Symbolism, Identity & Granite?

Depending on your privilege and political disposition, you’ll recognize January 26 as Australia Day, Invasion Day, Survival Day or just another day off. The day, and the weeks surrounding it always seem to amplify the complexities regarding Australian political history and current race relations.

January 26, 2013 was the first day in our nation’s history that the Aboriginal flag was flown parallel with the Australian flag, on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And has since been the case each proceeding year on January 26, with this past weekend being no exception. However, while passing over the bridge this morning on my regular commute to work, as expected, I noticed that our flag had been retired. Put away in the closet until the next day when Australia feels safe to recognize its First Nations peoples.

In 2017, young Aboriginal woman Cheree Toka launched a campaign calling on the NSW Legislative Assembly and the NSW Government to considering flying the Aboriginal flag permanently atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The petition now has the support of more than 125,000 signatures. However, in just November last year, the NSW Parliament failed to reach an outcome after debating the proposal, claiming they will continue to investigate future options. The fact that it’s apparently worth spending our government’s time and resources simply to discuss whether we can permanently associate the Aboriginal flag with perhaps Australia’s most iconic symbols is worth some discussion.

Sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall contends that symbols serve as sites of shared meaning and cultural identity. A few symbols or ‘cultural objects’ that exist in Australia include the Southern Cross, footy, barbecues, Uluru, and the Harbour Bridge. These symbols serve as representations of social and political identity. They are deemed uniquely 'Australian’ and have become ideas of national sentiment. As a result, they’ve temporarily replaced the 60,000+ years of sophisticated cultural systems of meaning that once predicated every Australian citizen’s identity (pre-invasion). Unfortunately, because of the highly racialized, colonial landscape in which recent iconic symbols have been developed and are reproduced – such sites of belonging have become contested spaces, where Anglo-Australians tend to control and dictate.

When another racialized or marginalized group starts encroaching on these spaces, there are harsh responses and real-life consequences. Take Adam Goodes being booed for performing an Aboriginal war cry in the sporting arena. Or the long-winded, political battle for the closure of Uluru. Or the shameful Cronulla riots of 2005, which promoted xenophobia and hate in efforts to ‘protect our beach’.

If we pictured a pyramid chart representing the process by which our national identity is reproduced, January 26 would sit at its apex. The day has become a desperate attempt to recreate identity and belonging for the benefactors of colonialism. But of course, like anything, it’s a day that means different things to different people. Societies and symbols are diverse, fluid and shift in their meaning all the time.

I cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge every day on my way to work. And I know that I see and feel something completely different to everyone in the carriage around me. I see a tragic metaphor.

I grew up in a small country town called Moruya, on the Far South Coast of New South Wales. Moruya sits on Walbunja Yuin country. Where in the 1920s, commercial quarries extracted thousands of tons of granite that now make up the four foundational pillars of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. What’s left of the granite: a monument in the middle of town, reading “A CELEBRATION OF THE GRANITE QUARRIES IN MORUYA THAT CONTRIBUTED TO THE HISTORY OF NEW SOUTH WALES”. No records of consent or consultation with local Yuin people can be found during this period.

I detract that the identity of a community should be drawn from the nonconsensual rape of land and undermining of Indigenous people.

Australia has seemed to fast track its development of a national identity by making meaning through essentialist symbols and dictating ownership over them, while they have quite figuratively and very literally been built on the foundations of racism, invasion and exploitation of land and First Nations peoples.

Either way, representation and symbolism have major significance in our political landscape. It shapes our social perceptions and affects political discourse in big ways. As it stands, Indigenous Australians are continuously preoccupied with shifting from a position of invisibility within our micro and macro communities, to one of significance and salience. After all, that’s unceded Yuin Walbunja granite holding our nationhood together.