killed, the government would retaliate against the whole community, and the timid would be forced to pick up arms and fight for their freedom. For a variety of reasons, the police were not killed and Kelly was captured. At his trial; however, 60,000 Victorians signed a petition demanding his life be sparred while others elevated him to national hero status.

Towards the end of the 19th century, words started replacing weapons as the main way to express patriotism and overthrow British rule. The Australian Labor Party formed using the American spelling of labor in order to associate itself with the revolutionary ideas of America over the conservative views of England. Culturally, strong anti-British values could be seen in the arts. Songs such as "Waltzing Matilda" and the "Wild Colonial Boy" championed the idea of death before surrender, and were sung as patriotic songs for Australia's sons and daughters.

Movies were also fertile ground for patriotic sentiment. In 1906, Australia produced The Story of the Kelly Gang, the world's first feature-length film. The film was extraordinary popular; running for five weeks to full houses. It only cost 1,000 pounds to make but returned 26,000 pounds. Over the next five years Australia produced more successful films such as the Eureka Stockade, The Assigned Servant, The Squatters Daughter, Attack on the Gold Escort, Sentenced for Life and The Mark of the Lash.

With the threat to its rule being carried in hearts and minds, rather than guns in the hand, the government had to develop some subtle ways to put down the rebellion. Arguably, the most intelligent move was to send Australian troops to support Britain in foreign wars; particularly in Africa. By sending the troops, the government was able to redefine the meaning of patriotism, and in a way that would divide. Instead of patriotism meaning fighting against injustice in Australia, it meant going to the other side of the world, and dying in a pointless cause. The words of Henry Lawson, a nationalistic poet of the era, illustrate just how effective the strategy was. The strategy actually resulted in the Australian patriot publicly criticising patriotism. In Lawson's words,

"This was the loyalty which sent several hundred jingoes* and several thousand pounds to assist England in crushing a brave nation of savages who were fighting for a country of no earthly use to anyone but themselves...Why on earth do we want closer connection with England? We have little in common with English people except our language. We are fast becoming an entirely different people. We are more liberal, and, considering our age, more progressive than England is. The majority of English people know nothing of Australia, and even the higher classes understand neither us nor our country. The latter entertain a sort of good-natured contempt for us which is only the outcome of their contact with our own shoddy aristocracy, which is several degrees more contemptible than that of England.

The loyal talk of Patriotism, Old England, Mother Land, etc. Patriotism? after Egypt, Burmah, Soudan, etc. Bah! it sickens one. Go and read His Natural Life, and other natural lives, by Marcus Clarke, and then talk of the dear old Mother Land that gave us birth. " (3)

[*derogatory word for patriot]

While involvement in foreign wars was an effective way to deal with patriotic slogans, the ideology expressed in movies was dealt with by undermining the whole industry. The government simply banned bushranging films. Denied its principle subject of interest, the Australian industry collapsed.

The white Australia policy was another effective way to divide patriots and maintain control. It helped filter out the migrants that had not have loyalty to Britain. It also weakened the solidarity of the trade union movement that accepted some non-white migrants as brothers, such as American blacks, but excluded others, such as Chinese.

World War 1 provided an opportunity to deal with the threat of the Australian Labor Party and its patriotic fervour. In 1916 and 1917, government held referendums on conscription. Predictably, the referendums divided the Labor Party. They also led to anti-patriotic advertisements such as:  

"To Arms!
Captalists, Parsons, Politicians,
Landlords, Newspaper Editors, and
Other Stay-at-Home Patriots
your country needs
YOU
in the trenches
WORKERS
Follow your Masters"

By the 1930s, the Australian government realised that undermining patriotism had a down side. Australia was in a depression, and the severity of the depression was made that much worse as a result of English banks draining the Australian economy with demands for debt repayment. Many of these debts were incurred by Australia supporting the English in World War I. The English government billed the Australian government for every penny it spent on Australian troops. As the governor generals of Australia were English, Australia had no option but to pay.

Aside from the debts, Australia was on the verge of breaking apart. In 1933, 68 per cent of West Australians voted in favour of seceding from the Commonwealth of Australia and becoming a new country. If WA had left, most of the other colonies would have followed, and federal politicians would no longer have a country to rule over. Forced to become semi-patriotic, federal politicians argued that Britain should not interfere in Australian politics. This was problematic for Western Australia because it could not become independent from the commonwealth without the approval of Britain. (In a bizarre outcome, Britain never made a decision about whether WA could become independent, so it has remained part of Australia ever since.)

Since the depression, federal politicians have vaguely supported patriotism without giving it too much fuel. In World War II, the federal government committed troops to support England, but also withdrew them from Europe to defend Australia against the Japanese.

After World War II, Australia's population stood at around 7 million. Fear of another Asian invasion inspired an ethic of "populate or perish." Initially, the Australian government tried to encourage more English to migrate, but not enough were interested in coming to a land with a reputation for convicts and kangaroos. Instead, Australia had to settle for low class immigrants from Italy, Greece, Youglslavia, Eastern Europe and then Asia. Between 1947 and 2000, more than five million people migrated to Australia to take the population to around 20 million. This massive influx presented politicians with a new threat to their control. At the very worse, such as huge wave of migrants could have resulted in a repeat of the patriotic fervour seen after the gold rushes of the 1850s. Migrants with no loyalty to Britain may have found a sense of belonging by supporting movements wanting to overthrow the government. At the very least, the migrants could have swamped Australia's institutions and taken control of them.

