What Does an Australian Look Like?

Imagine a face with different shades of skin. With wide, narrow, soft, hard, wrinkly features. Imagine a broken, refined, guttural voice that speaks in slang or another language.

Yes we are many, but how are we one?

What makes us Australian?

I want to capture the voices of our nation, the nitty gritty, the polished, the broken, the loud, the proud, the silent. I want to rummage through the cracks in our society to see what makes us stick.

While multiculturalism is the heart of our nation, ignorance is our downfall. We need to communicate without the help of sensationalist media or the labels that pepper our society. Only then can we integrate. It’s time to break the silence, to write these stories, capture the faces, to bridge the gap and see what an Australian looks like.

It’s time to find a collective identity beyond hot pies and footy.

Who knows, maybe our difference is the very thing that binds us.

I’m going to find out.

Who’s with me?

Don’t Settle for Someone Else’s Kebab

Two weeks ago, the Northcote Town Hall was buzzing with another energetic performance by the Anti Racism Action Band (A.R.A.B) who hip hopped, sang, belly danced, rocked and Krumped their way through their latest production Conjure. The story was about a brave young writer from the ‘burbs’ who’s chasing a dream that’s not restricted by her past, her family or cultural comfort zone and follows her desperate attempts to please a demanding publisher. It opens with a young boy, Habs, who owns ‘Hab’s Kebabs’ a small, popular stand in the North. He is the boy next door, the one you pass at train stations with the loud wog accent and gold chains and quickly look the other way, the one you write off because of his Broady slang or his background which suggests his dreams can only reach as far as kebab stands or take away shops. But that night, the Northcote Town Hall was the writer’s imagination and her stories starred kids like Habs who did not disappear in the backdrop of society but raised their voices and conjured bold futures beyond the suffocating mould of their stereotypes. The publisher was going insane demanding “more Neighbours,” not Bollywood, not Broadmeadows, not reality. More fake backdrops, sterile characters, whiter streets. After all, who wants to read or watch a reality cluttered with migrant kids caught between two worlds, who are daring to believe in another future? These stories have always been reserved for budget productions, not for the big screen. Not anymore. As I watched the A.R.A.B kids act, dance, sing, and believe, I saw passion. These kids are no longer settling for “someone else’s kebab”. So line them up, Habs. We’ll risk the onion breath, the heartburn. Give us kebabs with the lot!

Faulty Connections

Selecting sessions from the Melbourne Writers Festival program guide is like a lucky dip. This year I picked no duds. One session that stood out was Our Restless Life with John Carroll and Brigid Delaney. John thought distractions pushed us away from ourselves (I couldn’t agree with him more) and touched on the Ancient Greek theory of achieving beautiful rhythms; normal acts carried out in every day life that make us transcend and quell restlessness. Brigid spoke of excessive choices that make us want to belong everywhere and as a consequence we belong nowhere. As I listened and scribbled illegibly on my notepad, I couldn’t help but feel restless. Yes, having too many choices can make us stray from the important things in life, but what about connection? Isn’t it possible that for some people this restlessness may stem from a faulty connection to Australia? No? Well how about our lack of national identity? I posed the theory to our panellists at the end of the session. Yep, with trembling nerves and an intro that may have been a tad too long, I put it out there. Multiculturalism is the strength of our country but I think it’s the very thing that divides us. Because of this diversity we struggle to find common ground. Our panellists didn’t agree but I stand by my words. We’ve lost our respect and tolerance for diversity and therefore can’t move forward to establish a common identity. We have labels instead. When we go overseas we are Aussies no questions asked. When we come back home we are wogs, Anglos, Italians, Turks, Lebos, Greeks, black, brown, yellow, white, Christian, Orthodox, Muslim. What if this hostility and division, this sense of not being welcome here that generations of migrants have experienced has reflected on their children and the current generation struggle to find a place? Or is it simply a case of not being able to find our identity on a land that was not ours to begin with?

Being an Australian is more than draping the Aussie flag, uniting at the MCG, the tennis, at a time of national crises. An Australian isn’t blonde haired, blue eyed. Australians have broken English. Some have none at all. They eat rice for breakfast, kebabs for lunch. They wear a cross, a head scarf, come in different shades. It’s time we reshaped the jigsaw of our society so the pieces fit.