What it is (or might mean) to be…

Wholly crap,
you’re not going
to hold me to that!
I’d rather emigrate,
it’s a whole lot easier
– just upset the
Government and wait.
The Office for UnAustralian
Activities will come to
investigate rumours
you drink warm beer and
apparently like it, and find you’ve
resided (but were not born)
here for 18 years without
actually ever desiring,
even momentarily, to be
a rebadged citizen;
or worse, determine from
occasionally sober sources
you’d rather be dead than
classified a loud-mouthed
Australian. In any event they’ll
graciously offer you a choice of
immediate passage to Afghanistan,
North Korea or New Zealand.
One way of course, despite
ample proof you’re an
agreeable Australian poet with
published verse, are already influencing
contemporary thought about
what it is (or might mean)
to be Australian, albeit spoken
sotto voce. In my defence
I can aways say I intended to
be a model citizen but Johnny
Howard’s Gang of fascist bully-girls
put me off with their right-wing
shenanigans. Yeah, sadly,
THAT’S what they’ll
hold against me!
© I.D. Carswell

unAustralian
There's been some hoo-ha recently about the expression unAustralian.
Some suggest it's a recent political invention, and others that it's unAustralian to call something unAustralian. But the word unAustralian appears in both the Macquarie and Australian Oxford dictionaries meaning: "not in accordance with the characteristics…said to be typical of the Australian community". The sociologists say that today unAustralian means "incivility and foreign influence". Hence, the big banks are sometimes called unAustralian. Most people don't know that the word unAustralian first appeared a hundred years ago. In the first half of the twentieth century it referred to communists, fifth-columnists, or radicals. But it's also a word used in fun. A citation from 1965 refers to a gadget as "very unAustralian". And there's a folk band who released a CD called 'UnAustralian Songs'. So, while Americans may take being un-American very seriously, Aussies seem to think that unAustralian means not being able to barbecue a steak properly.