Waken the nation

To a new dawn,

Shake your bonds,

Seek your goal

Find your way.

That’s from The Australia Day Song, a ditty written by Peter Jennings and launched by Sir Mark Oliphant in 1977 in a (fruitless) attempt “to stir apathetic Australians” to take an interest in Australia Day.

Lee Lin Chin promises to rescue expats from lambless Australia Day in new ad Read more

It’s a long way from Jennings’s dinky tune (intended, according to the Canberra Times to “awaken dozing patriots”) to the full throttle jingoism unleashed by the most recent Australia Day lamb advertisement. In the new commercial, SBS personality Lee Lin Chin plays the head of Operation Boomerang, a commando-style body ready to use military force to ensure our holidays are spent in a manner deemed appropriate by Meat and Livestock Australia.

The ad’s drawn heat for a variety of reasons: in particular, Twitter’s been aghast at Chin’s embrace of “love it or leave it” patriotism, a sentiment many see as incompatible with SBS’s multiculturalism.

Actually, though, the whole campaign provides a neat illustration of how endlessly protean nationalism can be.

For, of course, contrary to what the nation’s butchers might have you think, there’s no long tradition of Australians eating lamb (a dish associated with northern Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Mexico, the Indian subcontinent and just about everywhere else) on Australia Day … for the simple reason that, until very recently, most Australians ignored Australia Day altogether.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Australia Day was simply a non-starter, so much so that politicians and pundits regularly pleaded with the public to take some interest in the occasion.

Persons who sing Advance Australia Day are the darling dodoes of our time Manning Clark

In 1973, immigration minister Al Grassby complained that “the poor observance of Australia Day insulted rather than exulted the nation”, so much so that he threatened to cancel it.

“If there is not sufficient interest in our national day,” he warned, “it would be better for Australia if it was not held at all as a public holiday.”

He had good reason for concern. In 1975, a study showed that only a minority of local government areas in Australia observed the day in any way at all and that “in most areas it was totally ignored”.

A few years later, the Victorian premier Dick Hamer said Australians were “apathetic” and “lazy” in celebrating Australia Day, and cared only about having a holiday; in 1980, the historian Manning Clark (himself an avowed nationalist) explained that “Australia Day has never caught the public imagination” and “persons who sing Advance Australia Day are the darling dodoes of our time”.

The largely unsuccessful campaign to popularise Australia Day became even more urgent in the 1980s, not least because of the looming 200th anniversary of white settlement. When the Australian Bicentennial Authority was established in 1980, its general manager explained, rather mournfully, that among the many problems confronting Australians was “a lack of national pride”.

But, as the historian Mark McKenna says, the millions of taxpayer dollars pumped into bicentenary events could not overcome the central contradiction of Australia Day: namely, that since 1937, Aboriginal people had marked 26 January as a Day of Mourning or – in more recent times – as Invasion Day. The anniversary of settlement was also the anniversary of dispossession, an inconvenient fact that rendered the bicentennial celebrations politically ticklish for their boosters.

Even coining a slogan for the occasion proved awkward, with the organisers switching from the bullish “Australian Achievement” to the more conciliatory “Living Together” and, eventually, to the entirely inane “Celebration of a Nation”, a catchphrase accompanied by a jingle of stupefying banality (“the celebration of a nation/ give us a hand/ celebration of a nation/ let’s make it grand!”).

Despite these contortions, on 19 January 1988, the Sydney Morning Herald admitted that “scarcely a day of the Bicentenary has passed when issues involving Aborigines and their ‘Year of Mourning’ protests have not featured prominently”. Not surprisingly, many Indigenous activists declared the whole year to be a festival of white self-love – it was, they said, a veritable “Masturbation of a Nation” (“give us a hand!”).

The seeming impossibility of salvaging Australia Day led many nationalists to pin their commemorative hopes on the always more popular Anzac Day. “Throughout the 1980s,” writes McKenna, “as Australia Day became a lightning rod for historical and political disputes, Anzac Day came to be seen as a less complicated and less divisive alternative.”

As early as 1967, Murdoch’s Australian newspaper noted the “crippling artificiality” of Australia Day and contrasted it with the Anzac celebration, which, it said, “expresses, as no other day or symbol can, something that we understand and nobody else can”.

In 1981, the same paper asked bluntly: “[Should we] give up trying to make Australia Day our national day in favour of Anzac Day?”

Yet Anzac Day had problems of its own.

In 1966, 20 women from the anti-war group Save Our Sons stood in front of the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance on Anzac Day holding posies inscribed with the slogan: “Honour the dead with peace.” After police were summoned, the women were told they could lay their wreaths – but only if they removed all reference to “peace”.

Not surprisingly, the growth of a campaign dedicated to peace in Vietnam corresponded with a decline in enthusiasm for an anniversary in which peace was considered offensive.

In 1969, the Age reported that Anzac Day had met with a “cool reception” with observers almost outnumbering participants; young people in particular were “noticeably sparse”. In 1973, the ALP national conference even discussed the desirability of replacing the Anzac ceremony with a “Day of Peace”.

