In the lead up to Australia Day this year, news.com.au published an interactive game that allows users to “build the perfect Australian” by combining various bits and pieces from a stable of notable Aussies. You go to the site and you get to pick the head, body and legs you want in your perfect Australian, then, the machine spits out a sort of True-Blue Frankenstein’s Monster, presumably so you can print out a life size copy and add it to the poor-taste nationalist shrine you’ve erected in your living room (between the limited edition VB cartons and the over-priced Channel 9 sports memorabilia).
There are 36 Australians of note on the app, and I did some quick maths: you can combine them to make over 40,000 distinct perfect Aussies. 40,000 is loads, but every single one of those perfect Aussies will be a white person, because every single person on news.com.au’s list of notable Australians is a white person, and that’s how genetics works (even Frankenstein-esque genetics). 40,000 perfect white Australians.
And it’s not like this is on a part-time blog run by one person who’s also trying to hold down a full time job. This was published on Australia’s largest news website. That means that someone at news.com.au had the idea, they pitched it to the editorial team, the editorial team chose the people to include, the tech team created the app, the editors reviewed it, and the online editor posted it. At no point did anyone think it was worthwhile including a single non-white person in the app.
If we want Australia Day to be representative of the inclusive, diverse nation we all live in, then as a bare minimum, this kind of narrow definition of what it means to be Australian (perfect or otherwise) has no place in our celebrations and reflections.
Call me overly politically correct if you want, but I almost always prickle at the idea of building a ‘perfect’ person of any kind, but especially when it is specifically about nationality or race, because there are some very dark ends to those well-trodden eugenic paths.
The interactive was called The Australianator, which is a bit of an unwieldy title, but I assume they only used it because “A Sentimental Reminiscence of The White Australia Policy” was too wordy, and I haven’t checked, but I think the Centre for Independent Studies may have already pre-emptively copyrighted that title for an upcoming project.
The Australianator as a website is so boneheaded and thoughtless in title and execution that it is actually baffling. Was their exclusionary list an accident? Was it cynical exploitation of nationalism to get page clicks? Was it a calculated attempt to annoy otherwise very placid people like myself into writing editorials for SBS? For all we know, maybe The Australianator, like the Terminator, is actually a computer program/robot sent back in time by future xenophobes to prevent a horrific dystopian future where racism no longer exists? Perish the thought.
The Australianator gives you a chance to build 'the ultimate Aussie icon' - 40,000 permutations in fact - but fails to acknowledge many notable Australians of a non-white ethnicity.
Whatever the case, there are obvious problems with your idea of national perfection being singularly white, particularly when you’re trying to describe somewhere as diverse as Australia; somewhere where around 46% of people have at least one parent who was born overseas. Intentionally or otherwise, a solely white vision of perfection sends a very clear message: Being white is a very important element to being Australian, and if you aren’t white, you aren’t a real Australian.
But the problems don’t stop there, it’s also just factually inaccurate to suggest all of the people available on the app are definitively capable of representing The Perfect Australian. Is news.com.au actually at a point where they would rather include fictional satires of Australia culture from half a century ago, rather than any person of colour?
As a Chinese Australian, there are always going to be people who look at me and think that I’m not a “Real Aussie”. Growing up, I would routinely have people tell me to go back to where I came from, and that really sucked. I’d like to pretend I was naïve enough to think, “What do they mean? I was born here in Australia?” - but the people of the Sutherland Shire in the early 1990’s made it very clear, and I knew exactly what they meant. I did not look like them, so I did not belong in their country, and while I don’t want to ascribe genuinely racist motives to the people who made this app, I can say that flicking through the site on Australia Day did make me feel a lot like that little kid at Illawong Primary School in 1994 who quit the school basketball team after the other kids told him they were all going to play for Australia, and he couldn’t because he was Chinese.
(Incidentally, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should probably say that I was actually very terrible at basketball, and I suspect my teammates’ overt racism probably stemmed from their frustration with my inability to hit a lay up, and while I don’t want to be an apologist for childhood racism of any sort, after I quit, the team did go on to win some sort of regional competition without me, so y’know, every cloud, I guess).
I’m not saying that the editors needed to specifically include people who looked like me as a Chinese Australian so that I could finally feel welcome and overcome the demons of my childhood, because I’ve learned to deal with those issues primarily by writing comedy about them and then having white people pay me money to listen to me talk. I’m not saying the list should have included Penny Wong or Lee Lin Chin or whichever person I feel adequately represents “me” as a Chinese Australian (though I guess, why not? those people are great), it’s just that the striking lack of diversity in The Australianator indicates a real thoughtlessness on the part of the creators and a commitment to long out-of-date ideas and this just really highlights just how tragically out of touch they are.
You’d think they could find one person of colour to include on their list. Just one.
Maybe in their minds, the problem is that all the people who could be considered notable Australians are white? I mean, obviously if you exclusively watched commercial television and got all your news from news.com.au you might mistakenly get that idea, but I assure you it is inaccurate. Even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia list of Australian of the Year Recipients reveals more diversity than news.com.au’s Australianator, people like Mick Dodson or John Yu or Lionel Rose or Cathy Freeman, or I dunno, this year’s Australian of the Year recipient Adam Goodes.
It is utterly ridiculous that this homogenous view of the ideal Australia still persists, not just because of how far removed from reality it is, but also because of how sheltered a day-to-day life you would have to live to think that this is the kind of Australia people associate with perfection. Even though it’s not surprising that this kind of thing was published on Australia Day by the Murdoch press, it’s still disappointing that people are so willing to narrowly define Australia based on outdated and arbitrary criteria that are at once lowest common denominator, and yet still somehow, completely out of touch with the broader population.
TL;DR – news.com.au thinks Kyle Sandilands is a more “perfect Australian” than Adam Goodes.
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