Who is Australian, anyway?

When I was a little girl, I thought I knew what it meant to be Australian.

It was 1988 and I was 5 years old, starting school for the first time. There I was, one of the tiniest little people in the middle of the school hall, surrounded by the biggest of big kids I’d ever discovered celebrating one of the biggest milestones in Australian history so far - the bi-centenary marking 200 years since the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788.

I had no idea what a bi-centenary or a convict of First Fleet was, but I understood the excitement of the event. As a kid starting school in that special year I was sent a very special coin from the Australian Mint, which I played with and ultimately lost. I brought something very special in to put in the school time capsule, something reflecting my life in 1988. The time capsule was also lost, buried somewhere near some trees in the school playground, so secret it hasn’t been found during numerous searches. Most importantly, I contributed to the biggest painting I’d ever seen.

An artist came to the school to work with the students to create a mural that would span the top walls of our brand new hall. It was a timeline of Australian history, spanning the entirety of our nation and the stories we tell ourselves. The First Fleet was there, so too were we children in 1988. The very first panel, the one I was most intrigued with, showed life before 1788.

Over the coming 8 years as I lived out my treasured primary school moments I would look at that mural with such pride every time we came into the hall to sit on the parquetry floor. Over time the floor would become scratched with use but the painting, hung too high for the sticky hands of children to touch it, stayed exactly the same. Australia was there in a complete history, and I had helped create it.

The decade following the Australian bi-centenary was a great time to be a primary school student. It was a time of big conversations about who we were and who we want to be as we sat in a time bubble between the celebration of the past and the upcoming excitement of the Millennium to be marked by the Sydney Olympics. Australia was growing up, forging our own path.

I always felt Australian - not American or English or some other nation tied to England. I was Australian and I knew what that meant. We were proud of our unique place in the world and our long history and culture, the one that went back thousands of years and set us apart from others. Being Australian was special. We had history and landmarks and animals that the rest of the world didn’t. We had values that they didn’t too.

Mateship, a fair go and equality were as much a part of the Australian identity as the people and places and things. They were values that kids seemed to be born with, but in all likelihood were created in spaces like our school hall. The lessons were there in the stories of the past- from Banjo Patterson and Ned Kelly through to the Eureka Stockade and women’s suffrage. Our history, time and time again, taught us that Australians are fair. It’s not Advance Australia Mean. That’s not who we are.

For me and I imagine a lot of kids that started school that year, it was a time of hope. The adults were creating our future and when we got there it was going to be beautiful and Australian. There were big conversations happening- did we want to be a republic? How were we going to welcome the world to the Olympics? Was Priscilla or Strictly Ballroom or Muriel’s Wedding the best Australian movie of all time?

In amongst all of this, our Courts were showing that they too were uniquely Australian. Mabo. Wik. Hindmarsh Island. The decisions of the law- which also arrived on the ships from England at the same time as the First Fleet- were recognising our history. Australia didn’t start when white men raised a flag and had a drink to the King’s health. It was always here, loved and lived on for many thousands of years. Which was pretty obvious, really.

Like all children except Peter Pan, I grew up. I left the school hall and went on to bigger things, starting university at the dawn of the new Millennium. I was too young to vote in the referendum on the republic, but I walked across the bridge, asking for Reconciliation. I watched Nikki Webster ride a thong into the opening of the Sydney Olympic Games and Kathy Freeman ignite the hopes of a nation dressed in white. I celebrated as she won the 400m gold and I felt like I knew then what it meant to be Australian.

But apparently I didn’t.

In the years that followed that high, a weird type of identity made it’s way into our national consciousness. Out of nowhere the green and gold seemed to be replaced with plastic Australian flags. I don’t remember the plastic flags before Cronulla, or I didn’t pay attention. There they were- in shops, on the television and ultimately in the bin after the festivities were over. Plastic nationalism, manufactured in the developing world, destined to become landfill.

Thongs, sunglasses, shot glasses, all with the Union Jack and the Southern Cross. This was Australia and if I didn’t love it, I could leave.

I do love Australia, very much. I haven’t left, but in that first decade of the new Millennium Australia seemed to be changing and the country that I loved seemed to have been forgotten. A fair go was replaced with the barbed wire of refugee detention centres and mateship traded in for aspirations of American nationalism, imported just like The Simpsons.

Is that really what the Australian identity is about now? Mass produced flags? Is this how we’re supposed to show our love to the country many of us were born in? With American nationalism wrapped up in an imported plastic Union Jack? Printed in a factory on a thong?

I don’t want the Australian identity I thought existed back, because I know now that it didn’t include everyone. I want a new one, even better than the one I fell in love with in primary school, where the future seemed possible and the ideas of fair-go, mateship and equality seemed indivisible from who we are as a nation. Can we create an identity even better than that? I think we can. One that represents who we are now, all of us.

I want to help create the Australia where my kids can be proud to put our history on the wall for all to see, including the parts that come next - the parts that haven’t been created yet and we can only dream of. The parts where we don’t shy away from our past, but acknowledge it so that we can work on our future together.

Our history isn’t fully written and never will be. It’s ours to create one that we should all be proud of. I want to help create a history that can make the next generation of little kids really proud to be Australian, to get behind each other and their place in the world. One that isn’t borrowed from another country, but represents us as a nation on our own.

Australia, it’s time to paint our own future.