°Light my fire
The second Australia Invasion Day post (the sports/war one here).
Police in Footscray (Melbourne) removed the above billboard - titled Proudly UnAustralian - last Friday. And then went looking around to see what laws might be invoked to justify their actions. On Thursday, there was also a bit of flag burning in Brisbane.
The Prime Minister is reluctant to concede to calls that burning the Australian flag should be a criminal offense - he thinks it’s offensive, of course, but making it illegal would, according to him, make “matyrs” of the flag-burners. But, times being as they are in AU at the moment, flag-burning (or ‘desecration’), as well as policing actions against it, will I suspect become more pronounced, even if as a kind of ‘low-intensity conflict’.
Some two years ago, Simeon Moran wrote:
The general principle of reconciliation has become an ideological cover for the strengthening of the hegemony of dominant white settler culture. Therefore reconciliation has effectively become a state strategy for containing an Indigenous politics of resistance.
And well-contained it has been, with some notable exceptions.
No doubt, in the current situation, there are many who lament the passing of this ‘reconciliatory’ moment (as well as that of Keating’s multiculturalism). But any detailed analysis of the institutional, as well as less formalised, histories of both indigenous and (so-called) ethnic politics in AU would, on the contrary, have to conclude that, here, it was a case of certain political organisations and trajectories opening “themselves up to a desertion in the ranks so that only the front line remains: a thin line of representation that can be sliced through and crushed”. To note only the most prominent of examples: the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (a kind of indigenous parliament) suffered an exodus and, only after this, was dismantled by the Government. Similarly, the Ethnic Communities Council also experienced a massive flight of members and the secession of its largest (Victorian) section. The same, I think, might be said of the trade unions in AU, particularly over the last twenty years.
Apropos the ‘art’ theme: Richard Bell’s “Aboriginal Art: It’s a White Thing”
More Australia Invasion Day blogging, just so you get some idea:
Esoteric Rabbit | Barista | Interbreeding | Joe | Bowling Alley | And a whole lot more
[…] one for wearing it as a T-shirt. When you start seeing flags, that’s when nationalism is getting out of control. […]
well futile [January 30, 2006 @ 8:57 am]