Aussie Pride!

How can anyone criticise or be racial to any other culture or religion for living in Australia and not adapting to ‘being Australian’?  What is Australian?

What sets our Aussie identity apart from any other culture?

According to Srivastava (2008) ‘national identity is perhaps one of the most ‘naturalised’ of all types of identities. It is assumed to be obvious, apparent, and historically authentic’. Australia is initially made up of immigrants and people from overseas, so what makes us, AUSTRALIANS, have authenticity?

Through the use of globalisation we have been portrayed and identified through characteristics in which other countries have labelled us with.

Can it be the way our accent is so distinctive, our “G’day mate” or maybe it’s our references to our “bogan” way of life. How can we call ourselves an ‘Aussie Battler’ if we have trouble trying to identify who we are as a nation? 

We have this reputation of a wild, carefree Australian lifestyle and this is able to be evident through the way we are portrayed within other cultures.

Let’s take for example, Australians within Bali at the Full Moon party; our youth is to be expressed all around the world as uncontrollable, irresponsible and plain right ‘acting as Aussie do’.

Even with in films, how we are able to identify an Australian character is usually through them having a heavy, outback accent and surfy appearance. But in Australia we do not all look like that as we are made up of a lot of different cultures due to nationalism.  ‘Nationalism is becoming less an ideology of the nation-state and more a personal project motivated and sustained by the desire of post national diasporic individuals’ (Sun,2002: 132).

As Aussie we are proud of our country, but what are we really proud of?

References

-          Sun, 2002 , 132 ( from handed out sheet)

-          Birch, D, Schirato, T & Srivastava, S 2001, Asia: cultural politics in the global age, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.