By some people’s definition, I’m probably about as Australian as you can get.
You see, my dad got interested in our family tree and managed to trace our family lineage all the way back to a convict on the First Fleet, one Edward Humphries. Old Eddy got busted for swiping a pair of leather boots and a cloth coat and was hit with seven years’ transportation for his troubles.
Transportation wasn’t all bad for Eddy - he met his wife here and they ended up having five kids.
My claim on having an ancestor who set foot on Australian soil in January 1788 is certainly not solid enough to join one of those First Fleeter groups - the lineage gets a bit cloudy in the generation after Eddy before clearing up all the way to the present day.
However, it’s good enough for me. While I think it’s cool to have some (albeit massively diluted) First Fleet blood, I don’t for a moment think that makes me somehow more Australian than other people.
I simply don’t understand the idea that one person could somehow be more of an Australian than another person. That - and the insult ‘‘unAustralian’’ - implies there is a set of rules that we all must adhere to in order to be considered Australian, and the more you adhere to them, the more ‘‘Australian’’ you are.
I was born here more than 40 years ago and, if there is a set of rules that defines an Australian, no-one’s ever shown it to me.
Really, any idea to codify what an Australian is is pointless and most likely it’d be chock full of stereotypes anyway, such as must love cricket, footy, the beach and the bush, must play two-up on Anzac Day, must have mates instead of friends and must drink VB.
As far as I’m concerned, from the time you become an Australian citizen, you’re an Australian - full stop. There’s no degrees - you can’t be more Aussie than someone else, you can’t be a better Australian or a true Australian. We’re all just Australians.
If media and the grammatically challenged Facebook sites I’ve seen are any indication, there is a segment of society that seems to have taken it upon themselves to ‘‘reclaim Australia’’, usually from some group of people they deem not to be Australian. Their definition of who is Australian seems to be based on race.
Many of these people are of my generation, so presumably their experiences of Australia must be the same as mine. But my experiences of Australia have always been multicultural; I grew up with kids from Greece and Turkey as neighbours and shared classrooms with students with Lebanese, Chinese, Malaysian and Egyptian backgrounds.
The idea of a monocultural Australia simply hasn’t existed in my lifetime. Indeed, it probably ceased to exist soon after World War II, when there was an influx of migrants escaping Europe for a new start and a better life.
So these people supposedly reclaiming Australia seem to yearning for a time they’ve never actually experienced. And they’re reclaiming a country from people who, whether they like it or not, are also Australians.
Anyway, it’s not about reclaiming Australia because we never lost the country. It just got better - the introduction of new Australians from other places around the world enriches and broadens our own experiences. It also allows us to see that people from other countries, despite their skin colour, aren’t actually that different from us at all. Some of them probably even like cricket.
Yes, Australia has come a long way since Eddy first set foot on its soil. But that’s something to feel proud of and to cherish. Happy Australia Day, everybody.
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