C-Day

It's Census night in Australia and I'm about to complete my form online (technology = awesome).

I was chatting with a girlfriend on the weekend about completing our Census list of questions.  In particular, we chatted about the heritage questions.  We were wondering which ancestry options to choose; the questionnaire asks you to select 2 ancestries which you most closely identify with.  Interestingly, one of the options is 'Australian'; that's not something that we normally have the option to select, it's always whether your English, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Greek, Chinese etc. This led us to question how and why people would select 'Australian' as their ancestry. What's the cut off point? Maybe if your grandparents were born here you can say that your ancestry is Australian. Or is it your parents? Or do you need to be a 5th generation Australian?

At the end of the day, unless you're an Aboriginal Australian, we all came from somewhere else, but I'm wondering when we get to start identifying ourselves as just Aussies and not as people from somewhere else. As someone whose family has been here for a number of generations, I most definitely identify myself as being Australian and I have no clear connection to any of my other ancestries; although it's clear that these blood lines have shaped some of the cultures and traditions in my family.

Nationality and cultural identity are always hotly debated topics in this country and I look forward to the day when we can just think of ourselves as Australians. With this option on the Census form this time around, maybe we're getting a step closer after all.