AUSSIE PRIDE: LEST WE FORGET

Good old Aussie pride; the nation had it once. 

Every now and then we see it still, revived briefly on cue for a few annual dates on a calendar, at which point we dutifully wheel out our Aussie pride, if only for a few hours, before packing it away again to make room for the new improved and infinitely more enlightened (?), 3rd millennium Australian spirit.

As a kid born a generation after WWll I was familiar with the stories of the war and its hardships familiar to all kids of that generation. 

I was fiercely proud of my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, whom it seemed had been to hell and back and lived not only to tell the tale, but given the opportunity, to roundly take the piss out of their adversities in true Aussie tradition.

At school I was taught to be proud of fellow countrymen of days gone by. I learned about great Australian explorers, their triumphs over hardship, their acts of bravery and self-sacrifice and their follies too.

I was taught that mine was a proud lineage reaching back, however tenuously, to the days of Pict and Scot, the Battle of Hastings, Runnymede and Magna Carta.

I was taught about the great mariners of history, of battles won by the likes of Nelson and of a globe circumnavigated by Francis Drake on his (pirate)ship the Pelican or Golden Hinde.

In those days school kids were taught that Cook was a great explorer and Phillip the father of a new and far-flung outpost of European ‘civilisation’.  Colonisation, yet to be pronounced a dirty word, gave rise to even more stories of exploration, of hardships endured and triumphs celebrated around the world and immortalised in poetry and song.

And of course there was Gallipoli.

Diggers were still about in those days, some of them family members, though many more would never again be present at the family gatherings I remember so fondly today, where stories of their adventures in distant lands were recounted and their great bravery and heroism extolled to eager young ears.

Then, as now, most Australians lived in suburbia surrounding the state and territory capitals but somehow there didn't seem to be the gulf between city and country life that exists today.

Growing up in Sydney I remember, very fondly, weekend hunting trips to rural areas such as Campbelltown and Camden where my dad taught me how to ‘ferret’, shoot bunnies and set snares.

The topic of conversation on these trips to "the bush" would invariably turn to the days of the Great Depression or the war years, when knowing how to hunt, whether by gun, ferret, dog or by trap, quite literally meant the difference between life and death.

Many a household relied on plentiful supplies of free “underground mutton” as rabbit was know, and the rabbit skins, hooped in the backyard to dry in the sun, were sold to a furrier for the felt trade, providing a pittance that nonetheless kept the wolf from the door.

It seems funny to me to hear today’s opponents to firearms ownership referring to “Australia’s emerging guns and hunting culture”. Australia has long been a nation of gun owners and hunters and while it’s possible some city kids weren't aware of it growing up, it was a rare Australian household that didn't have a bolt action .22 on top of dad’s wardrobe, just in case it might come in handy.

In fact in those days the old .22 and the .303 were a little like rhubarb plants – every household felt better for having at least one, even if no one actually ate rhubarb.

Aussies were a very proud, incredibly capable and fiercely self-reliant mob and this spirit of resilience was further reinforced by the contributions of the many cultures from around the world that came to call Australia their home.

I remember warmly, the local fruiterer, Nic, who in his heavily accented Italian-Aussie would call out to my mum as she passed his shop – “Bloody cheap spuds today, Missus. Cheap as the bloody ten bob tart, Missus, my bloody oath!”

Mum would just smile and maybe pick up a pound or two of bloody cheap spuds while taking the opportunity to chat quietly with Nic’s ‘Missus’, Maria, about her husband’s use of colourful metaphors and the hazards inherent in learning English from the blokes at the Sydney produce markets.

I even recall mum sending dad to have a quiet word with Nic one day, Aussie bloke to Aussie bloke, to suggest he not make a habit of telling women they should come back on Wednesday for nice tomatoes because “the bloody tomatoes today they are not much chop, all fuckin’ bruised shit!”

It would never have occurred to us to take offence. Nic was just trying to be Australian and thanks to the contributions of people like Nic and Maria and many thousands of others, who emigrated in the first decades after WWII, Australian society was hugely enriched for their presence and along with it, what it means to be Aussie.

History looks back on that period as the time of the “White Australia Policy” and perhaps that’s true, technically. It always seemed to me to be a time when people who’d suffered the deprivations, the hardships and the losses of war came together in a free and welcoming land to start life anew, far from the likelihood of any resurgence of aggression in Europe.

Whatever the case, I remember it as a time when folk were staunchly proud to be Australian.

I don’t know when that changed; when the pride we once had in our culture and accomplishments, our history and our diverse lineages turned to shame.

I suspect it had something to do with the way we view history and teach it in our schools. We no-longer talk about "first settlement" as it was known back then, referring to it instead as the "invasion of a continent" and the oppression and wholesale slaughter of its indigenous inhabitants.

The heroes I learned about at school; brave men, who conquered geographical barriers to open up new frontiers, have their achievements played down today because of their impact on indigenous folk.

Today Captain Cook is considered little more than the forward scout for an invasion force and the first settlers are considered thieves, murderers and spreaders of foul disease.