To deal with the migrant threat, the Australian government developed a policy of multiculturalism. Migrants were encouraged to preserve their cultures rather than assimilate the Australian way. Whitlam minister Al Grassby even equated the idea of patriotism with Nazi style supremacy. For Grassby, just the simple act of defining one's ancestors as Australian on a census form was an act of racism comparable with the killing of six million Jews. According to Grassby,

"It would mean there was a secret master race that considered themselves pure Australians...It would be worse than the Third Reich." (4)

The policy of multiculturalism was a very effective way to maintain control. The migrant that spent his days trying to preserve his culture was not a threat to anyone. Likewise, the migrant head of an ethnic council was no threat to anyone except to other ethnics that wanted the position themselves. It was the migrant that wanted to be head of the Australian government, or make decisions about which ethnic council should get funding, that the government saw as a threat. Consequently, while the migrants were off trying to maintain their homeland's culture, the unpatriotic Australian bureaucracy was consolidating its power. To put things into perspective, if someone like Barrack Obama had migrated to Australia, the Australian government would have given him money to go away and play the bongo drums at some multicultural festival. It could then concentrate on extending its power. It should also be noted that while politicians were telling migrants to preserve their cultures, they personally never pledged allegiance to a foreign country, or publicly displayed cultural traits aligned to other country, or their ancestor's country. They just maintained a neutral stance that ensured they didn't alienate anyone, and were seen as the most qualified to decide which ethnic councils got money, and how much.

In the 1990s, government saw a threat to its power in the form of a directly elected president. It knew that one day the Queen would be removed as the Australian Head of State and it wanted to ensure her replacement would not be a threat to their power. The government's chief fear was a directly-elected "populist" president. Such a president would give power to the people, and take it away from the entrenched institutions that they had senior positions in. To deal with the threat, it held a referendum in which voters had to decide between a president appointed by parliament or no president at all. The vote was held with almost no patriotism. Proponents wanted Australians to have enough patriotism to support an Australian head of state, but not enough to believe the Australian people were capable of choosing him or her.

Today, the lack of patriotism in Australia is still useful for government. As long as the fractured nature of Australia never gets as bad as the Balkans, the government never needs to be concerned about a political movement overthrowing it. Because it doesn't need to worry about a threat, both sides of parliament have been able to set extremely high taxes, and use the tax money to fund interests that consolidate their power. To put Australia's tax rate into perspective, people in countries like South Korea and Japan are taxed at between 6 and 10 per cent. Australians can be taxed as high as 47 per cent.

Although government may change, both parties know that there are only two institutions in the game, and it wont be long before it gets another go in power. Furthermore, most of the bureaucracy remains in tact. Government does not need to be populist, and it does not need to clean up the corruption in its ranks. Even if it loses an election, the new government can't purge all the corrupt members in the ex-ministry or bureaucracy. In a recent example, the late Bob Collins was a paedophile who molested little boys over decades. Successive governments would have known what he was doing, but they did nothing. The extent and public nature of his paedophilia didn't even emerge until after he was dead. Collins was entrenched as a power broker and that power remained irrespective of which party was in government. People needed him, and people feared him. Consequently, they turned a blind eye to his actions, even when he raped boys in his parliamentary office.

To maintain its control, the government funds a lot of unpatriotic causes, but just enough to ensure not too much damage is done. It funds the ABC to deliberately undermine patriotism with one show, then build it up with another. It funds the SBS to keep migrants focussed on their home country rather than engaging with Australia. It funds humanity departments to undermine patriotism, all the while knowing that if the departments become too much of a problem funding can be cut. The funding not only serves government, but also serves academics themselves. This was very evident in a 2005 survey of intellectuals by the Australian Public Intellectual Network. The survey asked 200 scholars to list 10 important and influential thinkers. The list they produced had 8 white men in the 10 most influential Australian intellectuals. Men occupied 17 of the top 20 places. (5) As well as women being grossly underrepresented, non-whites were underrepresented. Not a single Australian with African, Asian, or South American ancestry made the grade.

Contrary to some misconceptions, patriotism has never been used by Australian governments, or the associated bureaucracy, to maintain control. Patriotism is the chief threat to their control, and always has been.

To deal with the threat, Australians have been raised to believe that patriotism means fighting useless wars in foreign countries, removing children from their Aboriginal mothers, and using dictation tests to exclude non-whites. Australians are not raised to believe that patriotism can mean risking one's life to save a neighbour's house from a bushfire, volunteering to be a lifesaver at the beach, or lending a helping hand in a local charity. They are not told that in the 1850s that patriotism meant standing up against corruption, or that in the 1970s, patriotism meant unions banning work on heritage sites that developers wanted to demolish. All the alturalistic and community aspects of patriotism are ignored by government because not only is it a threat to its rule, it is also completely alien to the way the Australian government is run.

Vinegar Hill rebellion

Eureka rebellion

References

1)Paul Mulvey,  Flags 'not banned' but unwelcome, January 22, 2007 http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21095538-2,00.html

2)Carboni Raffaello, The Eureka Stockade http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Eureka-Stockade2.html

3)HENRY LAWSON Autobiographical and Other Writings 1887-1922 ANGUS AND ROBERTSON, Sydney 1972

4)Stephen Gibbs, Wannabes and ethnicity, Sydney Morning Herald April 26, 2005

5)Richard Nile, First cohort for thought, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20459801-25132,00.html

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