From the vault: Flag fight
This article was originally published in Edition 156 (Week 9, Term 2, 2023) of the Pin Oak.
In Year 2, the highest accolade you could receive was the title of flag flier. We would be on our best behaviour in hopes that our teacher might let us scurry out into the cold and pull the flag up its pole. This involved lots of “shotty not tying” and not getting back to class for a good ten minutes – an ideal way for an 8-year-old to spend a Monday morning.
We were too young to realise what the flag meant. Or that people argued about what it meant. That our flag was in fact the most politically controversial thing to be worn by a toy koala. Which is honestly kind of bizarre, because it is the most boring flag ever. Canada’s got the maple leaf, France the tricolour stripes, South Africa that cool line thing and we’ve just got England at night.
That’s actually a bit from Jerry Seinfeld, who perfectly encapsulated the overwhelming underwhelm of the Australian flag. We’re essentially stuck in a permanent couples costume with New Zealand.
And yet our flag upsets so many people. It’s become the rope in a constant game of tug of war – pulled left and right, in a state of constant tension, causing rope burns on the hands of whoever grabs hold.
But that doesn’t make sense. A flag is a piece of fabric. How can that hurt anybody? So let’s unpack this troublesome flag. Unfurl it if you will.
The founding principle of our flag is the British Empire, subtly represented by the Union Jack in its corner. A little-known fact: all countries under British rule had identical flags. Canada, Kenya, New Zealand, and India all bore the same pattern, but instead of our southern cross, they were identified by their own crests and emblems.
This seal of ownership is painfully apparent on our unchanged flag, whilst other nations have sought to find more individualistic designs since the fall of the empire. Quite frankly, I don’t think we need a reminder of Australia’s colonisation: systemic racial injustice forms its own Union Jack across the nation, without the constraints of a flag.
Ian Trust, an Aboriginal man from the East Kimberley and the executive chair of the Wunan Foundation, constructed a thought experiment that illustrates the true impact of intergenerational trauma at a systemic level.
Imagine a river in that dark blue of the flag, raging and unforgiving. Despite the governmental stars that shine above, whose seven points represent the states and territories of Australia, it’s an unmitigated zone. All the opportunities Australia has to offer are on the other side of the river. Work, culture, livelihood, stability.
To cross the river, you have to learn how to swim: how to read and write. And the only way to do that is to go to school. But many Indigenous parents have reservations about sending their children to these institutions, which have been the cause of such pain in the past. As they should.
And so, only 45% of indigenous students complete the HSC, compared to a 75% success rate of their peers. These kids are sucked down the river and into the mouths of the crocodiles. It’s a vicious cycle of intergenerational trauma.
What Ian Trust shows us through this image is not an undefined ruthless hatred towards the constraints of our country, the constraints of our flag. It’s an endless struggle to fit in, to make it work. The weight of that issue drops into our hands without much prompting. It’s not well concealed by the flag’s stitchwork. The next weight, however, doesn’t lie in the dark blue, but in the Union Jack – and its ever-fraying edges.
Allow me to introduce you, ladies and gentlemen, to the Republican movement. Whose goal is to establish Australia as a country separate from Britain and outside of the Constitutional Monarchy. Also known as those who don’t get to experience the joy of a Queen Elizabeth cookie tin. The Republican movement takes issue with the Union Jack. They loathe the hold that the Empire still has over Australia, its ghostly hands still pulling strings in our government to this day.
Their discomfort is less to do with the past, and more with the future. Their famous tagline is “Don’t you want your children to have the opportunity to be the President of Australia?” My mother wants the same for me but isn’t quite bothered to fight for constitutional change and has been known to suggest I marry a prince of some European country instead. Same end result, different country.
But unfortunately, we can’t all marry princes, and Australia finding its footing as an independent country has been a long time coming. So who’s tugging at the other end of the flag?
Nostalgia. One in three Australians want the flag to stay the same, which isn’t a majority but it is a message. There’s hesitancy there. Our soldiers, including our Anzac, have all fought in the name of that flag. That flag was shown as Kathy Freeman received her gold medal, when Ian Thorpe gained the most medals ever won by a single Olympian, when Ash Barty won Wimbledon.
Even PM Albanese was sentimental when asked if he wanted to change the flag, commenting “I’m always very proud to stand in front of the Australian flag and I think anyone who is a member of the Australian Parliament should do so as well.”
And so we see the fight unfold, the flag and all its symbolic meaning the centre of a brawl unlike any other. Because that’s the thing we don’t like to talk about: how our rope burns got there. Very rarely do debates have to turn into tug of war, but that’s what this conversation over changing the flag has become.
It’s childish and volatile and perhaps one of the greatest examples of political discourse in Australia. As much as I love our parliament’s informal register and extremely creative insults, this constant refusal to acknowledge the perspective of the opposition – each party tugging with all their might, claiming the title of morally righteous – is all too familiar.
We pretend it’s in good sport, this flag fight. The old hands at the game tugging to the right, towards the flag remaining the same, barely acknowledge their opposition, who’ve just arrived on the scene and are trying desperately to bring the flag to the left. There is no middle ground, no empathy; instead, we see politicians at each other’s throats and protestors ready to tear down the barricade over a piece of fabric.
The irony of it all is that we’ve created the greatest division in our country, over the one thing that unites us all: our nationality. We’re united in the fact that we’re stubborn and brave and we hate authority. We’re Australian.
That’s nothing to be ashamed of. But perhaps we should take a closer look at the way we’re handling our debates, our identity, our reconciliation. Our flag has been rolled into a very dense, messy burrito of all the issues plaguing our nation. We’ve sunk to the level of Year 2 students, rushing into the playground and clawing at the sides to see who can win.
We can do better. Informality in our discourse doesn’t mean a lack of respect. Multiculturalism doesn’t mean division and misunderstanding. Saying sorry isn’t embarrassing, but neither is loving something that is flawed. The beautiful thing about loving something is that once you get over the fear of it changing, you realise you want it to be better. You want it to be the best. We can love our flag, love our nation, and still want change. We can be proud and mournful. We can be respectful of the past and still want independence.
Discussing these things is important. Unpacking our history and how we see ourselves is a pressing political issue. But notice the word unpack. As long as we keep these issues stitched into our flag, off the ground and out of reach, we’ll never be able to action change. Our issues are at ground level -they’re messy and blurred. Separating them from us as something regal and quite literally not on our level is ridiculous.
We need to discuss these issues with kindness and empathy. But before we even attempt that, we need to take these issues from our flag and lay them out on the table. Not romanticised, or regal, or untouchable. We don’t need to be careful in laying them out – we need to be curious. We need to be excited, just like we were in Year 2 – but instead of pulling the flag up its pole, we need to bring it back down to the ground.
Violet F, Year 10