Skippies Can Forget Tut-tutting And Hop To Help

Newcastle Herald

Friday December 16, 2005

Greg Ray

IT seems a bit hard on Skippy, if you ask me.

The poor old kangaroo of TV fame, who used to spend her days tut-tutting and rescuing young Sonny Hammond from rockfalls, mineshafts and other hazards in the Waratah National Park, has been caught up in the gang aggro in Sydney in recent days.

"These Skippy Aussies want war," one text message widely circulated among one of the combatant groups is alleged to have read.

I looked up "Skippy Aussie" on the internet and found this reference on Wikipedia:

"Skippy Australian is a tongue-in-cheek term for Australians of Northern European descent. The term is derived from the title character of a late-1960s Australian television show Skippy the Bush Kangaroo . . . For immigrants, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (which was repeated ad nauseam throughout the 1970s on Australian television) would have typified Australia's monoculture prior to the 1970s."

Wikipedia says the term was popularised by the comedy TV show Acropolis Now, but it was definitely in use well before that program appeared. Some ethnic groups, adopting a fairly natural siege mentality in a country they found hard to understand and not altogether friendly, referred to Anglo-Australians as "kangaroos", using the universally recognised symbol of Australia to label the dominant group they found themselves among.

Interestingly, in the same way that the majority used racial stereotypes to characterise people known generally as "wogs", "spics", "dagoes", "greasers", "Balts", "reffos" et cetera, the minorities applied their own stereotypes.

To many Anglos, all wogs smelt of garlic, were a bit stupid and frequently untrustworthy. By contrast, (and I have had this discussion with Australian members of many racial minorities) Skippy Australians have tended to be characterised as mentally slow, lazy, dirty and immoral. This kind of racial stereotyping is equally damaging and offensive no matter who it's directed at. I have met people, for example, who were disowned by their families and their ethnic communities because they brought shame on their family by marrying "kangaroo" Aussies.

Fortunately for Australia, among most newly arrived ethnic groups the mutual distrust and misunderstanding tends to fade over a generation or so.

That's obviously going to take longer and be a lot harder for many people whose families came from the Middle East.

For this I partly blame the war on terror and the hysterical propaganda that surrounds it, the misguided but unrepentant Australian involvement in the invasion of Iraq and the constant promotion of religious intolerance by Muslims and Christians who should know better.

The way the odds are stacked right now it's going to be hard to fix this mess and turn these enemies into friends. But we Skippies, still the majority in this country, have a responsibility to try.

gray@theherald.com.au