In 1981, a group called Women Against Rape attempted to march in Canberra on Anzac Day to highlight the consequence of war for women. In response, Sir William Keys, the Returned and Services League (RSL) national president, denounced “feminist group[s] whose ultimate purpose was to bring changes into Australia’s social and political systems by debasing and degrading its great traditions”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the crowd reject a request by Big Day Out organisers to not wear or display the Australian flag during the Big Day Out music festival in 2007. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Keys’s identification of Anzac Day with opposition to social change was widely held. In 1982, Bruce Ruxton from the Victorian RSL called the police on members of the Gay Ex-Servicemen’s Association as they sought to lay a wreath.

“I don’t mind poofters on the march,” he said, “but they must march with their units. We didn’t want them to lay a wreath because we didn’t want to have anything to do with them. We certainly don’t recognise them and they are just another start to the denigration of Anzac Day.”

The following year, demonstrations by a feminist group called Women Against Anzac Day saw 168 women arrested in Sydney alone. Protests continued until 1987, and many commentators suggested that Anzac Day was in the process of dying out.

Of course, they were entirely wrong.

Historians argue about how exactly to explain the growth of Anzac Day from the late 1980s onward. In part, the Anzac resurgence corresponds, as historian Ken Inglis says, with the death of everyone who actually fought in the first world war, since the disappearance of that generation allowed the celebration to be entirely reshaped. Equally, it’s no coincidence the popularity of Anzac grew as the left went into crisis with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Most of all, though, the modern Anzac Day reflects the renewal of Australian militarism.

In 1990, Bob Hawke became the first modern prime minister to attend the dawn service at Anzac Cove. The next year, he committed Australian forces to the first Gulf war, proving that the use of military power could be politically palatable again, despite the Vietnam debacle.

With the breaking of that taboo, a trickle turned into a flood.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, war has become Australia’s natural state: military personnel have, after all, engaged in some sort of armed conflict during the vast majority of that time. We’ve become increasingly accustomed to conflict (albeit fought at a safe distance), to politicians garbing themselves in khaki and posing with tanks and military jets, and to Anzac Day as a turbocharged celebration of militarised patriotism.

Indeed, Anzac hasn’t been “revived” so much as totally reshaped, since the modern commemoration bears almost no relationship to the ceremonies held in the first half of the 20th century. In the Howard era, newspaper editorials discussed Anzac as a day that “salutes the country itself”, a time when Australians “celebrate” their “founding generation”. As McKenna says:

Never before had Anzac been seen as a day of ‘celebration’ … Far from a resurgence of ‘the Anzac tradition’, Howard was using Anzac Day as a vehicle for national self-congratulation.

Rather than Anzac Day replacing Australia Day (as the Australian and others had suggested), Australia Day has been Anzacised, reconstructed along the militaristic lines of 25 April.

The timid little event that Grassby plaintively urged people to notice has morphed into a festival of flag capes and boozy chest thumping – as Big Day Out promoter Ken West discovered in 2007. Disgusted by the prevalence of flags at the event in 2006 (only a month after the Cronulla riot), he tried to discourage music lovers from bringing them.

“The Australian flag was being used as gang colours. It was racism disguised as patriotism and I’m not going to tolerate it,” West said – but, then, after a huge outcry, he backed down.

“We think we’re pretty good and we are,” explained John Howard in his Australia Day address that year.

Labor traditionally gives its nationalism a slightly different tinge to that favoured by the conservatives.

For Anzac Day and Australia Day, Howard and Abbott emphasised an Anglo iconography of bronzed diggers and Don Bradman and Hills Hoists, whereas the Labor PMs stressed Indigenous rock paintings and ethnically diverse children. Nevertheless, the new Australian militarism has been an entirely bipartisan affair, with Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard pursuing the pointless war in Afghanistan with quite as much enthusiasm as Howard.

You can see the differences in those lamb commercials.

'Operation Boomerang' lamb ad insults Indigenous people, say critics Read more

An earlier iteration featured football footballer Sam Kekovich attacking those who refused to eat lamb as “unAustralian” before shouting:

The soap-avoiding, pot-smoking vegetarians may disagree with me, but they can get stuffed. They know the way to the airport.

It’s a parody of Liberal-style nationalism with Kekovich ironically channelling the old-fashioned bluster of an RSL reactionary.

As the media site Mumbrella explains:

The recruitment of Lee to the role … addresses criticism the lamb marketer faced last year with some claiming the ads were too “whitebread” and dominated by males.

Accordingly, her ad instead captures the spirit of Labor’s version of the new nationalism, with its evocation of high-tech terror raids and coercive jingoism presided over by a feisty woman of Asian descent.

Just as the new, militarised Anzac Day entirely ignored the politics of the first world war, the new, militarised Australia Day simply steamrolls over the response of Indigenous people to their dispossession: presumably, they too can “get stuffed”.

Should we care about a stupid meat commercial? No, not especially.

In fact, Lee Lin Chin’s participation in the lamb campaign illustrates the limits of the left’s increasing preoccupation with symbolism and representation. Meat and Livestock Australia didn’t create the new nationalism and neither did Chin. A country consistently engaged in armed conflict for close to 15 years will inevitably develop a belligerently jingoistic culture – and there’s no necessary incompatibility between that and the kind of official multiculturalism championed by SBS.

To put it another way, you don’t end militarised nationalism by getting different people on TV. You end it by stopping the wars.