I sometimes wonder if Australians have the courage to become a cosmopolitan nation and survive the identity crisis.
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The US and the UK have gone through this phase, towards a cultural utopia and while there were racial and cultural challenges and perhaps still are, they can easily say they have retained their identity and become enriched by the influx of immigrants.
Australia? Well, we sort of lapsed into a comatose colonial culture from white settlement when we booted out the first inhabitants.
While we share the same Anglo-Saxon culture of the mother country and the North American pilgrims, we have become a default version of a proverbial backpackers or youth hostel.
I think PM Albanese is trying to find the Holy Grail of identity with his proposal for the Voice.
But we struggle with it. Even our Christmas Day and Easter have always been hijacked by Santa and the Easter Bunny.
Our children have imported the Celtic celebration of Halloween on October 31, in the absence of something distinctly Australian and even though it has been a part of the US and UK culture for generations.
Our national anthem has all the passion of a starving cockroach and we cling to a bemused monarchy, drumming their fingers, waiting for the colonial kid to move out of home.
Australia Day has become Invasion Day, while our real Australia Day languishes on New Year's Day when the six colonies united into a Federation on January 1, 1901.
People overseas can't figure out if an Olympic gold medallist is from Australia or New Zealand, because our flags look the same.
I guess it's why Anzac Day looms large as our national day because we blindly and naively backed the mother country in 1915 and feared a Japanese invasion in 1942.
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The Turks kicked us out of Gallipoli and the Japanese almost kicked us out of what was then our own territory, Papua New Guinea.
These dark and catastrophic military adventures became enshrined in our Anzac Day and into our psyche, as if there was some glorious point to make by the slaughter of our young.
Our very own most distinguished war-time general, Sir John Monash, who stopped the slaughter in France in the Great War by employing different assault tactics, has been forgotten.
Our Anzac heroine Nancy Wake, who was born in New Zealand and grew up in Australia, became a leader in the French resistance in World War II.
The German Gestapo dubbed her the White Mouse because she killed many Nazis and never got caught.
She died in 2011, aged 96, but I reckon most Aussies and Kiwis have never heard of her.
I was horrified to watch UK popstar Robbie Williams perform at last year's AFL grand final, just as Meatloaf did years earlier.
We have immense local talent but we still import these overseas acts for such iconic days in place of something distinctly Australian.
It is another example of our complacency and lingering inferiority complex.
In a few weeks, a new monarch will be crowned in London and we'll have to find another date for a King's Birthday weekend and maybe dump the Queen's birthday June long weekend.
Why do we have to shape our calendar to fit in with a British monarch? Why should his reign concern us? I bet many tens of thousands of immigrants are asking the same question.
We were once a Christian country but it has declined, from 52 per cent of the population in 2016 to about 44 percent in. 2021.
Almost a third of Australians either don't believe in God or identify as atheists, but they will pay homage to a chocolate rabbit and a morbidly obese old Eskimo in a red jump suit.
And now this diminished Christian faith will have to compete with Ramadan, Buddha Day and the Hindu New Year and Chinese New Year.
I feel sorry for these immigrants. They must turn up on our doorstep and ask: Where's the culture? Where's the religion?
You see, the UK and the US have assimilated millions of immigrants while retaining their distinct cultures and I concede their road to multi-culturalism wasn't easy.
But in Australia we present as a blank canvas, a cultural green field site. It's as if we dispossessed the original inhabitants to find space for a mediocre cuppa and a snooze.
The Voice will in essence be our Kiwi Treaty of Waitangi. Hopefully it will settle the great divide between our First Nations and colonial descendants.
Ironically, the search for an Aussie identity may well fall to our future Indigenous leaders and new Australians from Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Far East.
They will have to set about modernising our flag, finding a more patriotic national anthem and hone our culture, simply because white Anglo-Saxon Australians wouldn't know where to start, or couldn't be bothered.
- Barry Prismall is the former Examiner deputy editor and Liberal adviser.
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