If Audrey (Boys are made of Slime and Snails) Apple does not like Australia, then she could always leave.

No tanks have ever rumbled down these streets, and Australia is one of very few countries to never have a civil war.

It is almost impossible to starve in this country, and Australia is rated in number 3 position on the United Nations Human Development Index (out of about 173 countries).

So if Audrey Apple does not like any of this, she can always leave.

Are you illiterate HRS or was that just a pisstake? She didn't say she didn't like Australia. . She said she didn't like it being defined in a way that excluded the bulk of the population. Your thoughtless response, unforunately, proves her point - Australia's newly self-conscious nationalism is ridden by ugly red-necked exclusionists whose concept of the national character is stuck in some mythical 1950s Chips Rafferty mindset. Your problem is that John Howard has gone. Your chief sponsor has left the building and your attempts to use the national day as a wedge to exercise your mean-spirited prejuidices will not be tolerated.

Mr Denmore,
You could always leave as well, and you are free to do so.

And you could always take Audrey (Boys are made of Slime and Snails) along with you.

You WERE joking. Sorry, I thought you were serious

Mmm. Indeed. The first post on this thread seems to be more of a polemic against Ms Apple than any kind of comment on the article.

I must concur with the central message here - I don't identify with the image that is most consistently identified as 'Australian.'

The blue-singlet-wearing-sheep-shearing-beer-drinking-chuck-a-prawn-on-the-barbie-holden-driver-with-an-akubra-and-cattledog certainly does exist, and of course, he's as Australian as anyone else.

But I don't think it's fair that this image is appropriated as the image for all of us - it works for the many people out there who fit a number of these boxes, but plenty of people don't.
Sure, I like my beer and I don't mind a prawn on the barbie and I've nothing against Holdens. That being said, I don't fit the rest.

What bothers me, I guess, is when the term 'Un-Australian' is trotted out. It's crap. I'm going to say right now, that using the term 'Un-Australian' is 'Un-Australian.'

So as far as the comment 'If you don't like it, leave' goes, it's crap, and it's trotted out far too often.

Logically, anyone who says this, will be the first people to abandon the country if it does run into hard times. When they don't like it, they'll leave.

The same excuse it trotted out in the US. If you ever expressed concern about the dumb decisions made by their government regarding international wars, you must be some kind of US-hating pinko, instead of a patriot.

Me, I'm more devoted to Australia than that.
If something's wrong, I try to fix it, instead of draping myself in a flag and being manipulated by jingoistic pap while exhorting the people who are expressing themselves to leave.

I mean, HRS, how's this sound:

Don't like the supposed feminist conspiracy in this country?

Then leave.

TurnRightThenLeft, beautifully put.

HRS, your obsession with Audrey's banner from her blogsite continues to make you look bad. Get over it, you have made your point, time to move on.

R0bert