Our special day a day for all by Andrea Burns EEE: Titration: Doa iedsay Real Australians know that the only way to get from the carpark to the ocean on a stinking hot day is to stand on your towel until your feet stop burning — then run! ‘That spit on your finger, applied to that mozzie bite on your ankle is the best way to stop the itch. ‘And that anyone shortening or adding “y” to your name, considers you a friend. Whether the stork dropped you off in the red dirt of Amhem Land or war-torn Afghanistan, it doesn’t matter. When you accept the identity of being an Australian, it comes with strings. Some of them involve knowing our ways — taking your turn buying a round at the pub — even if you're only having a lemonade. Understanding that if you're asked to “bring a plate”, it should have food on it. (It's not an indication that your host is short on crockery) Still, according to the Australian Bureau of Statisties, there are only 669,000 “real” Australians — people who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. ‘A speech by journalist Stan Grant, released in time for Australia Day, notes that for many indigenous people, the day the First Fleet arrived on our shores is anything but a celebration. Grant argued that racism was at “the foundation of the Australian dream”. “The Australian dream — we sing of it and we recite it in verse,” Grant said. “Australians all let us rejoice for ‘we are young and free. “My people die young in this country. We die 10 years younger than the average Australian, and we are far from free. We are fewer than 3 per cent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 per cent — one quarter — of those Australians locked up in our prisons. And if you're a juvenile, it is worse — itis 50 per cent. An indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.” “1 love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges,” Grant quoted from Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem My Country. “It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, diseases ravaged us on those plains. “Our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law, and when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman. We were fly-blown, Stone Age savages, and that was the language that was used. Capt. Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment . . . was sending out raiding parties with the instruction “bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers’.”‘Some indigenous people mark today as Invasion Day. For others, Australia Day is a celebration of culture — a day to pay tribute to the resilience of Australia’s first peoples. Grant's speech is already described as Australia’s version of Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” oration, ‘The fact i’s gone viral suggests it’s struck a chord, Its wrong that it's taken 200 years to acknowledge our real history, but I like that recognition is —~ slowly — seeping into ovr public consciousness. Our shameful past is finally being given its rightful place in our present. 1 also like that the other 22-odd million of us are blow-ins from all over the planet. Mongrels with a similar mindset, blurring cultures, food and customs. We're so much richer for that diversity. Still, our rules are pretty simple, Be decent. Work hard. Look after people. Laugh. Some of the stuff that makes us proud is obvious — including our much-loved sporting heroes. Last weekend, one-time brat Lleyton Hewett bowed out of professional tennis with a statesman-like finish. “Little Lleyton” was all grown up. Gracious. Humble, Celebrated, “Come ON!” Indeed. But we also have classrooms of clever kids who'll go on to be world experts in everything from science, to business and the humanities. Homegrown movie stars, too — Cate, Hugh, Russell, Sam Worthington, ail those Hemsworths. ‘Yet it's the people whose names we don’t leam that we really admire. We label them “heroes” — everyday ‘Aussies with decency in their DNA. During the recont fires we saw exhausted, emotionally-spent people who'd flocked from all over the State — indeed, all over the country — to muck in to save the homes and properties of people they'd never met. There were some wins — and so many, gut-wrenching losses. Two families lost loved men in the flames. Facing a wall of fire as big as a building must have been terrifying. But these extraordinary Aussies pushed on. Why? “Cause it needed to be done.” We don’t thump our chests or bang on — we just get on with things quietly —and then go back to our lives. Tonight, hundreds of thousands of us will come together to line the river foreshore for the fireworks. We'll wave flags and wear thongs made in China emblazoned with the Aussie flag. Eat lamingtons. Prawns, if you're lucky, maybe a cold chook and salad, washed down with a coldie. We'll sing along to Aussie music classics, as explosives light up the sky. The noise will preclude much conversation with the people sharing the picnic rug but you probably won't mind. Amid the din, | always feel grateful For family. Friends. And that luck delivered me to this beautiful place. Sure, it's not perfect. But it is ours. Happy Australia Day.ETA ENGLISH EXAMINATION Stage 2 (Year 12) Semester Two Question Paper Passage One The following essay titled “Mateship* was written by Tom Keneally, a respected ‘Australian writer, It was published in 2008 in a collection of works by well-known ‘Australians called Australian Greats, which is described on the ABC Shop website as “a fascinating and wide-ranging collection of pieces by noteworthy writers, commentators, larrikins and curmudgeons on distinctive and sometimes surprising aspects of Australian life and history.” Mateship There is a national assumption that mateship, an intense bond between males, is ~in the whole world — most intense in