Our cultural inheritance is being eliminated as fast as our physical one
In an earlier piece I wrote about the physical destruction of what I dubbed the Old Australia. The parks, gardens, golf courses and the like that form the material legacy of our Anglo-European heritage are being eliminated via mass immigration and a myopic focus on economics.
Accompanying this elimination – and no less importantly – is the cultural erasure of the Old Australia. Not only is our physical heritage being destroyed, our history is as well.
Let’s begin with the nomenclature. All around the country we are witnessing the eradication of our nominal tradition at the behest of the demand for diversity. In the wake of the shift from Ayers Rock to Uluru, other sites are now following suit. Fraser Island has famously been transformed into K’gari. Cape Byron has been dual-named Walgun from the Bundjalung language.
It doesn’t end there. Moreland Council in Melbourne was recently renamed Merri Bek from the “Woi-wurrung word for ‘rocky country’”. So all-pervasive is it, once-unknown words like Naarm, Gadigal and Meanjin have slipped into common usage. Even the AFL has a round in which teams are referred to by their indigenous equivalents. You may have caught a game this year involving Walyalup (Fremantle) or Yartapuulti (Port Adelaide), for instance.
The current leftism is that insidious we are even expunging the names of figures who never even set foot here. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Western Australian Government rechristened the King Leopold Ranges – named after the Belgian monarch and colonialist – the “Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges, using both the Ngarinyin and Bunuba names for the area.”
Unsurprisingly, the most egregious examples are in Victoria. Indeed, Premier Jacinta Allan recently announced that her state is to get a raft of new uber-liberal names. The “Equal Places” program aims to do nothing less than “increase place naming after underrepresented groups including women, First Nations, LGBTQIA+, people with disability and culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) communities.”
Women will be particularly prominent. As part of the related “gender equality strategy and action plan“, Victoria “has set a target of 70% of new commemorative place naming after women”. A figure that is obviously disproportionate and that completely disregards historical female roles and positions.
None of this matters to our liberal elite, of course. Such facts are to be ignored when they inevitably conflict with the reigning leftism and organisations like Gender Equity Victoria and their Put Her Name on It campaign.
If it isn’t our names being abolished, it is our symbols. The most prominent example is that icon of European imperialism: Captain Cook. In a concerted effort to impose their values, leftist activists have attacked and eliminated monuments to the English explorer in a number of states.
In Cairns, a 50-year-old statue of Cook was removed in 2022 due to its perceived role as a “symbol of colonialism and genocide”. In Sydney this winter, an alleged “professional protestor” and her accomplice sawed away at a 145-year-old statue of Cook in Hyde Park with an angle grinder.
In Melbourne, the attacks on Cook are almost too numerous to mention. In St Kilda over Australia Day, leftist activists improved on previous efforts by lopping the suburb’s statue off its plinth entirely. A month later, another monument was destroyed in Fitzroy Gardens, an event that brings the total number of attacks on the great Englishman to three this year in the Victorian capital alone.
Our festivals have not escaped the commissars either. In 2021, the Anzac Day march in Melbourne was quietly cancelled – ostensibly due to Covid. Yet a few months prior, leftist protestors were permitted to storm through the city for Black Lives Matter. Outright bias in favour of liberal causes and against conservative ones has become so ubiquitous it barely warrants mention.
Remaining in Melbourne, a similar calculus was at work in the city’s cancellation of its Australia Day parade. Last seen before Covid, the festival seems to have been shelved permanently. Like Anzac Day, any event celebrating our Anglo-European identity is clearly too contentious to let stand.
One possible consolation is that our issues are not occurring in a vacuum. The same is true across the Western world. In Scotland, Enlightenment icon David Hume had his name removed from a building at the University of Edinburgh over concerns that the “philosopher’s views on race [would] cause ‘distress’ to modern day students.”
An eradication that is sadly only one of many occurring in Britain. Indeed, almost 70 “tributes to slave traders, colonialists and racists [had] been removed across the UK” by the beginning of 2021. A trend that shows little sign of slowing or of stopping spreading.
These sentiments are obviously seen in America as well. To take one example, over 100 Confederate monuments have been removed in the US since 2020 and the death of George Floyd. One of the chief rationales is that “the presence of these memorials more than a hundred years after the defeat of the Confederacy continues to disenfranchise and alienate African Americans.”
And it is this demographic diversity and the cosmopolitanism of our ruling class – what Christopher Lasch called “The Revolt of the Elites” – that explain the erasure of Old Australia.
What has occurred is that decades of unrelenting demographic change has acted in concert with elite edicts and the market to alter what Australia and an Australian is. Witness the newfound prominence of Ramadan, or Pro-Palestine or “Invasion Day” protests, or once-unseen ethnic conflicts. Conversely, note the decline in events like Australia Day, horse racing or army recruitment.
As this makes clear, the current approach of uber-liberal immigration and an unthinking faith in economics to solve our social ills leads to little more than Australia becoming an antipodean favela. Demographic shifts and blind faith in the market guarantee we won’t become another Singapore, but we’ll be yet another Lebanon or Brazil. Indeed, we already see this with Islamist protests and Geoffrey Blainey’s observation that Australia could be 10% Islamic this century.
If we want to retain what remains of our Western heritage, we need an elite who want to make it so. This will mean a radical rethink in our immigration policy – about who will best help us preserve and build upon our heritage – and potentially a greater role for the state.
If not, then we’ll simply drift along the path we are on.
Yet the fickle turns of liberalism and demographic change do not presage a happy or fruitful future. As Pat Buchanan noted, what we are doing is a gamble, and we presently engaged in a moronic approach that puts “hope over experience”.
