Dear Bugsy,

So your identity is a credit card? How sad... The reason I started this thread was to find out more about the people that make up this great country of ours. Many people take for granted the cultural mix that is Australia's population, but what of the people who have created this diversity?

What is it like to have come from somewhere else and settled in Australia? I thought the responses that would come forth from people would provide a window on the experience of leaving one home in order to create another.

Confounded expectations, culture shock, conflicting national loyalties, and a search for belonging - these were the themes that I was expecting - in other words a collection of experiences about making a new life in Australia. I did not expect, " Look at your
driver's licence, and then ... your credit card." As I said, how sad!

Cj Morgan, - How Australian am I? Well I was born here. Grew up here. Educated here. Work here. Pay my taxes. Am an Australian
Citizen. But to me it is a very big deal - I love this country.
How could I not? Australia welcomed my family after the communists
had seized power in their country. I had the chance to grow up in a democracy, a privilege for which I will forever be grateful...

But my drivers licence, credit card and various other documents all show that I have an Australian identity. Without them I cannot do much, I would be a non-person in the eyes of the law. I must say that the question was phrased rather ambiguously. This is my answer.

Certainly will be a lot easier to argue an Australian identity exists when people stop seeking "ethnicity".

Particularly when after being asked the question and answering Australian such is not sufficient.

Even worse when around the country the attitude and or response makes it plain my saying Australian is the wrong answer ;-

I am third generation Scandavian on one side and fourth generation English/Celtic on the other. In different ways, both sets of immigrants were adventurous, impetuous, optimistic but not entirely successful or happy people. My Scandavian grandparents were poor, travelling half-way across the world (separately - they had a fight! - but it ended happily) for the opportunity to start a pig farm. They were poor here too, and neither ever saw their own parents or siblings again. It's unimaginable to me, though of course many refugees are in the same situation today. My English great-grandfather was better off, but more foolhardy. He was a dilitente and an adventurer, and came to a sad drunken end, but he left enough descendents to make up for his mistakes.

I see the Australian character in my ancestors. All countries built on multi-cultural immigration - and for all the anti-PC hoo-ha of the Keating years, Australia has been multicultural since colonisation - have a frontier-settling, nation-building spirit, sometimes more enthusiastic than wise, but always hopeful and spirited. We're iconoclasts - for whatever reason, we've rejected the home country, because we feel we can build something grander. But because we're still a young country, there's an uncertainty and sometimes a selfishness about our position - an immaturity about extending the same genorousity that we have had extended to us. Teething problems. A nanny-knows-best insecurity. It'll pass. Give us another 200 years.

We also built this nation by destroying the nations that existed before we got here. There's a great shame and sadness behind our very (non-Indigenous) presence here.

I find it odd when people say they are proud to be Australian (or American, or Yugoslavian, or whatever). We are who we are - we had no choice where we were born. But I find it endlessly fascinating to be Australian; to explore its variances. What a remarkable history. What a lot remains to be done.

Dear Bugsy,

I accept your answer. However as a uni student I had no driver's licence, no credit cards. I travelled inter-state. And I didn't need cards to validate me.

Bugsy, I suppose what I really wanted was not how the law saw you, but how you saw yourself. I apologise if my thread was not that clear cut.

I see myself as aussie and as nothing more! My fore fathers came to this land when there was really nothing here and built it from the ground up. The black fellas where still wild and blokes like Banjo Paterson were writing the likes of The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda! They arrived between the times “about” 1850 -1890 on both my mother and fathers side!

I don’t identify really with many “new” Australians I feel I have as much in common with for example a new immigrant from China….. as I do with a Chinese citizen.

The Left has re-coined the term Australian to mean anybody anywhere and anything! Fungo Bungo man from Africa is as Australian as Don Bradman according to the them.

They use it so loosely that unless you where brought up here it must be a difficult concept to grasp.

CJ Morgan – “It's not an especially big deal to me.” That’s why people like you should be ignored when in comes to debates regarding the future of our great nation. Since you don’t care you should just sit there and be quite! At least I now understand why you have such mad ill conceived ideas about what is best for Australia. You have no credibility on the subject.