http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/how-the-australia-day-lamb-ad-contributes-to-everyday-cultural-erasure-20160113-gm5dj5.html
How the Australia Day lamb ad contributes to everyday cultural erasure
You've got to hand it to the Meat and Livestock Association (MLA). Operation: Boomerang, its latest attempt to convince us that eating lamb on Australia Day is some sort of venerated tradition, delivers a masterclass in both irony and cultural appropriation without even trying.
The spectacle stars Lee Lin Chin, who presides over a crack team of troops that infiltrate foreign countries to retrieve Aussies 'trapped' overseas. The irony, as Indigenous X founder Luke Pearson noted, is "that on a day many of us call Invasion Day there's an ad about Australia invading other countries to bring all those white guys 'home'."
'Home', as we all know but like to pretend we don't, is a country that was founded on the attempted annihilation of Indigenous culture. And that's where the cultural appropriation comes in. By invoking the boomerang, the MLA has taken a potent and recognisable symbol of the very culture that white Australia invaded, and used it to celebrate the triumph of colonisation.
... Another irony is that Operation: Boomerang erases Indigenous culture while aiming to establish a national tradition of lamb consumption - an animal that is not even native to this country.
... it seems Australia and Israel have much in common. Both nations pride themselves on free and democratic principles. Both were founded on land already occupied by another people and have engaged in the systematic erasure of these people. And both deny this erasure by mythologising their own origins, invoking metaphors of a land previously barren and lifeless; where Australians talk of "nothing but bush", Israelis boast that they "made the desert bloom".
But Aboriginal people call Australia Day "Invasion Day," and Palestinians refer to the creation of Israel as Al-Nakba, "The Catastrophe." The days that the mainstream culture of these countries celebrate as their birth are the very days on which the culture of another people were marked for erasure. This is not something to be celebrated but a tragedy to be mourned.
No national holiday can be a cause for unbridled celebration when it hinges on erasing the reality of a violent past, no matter what is on the menu.
