THE NAKED CITY with Coffin Ed, Miss Death & Jay Katz

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY – FROM OUR LOVEABLE ROADKILL!

Depending on your own personal history and degree of patriotic fervour Australia Day arrives complete with different strokes for different folks. For some it’s clearly Invasion Day, for others a chance to get that musty Australan flag out of moth balls and drape it over your body Pauline Hanson style and for probably the vast majority –  just another public holiday.

Surprisingly it wasn’t until 1994 that the powers to be decided to engrain the 26^th January into our collective psyche as Australia’s official national day complete with an Australia Day Council, assorted Australians of the Year and all the hoopla that a bureaucracy could generate. Most of the activities like free outdoor concerts, a ferry race on Sydney Harbour and yes, even more bloody fireworks would appear fairly innocuous and free of any overtly nationalistic agenda.

That’s certainly the image that the authorities want to generate – a kind of warm and fuzzy, watered-down expression of Australian pride, seemingly stripped of any political or jingoistic agenda. They have even gone to the extent of banning bodily flag draping from Cronulla Beach, to avoid anything like the nastiness of 2005.

Admittedly there is still a minority that would like to see a more strident and forthright display of Australian prowess – a warning to anybody out there who might chose to invade our precious sovereignty, be they boat people from Afghanistan or aliens from outer space. Instead of vintage buses rolling down George Street, perhaps we might entertain a full scale military display (North Korea stylee) complete with thundering tanks, missiles strapped to the back of trucks and goose stepping troops. Eighty thousand school kids at ANZ stadium spelling out “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!” with a set of brilliantly choreographed colour cards would certainly bring a lump to the throat of any true patriot tuned into the six o’clock news.

George Orwell once described nationalism as, “The habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” As the paper flags and beer cans are cleaned from the gutters late on Wednesday night let’s hope we put our nationalistic zeal on hold for another 365 days and get on with the job of just being good citizens of the world.