Dawn Fraser's use of the race card against Nick Kyrgios is frightening
Updated
Dawn Fraser says tennis star Nick Kyrgios and his compatriot Bernard Tomic should go back to where their parents came from if they want to act up. She is out of line, writes Monica Attard.
At least Dawn Fraser's views on race have progressed.
In 2007, the swimming legend told me on ABC's Sunday Profile: "I love my country very much and I see lots of things happening. I mean, I wish I could be as outspoken, I suppose, as Pauline Hanson and say, 'Look, I'm sick and tired of the immigrants that are coming into my country.'"
She went on to justify that startling and apparently racist comment by asserting that "mutual respect" - in her view, a hallmark of Australianism - was the sad loser as she witnessed social cohesion breaking down because of high immigration levels.
Now, she's dipped her toe into that murky water again in an interview on commercial television. This time, though, she was more Hansonist and frankly more frightening.
This time, the people in Ms Fraser's sights were Nick Kyrgios, the talented if brash tennis phenomenon Australia is struggling to embrace, and his compatriot Bernard Tomic. Both, she said, should go back to where their parents came from if they want to act up.
Tomic was born in Germany to Yugoslav parents. Kyrgios is as Australian as me. He was born in Australia to a Greek father and a Malaysian mother. (I was born in Australia to Maltese parents.) I would hope both their childhoods in the decades following mine were less racist than my own when being non-Anglo automatically meant lowered expectations and the need to fight harder for the right to succeed. From everything publicly available on the subject, it seems Kyrgios at least had a calmer ride.
Kyrgios has extraordinary natural talent. As a tennis fan, I am gobsmacked by his raw and at the same time sophisticated sporting prowess. But he's also only 20 and has a big personality. He's made mistakes. He's acted in ways which some would call arrogant. But he has also done more to lift Australia's profile as a great tennis nation than just about anyone else in recent years.
Until now, all he needed to fight against was his own flamboyance. Now Dawn Fraser has opened up a new front. If a swimming legend can play the race card to criticise the young Kyrgios for his "arrogance", his "sense of entitlement" (or was that German-born Bernard Tomic?) or "petulance", anyone can: Kyrgios is like he is because he's not one of us and if he doesn't want to be like us, he should go back to where his parents came from.
Though it's hard to fathom how one's heritage has anything to do with talent in any field, one might imagine Dawn Fraser's comments on sporting personalities who happen not to be of Anglo stock comes perhaps from her own heritage. That was a time (thankfully long gone) of a White Australia policy in a nation where "otherness" was less visible and our contributions were denied or stubbornly unacknowledged.
It became less visible for a few decades until Pauline Hanson lobbed it back into the political arena, so ably abetted by then prime minister John Howard, who failed to distance himself from Hanson's more objectionable views. Personally, I was rattled. Though I was born here, the prospect of again living in an Australia where it was OK to call someone a "wog" and view them so narrowly was too terrifying to explain here.
Now, though, we have a new fear with which to buttress and justify racism. Even though it's a partially manufactured fear, terrorism has given the Australian Government the rationale for citizenship laws that tell some Australian citizens to "go back to where they came from".
There are many who think this is justified when it comes to those who would do us harm. In extreme cases, it no doubt is.
But even while she has now issued an unreserved apology, Fraser's comments feed into the same wider meme about "others" in Australia being so different, so reprehensible that they should go somewhere else, anywhere else in fact.
The commentary will go on about whether Nick Kyrgios "tanked" in the second set of his match against Richard Gasquet at Wimbledon and about some of his other on-court antics. But it would be a sad, sad Australia if the comments of an aging swimming legend were used by people to license extending a political predisposition to a young kid doing what he does best for the country in which he was born.
Dawn Fraser, even though you say your comments weren't born of racism, they sound like they were and this wog thinks you are out of line.
Monica Attard is a Walkley Award winning journalist and a former broadcaster at the ABC where she hosted Media Watch, PM and Sunday Profile.
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Topics: tennis, race-relations
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