Australia. The word is invoked with such a sense of holiness that it covers our ideas of liberty and fraternity. It was forged in the miseries of convictism, enhanced by the enormous distances and vicissitudes covered and endured by stockmen and shearers in the nineteenth century, institutionalized in the great strike of 1892 and the emergence of unionism, and sanctified in the sacrifices and heroism of wars and their horror camps. There is no doubt that solidarity and friendship between males is a potentially positive experience ~ one every male should have if he wants to be well-rounded. Males honour this reality in the way they address each other in Australia. The inclusion of the word ‘mate’ in a sentence is essential if you wish to avoid the impression that you're being pretentious or hostile, Above all, i's the Australian peace-word between males. Sometimes it works, too, stopping the thrown fist. Mate is also a word for the barbecue, where it can be used three times on its own in a sentence to mean as many things. ‘it's a great day, mate!" the host might say. To which the reply, ‘Mate, mate, maaate!’ means, ‘I greet you in return, | too think the weather's good, and I've had a good week at work, relish the aroma of your snags and exult in the temporary perfection of the cosmos.” I confess to having used it occasionally myself in all three senses and a few more, though not in the one sentence. Mateship, when it’s Weary Dunlop trying to sooth the nightmares of an Australian prisoner dying of beri-beri on the Burma railway, is a noble thing. Mateship was good even when my old dad was dared by his section of Australian males during World War Ilto ask King Farouk of Egypt, who was visiting an excavation in the desert, to give them a lift into Cairo so they didn't have to wait for a military truck and all its discomforts. What did they say to my father as they shot along the highway in the king's huge limo? ‘You really done it, mate!” : But the assumption is that our mateship is the top variety, that it is superior to the friendships of males elsewhere not only in degree, but in substance. Certainly, as a war-time child, | heard from the mouths of returning diggers that Australian officers in Changi and elsewhere had more concem for their non-commissioned men that British officers did. This was certainly a triumph for mateship based on the idea of equality. Egalitarianism, despite our being globalised and worn down to the homogenous and pallid virtues of the world at large, is still a principle which we have to make gestures to, and do so unconsciously. British plumbers, when | lived in Britain a while, called householders ‘sir’. Australian householders call their plumber ‘mate’, in the hope of fraternal discounts or better work. : Yet, despite the added quality egalitarianism gives to mateship, there are dangers in considering ourselves especially gifted in it, indeed to have comered the market in it. Itcan have a holiness. It can also be a bond of savagery. The convicts and ticket-of- 4ETA ENGLISH EXAMINATION Stage 2 (Year 12) Semester Two Question Paper leave men who committed the Myall Creek Massacre in 1837, encouraged by the earlier exploits of their social better, the execrable Major Nunn of the Mounted Police, believed themselves mates. The feral youths trawling the streets for female flesh in the Australian movie The Boys considered themselves mates. One of the darkest epitomes of mateship is pack rape. The Cronulla rioters were bound in mateship against those they considered didn't subscribe to that ideal. For much of Australian history mateship has tended to exclude. Unless an Aborigine was a top stockman or sportsman, they were excluded. And as has been so often scathingly reported, women are excluded. So what does one make of a nationally revered institution which excludes 51 per cent of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia? Does it deserve the lustre bestowed on it? In a lifetime of some length, | have seen mateship painfully and reluctantly expand itself to the post-war refugees, to Asian-Australians, and now to Muslims. The team members of the Sydney Bulldogs Rugby League would not consider their famous Muslim, Ramadan-observing winger, Hazem el Masri, anything but a mate, although it has to be said he had to show his natural nobility and kick goals unerringly to get there Even the utterance, ‘I've got this gay mate who says...’ is no longer an impossibility though generally gay men are stil treated with as much undue suspicion at the altar of Australian mateship as they are at the altar of Cardinal George Pell. ‘So, mateship has been a great Australian democratic virtue, sometimes joyous, sometimes grudging, and a great hysterical Australian vice as well. In so far as it recognizes friendship and respect amongst men, | cherish it as much as anyone. Indeed, in a number of social and working situations it has proved an engine of tolerance too. The newcomer of course has to prove himself, but if he picks up on the sometimes unfair signals of the mass, he can find himself addressed as mate and being assured he is not such a bad poor Pommy / Wog / Towel-head bastard. That's the thing. Mateship tends to be a rough implement. Yet it is also true that despite its painful possibilities, it has sometimes worked better than all the invoked fraternity of other nations. also weep, however, for the manifold crimes and follies committed in the name of mateship, and for the way women's advice and hope are fobbed off with the cry, ‘I've gotta, he's my mate." With all these qualifications thrown in, there’s no doubting its continuing potency, and the enduring if deluded belief that the bond between male friends on this continent is superior to that enjoyed anywhere else on planet Earth. See next page for Passage Two