Southern Cross Tattoos
Lets just say I’m feeling inspired and still quite pissed off with the group of horrible people (who all had these) that I happened to encounter at the beach on Australia Day this year. These tattoo are completely feral, and generally, so are the people who get them. I mean really, nothing screams national pride like a “sutherland cross” tattoo or a “f*ck off we’re full” sticker on the back of your ute.
Tags:Things we Don't Love
29 January 2010
Georgie Love says:
Adam’s best friend is a tattoo artist (albeit in wagga wagga of all places) and he said the tattoo he gets asked for most frequently (which he HATES doing and otherwise refuses to do any kind of racist tattoo) is the fricking southern cross.
cath from chunkychooky says:
I could not agree more. In fact I wrote a huge post about how the Australian flag has been used as a symbol by racist red necks ( ie pauline hanson draped in flag, cronulla riots) and then got hate email from someone- whcih kind of freaked me out. So i took it off then defiantly put it back on, then off agina when I got nervous… I do like how you called it the Sutherlan cross- nice one. I removed one of those stickers from a ute just the other day in a car park. So offensive.
heather says:
i understand where you are coming from. i hate yobbo asshole bogans as much as the next person.
but, just like anything else, not *everyone* with a southern cross tattoo is necessarily a part of this group. i got mine (a small one, on my left wrist) while i was an ex-pat living in the states as a reminder of my roots. silly, i know, but at the time it meant a lot to me.
just my two cents :)
ben says:
Why is it that everywhere in the world the people that wave the flag the hardest are the last ones you’d want to have representing that country.
Emma says:
Oh I know they have totally become a badge of horrible and stupid and narrow minded idiots, but as Heather illustrates above, many people got them for years in a completely different spirit than they are now taken. I remember reading an interview with Scott Cam (TV show tradie) saying racist people should stop high-jacking a national symbol…(here I googled and found it http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sunday-telegraph/scott-cam-blitzes-neo-nazi-thugs/story-e6frewt0-1111118721790 yes I know its from the tele, embarassing huh??)…having said that I have a friend who got one years ago while living o/s, in celebration of home, and has gotten it covered up because of what he feels it has come to represent. and the assumptions people make about him when they see it.
Sorry your Aust day was marred by dickheads
Em :)
kel says:
This is quite true, I shouldn’t really ‘generalize’ because unfortunately like a lot of things which become “the in thing” as adopted by idiots of all forms, the people who get them before this happens and for a personal reason often lose out in the end! I have a friend with an amazing Where the Wild Things Are tattoo he got years ago, who now has to put up with a whole lot of first gen movie goers asking him about it! Not quite the same thing, but I know where you are coming from. But such is life, and I hear tattoos are quite permanent, so hopefully one day the southern cross won’t be associated with boganism like it is so often now :)
Angela says:
You know I completely agree- but I am proud you are taking to calling it the ’sutherland cross’ as well.
Brian says:
The ’southen cross’ as a somehow national pride emblem is a joke, like Autralia has dibs on a constilation lol. Hmm wonder is hese bogans realise whats on the brazilian flag etc.
Sadly sportng this constilation is now known as the Austika.
On another note if anyone ever wants to confuse these dumb shits, wearing austikas tell them an asylem seeker killed a peadafile.
BelladonnaLeigh says:
As Brian said the southern cross is a constilation, so are we to condem ever person that has it As a tattoo or the children who go to schools that have it aa there emblem? People need to look past the tattoos and into the person that has them. I have a southern cross tattoo to represent the school I went to as a child, does that make me a racist? Yes the southern cross is on the Australian flag but also on the new Zealand flag, but it doesn’t make the new zealanders that have them racist, does it now? And more to the point of rasicm, people are what we make them, we let anyone come onto Australia and give them what thy need to start a new life, but then they don’t embrace what they have been given. And so I can understand some of the hostility between Aussies and other nationalitys.
So is this what Australia has become? We can’t show our pride for living in one of the beat places in the world for fear of being branded as a racist. I find that apalling!!
So now I have said my piece I have one further thing to say, if having pride in the country you live in is racist then brand everone on Australian soil racist because If they did not have pride in this country then why did they come here in the first place?