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Assimilation for the millennium.

Article Excerpt
When the cries of our young bring us together as one; that's Australian.

So ends a recent television advertisement for The Australian. It lists a set of feel-good Australian characteristics: hard work (cancer research); common resource wealth (mining); multicultural acceptance (Muslim-girl-becomes-surf-lifesaver). Assuring images are linked up with jingoistic doggerel that turns on the happy coincidence of 'Australian' and 'Australian'.

Yet that final verse is striking. It is accompanied by the image of an Indigenous child staring into the sun, shading her eyes with an up-held hand. It is, of course, no surprise that The Australian might be seen to be endorsing the government's extraordinary intervention in the Northern Territory. The newspaper has, for a number of years now, consistently targeted Indigenous communities, with salacious and politically triumphalist attention paid to their social problems. So this is a pernicious addition to what has become annoyingly familiar.

However, if we pause for a moment to seriously consider what the ad is attempting to naturalise and reconcile in a quick and smooth gesture, we might think further about the particular difficulties inherent to: 'our', 'us' and 'one'. The problems tied down in this use of these three short words actually reach past this example and run...

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