When I was growing up, flying the Australian flag was a weird thing to do. There was one house in my 1980s neighbourhood that...
When I was growing up, flying the Australian flag was a weird thing to do.
There was one house in my 1980s neighbourhood that had one out the front, but everyone regarded its occupants as freaks. It seemed like the sort of insane teary-eyed British patriotism that we’d seen satirised on The Goodies, and we half suspected they would be wearing Tim Brooke-Taylor-style Union Jack belly button protectors. Weird.
Jump forward 30 years and the picture is very different. Increasingly, the thing seems to be hoisted over, pasted upon, sewn into or painted on any surface you could imagine – from processed snack foods to garbage bags, and from toilet brushes to F-35 fighter planes.
Ever since Pauline Hanson first appeared in photos with the rotten thing draped around her (the first time in my life I’d ever seen a person behave in such a way), we’ve seen an explosion in the numbers of racist thugs in Australian flag capes.
From the Cronulla anti-Lebanese riot to the rise of today’s fascist United Patriots Front, the sight of a young white male wearing a flag now carries the threat of impending racist violence.
The Labor Party too is caught up in the flag frenzy. They might not wrap themselves in it, but they certainly like to fly it. What a difference from the situation when Paul Keating was prime minister and refused to fly those ridiculous little flags on the bonnet of the prime ministerial car. When journalists asked him to explain, he brushed it aside as “no big deal”. And it wasn’t.
What has changed in Australian capitalism to make the flag so important? It’s partly rooted in the continuing neoliberal push, with its attacks on the old traditions of social welfare and the ongoing erosion of the welfare state. In that context, a resurgent nationalism is central in forging a fake sense of community and papering over the real divides in society.
But it’s also bound up with the renaissance of Australian imperialism from the 1990s, when the Australian state sought to rehabilitate the image of its armed forces. This has involved a torrent of propaganda linking the flag with the glorified and fictionalised war heroes of old.
READ MORE: How flag-waving foolishness became a national pastime
In Queensland there were a few houses on some of the backstreets that flew the flag on a literal goddamn flagpole, that was always a little unnerving.
I… is that an odd thing there? For a while in America it was been atypical but unremarkable for (ranch/alt. lower-middle-class) houses to be built with a flagpole out front for flying Old Glory
Really that was a new-build style for the suburban expansion of the American Golden Age tilted towards veterans of the WWII-Korean War era, Vietnam kind of broke the “Great Patriotic War” thing by which the American war flag was a uniting force.
(Americans use their civil flag as their war flag, how weird is that?)
For a while those houses flew POW/MIA flags, which was a Vietnam dolschtoss myth that briefly got adopted by the official government, augmented by the fact that a disproportionate share of Vietnam MIAs were pilots this officers thus college graduates who matter.
