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CANBERRA Brooding Bicentenary

Australia is due to celebrate its two-hundredth anniversary next year, but the atmosphere of festivity is already threatened by controversy. For one thing, there is a row over choosing a new Australian flag. The present one has a British Union Jack in the upper left-hand corner, an historical feature that ought to be eliminated, according to a lobbying organization called Ausflag. The Ausflag leadership argues that the Union Jack is too reminiscent of the settlement of Australia by convicts and subsequent British colonialism. Ausflag wants something with kangaroos or koalas, according to designs submitted. Prime Minister Bob Hawke, however, will not hear of changing the flag just for the sake of the bicentennial jamboree in 1988. And then the representatives of Australian aboriginal groups, who settled the country forty thousand years ago, announced that they will not join the celebrations, which they describe as “farcical.” The head of the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organizations said of the colonization of Australia: “It was an invasion, so why should we celebrate anything?”

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CANBERRA Brooding Bicentenary

Australia is due to celebrate its two-hundredth anniversary next year, but the atmosphere of festivity is already threatened by controversy. For one thing, there is a row over choosing a new Australian flag. The present one has a British Union Jack in the upper left-hand corner, an historical feature that ought to be eliminated, according to a lobbying organization called Ausflag. The Ausflag leadership argues that the Union Jack is too reminiscent of the settlement of Australia by convicts and subsequent British colonialism. Ausflag wants something with kangaroos or koalas, according to designs submitted. Prime Minister Bob Hawke, however, will not hear of changing the flag just for the sake of the bicentennial jamboree in 1988. And then the representatives of Australian aboriginal groups, who settled the country forty thousand years ago, announced that they will not join the celebrations, which they describe as “farcical.” The head of the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organizations said of the colonization of Australia: “It was an invasion, so why should we celebrate anything?”