Indeed we are assured the results of their evil influence on a free and peace-loving people can still be seen today.

Children are taught they have no right to be here, that they are invaders and all the accomplishments of their forbears are therefore invalid and their culture cause for shame.

Recent generations, especially those populating suburbia, don’t appear to believe in a distinctly Aussie culture at all. Rather, they adopt the latest fashionable TV-sitcom pop-culture as their own while marvelling at and even venerating the exotic cultures found among more recent settlers of Australia’s shores. It’s as though they've been convinced we've nothing that merits celebration...that our culture is vacant and bland requiring external enrichment.

And we can always count on the metro-centric Greens and their various allies to take every opportunity to undermine and denigrate the Australian culture, promoting a black armband attitude toward our history and Australian influences.

There is no doubt that the history of this nation since the discovery of ‘New Holland’ nearly 250 years ago is strewn with events and practices that were unconscionable by today’s standards, but for an enlightened society to raise new generations of children to embrace a culture of guilt and shame is just a socially acceptable form of abuse.

To raise well adjusted children one must imbue them with a sense of pride in who they are and where they have come from. If you doubt this just ask a German friend what it was like to be raised with all the guilt poured into that small nation after the Great War and again after WWll.

History cites resentment for the burden of shame and outrageous war reparations forced upon the German people as principle reasons for the Nazi Party’s rise to power. Was it really any wonder, given the Nazi’s emphasis on restoring national pride?

We live in an age where technology has vastly increased the range of human hatred, hypocrisy and intolerance, while facilitating the individual’s abuse of power. Add to this the fact that we have far more free time than ever before in human history and the stage is set for otherwise ineffectual people to flex their underdeveloped muscles by engaging in the sport of hating and banning.

Hunting is cruel, they claim, and MUST be STOPPED!

Fishing is cruel, they claim, and MUST be STOPPED!

Fail to bow to their will and you will be abused, denigrated, threatened and subjected to more hatred than most soldiers in active service will ever face on the battlefield.  And all of it expressed by people who see themselves as beacons of enlightenment and compassion.

But should you happen to belong to one of the world’s community of first nations peoples, the attitude is altogether different.

It is only white Anglo-Saxon, European hunting and fishing that must be stopped.  All other hunters and fishers are simply struggling to preserve traditional and often highly spiritual aspects of their culture.  This must be preserved at all costs!

I have never known a hunter or fisher who claimed he “kills for the joy of killing”, as the Greens are so fond of claiming. Nor have I ever known a hunter or fisher to kill a creature because he hated it.  But visit any number of pro-hunting sites on the internet and it will take but a moment to identify who in our community is really driven by malice to kill and maim.

It is most often women and those who consider themselves the nurturers of the community, the teachers, the nurses, the welfare workers and the grannies. 

The depth of bile and evil these people can draw on to wish hunters, fishers and their families the most graphic forms of misfortune, is truly breathtaking in scope and imagination.

Yet they believe me primitive and themselves enlightened.

They believe it is my lack of respect for other living creatures that makes me a ‘killer’, while their enlightened appreciation for the beauty of nature’s wondrous diversity justifies their wish to see someone blow my children’s heads off with a shotgun or stick an arrow in my grandkid’s ribs to see how it makes me feel.

And while this attitude is all too often attributed to only a very small minority of lunatics, the fact is increasing numbers of them are finding their way into positions of influence and power.

There is more hatred and intolerance in the world today than ever before. Where once people might show their opposition to a practice by not engaging in it, in this age of enlightened intolerance they will settle for nothing less than absolute prohibition of all they do not approve of.

And of course the facilitators of hate, organisations such as Get-up and Change.org, where people can create a petition to STOP anything their dark hearts desire, exist to help the haters explore and perfect bullying to a fine art.

Meanwhile, folk who are more in tune with what it really means to be Australian are gravitating to rural areas where they are apt to find more down to earth, tolerant, peace-loving people with similar views and interests. 

And rest assured that whether here at home or on the other side of the globe, it is images of these folk and not a race of angry Vegans, Greens or animal rights activists the world conjures-up when it thinks about Aussies and Australia.

The world thinks with envy of an Australia populated by capable resilient outdoors folk who will wade half the night up to their groins in freezing water to catch the ‘shrimp’ they put on the barbie.

They think of people who would rather drop a line in to catch only the fish they can eat, rather than buying fish from Coles or Woollies caught by super-trawlers along with thousands of tons of wasted bycatch.

They think of people who take responsibility for hunting, or for raising and killing their own meat rather than paying a professional assassin at an abattoir to do it for them and disguise the meat as sausages. And most of all, they think of the spirit of Aussie mateship forged between capable men and women engaged in all these earthy, practical endeavors. Endeavors that made our durability, resilience and self-sufficiency in hostile environments such as Kokoda and Gallipoli, legendary.

They think of a proud nation of strong and healthy outdoors folk wearing driza-bones and Akubra hats and we should be proud of that image, lest we forget.   

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now...

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