Ideology paints itself into a corner

I have been reared to believe that power corrupts and that the WASP value system is only one of many to be considered. Until a few months ago, I would have told you that freedom of speech is one of our most important democratic principles. I teach at the University of Newcastle, in the newly developed bachelor of arts major in creative arts, and endeavour to bring these formative values to my professional life. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself almost irresistibly compelled to censor some of my students' work.

The dilemma was instigated when our creative arts teaching staff decided to publicise the work of our students by holding a multimedia event. The event was to be called "Downright un-Australian!". The students were asked to ponder the statement that "to call someone un-Australian is deeply and paradoxically un-Australian". We asked our students to think about issues of national and cultural identity, and to consider what being Australian or un-Australian meant to them.

With the federal election looming and national identity being used as a potent political tool, we thought that it would be a fascinating and challenging area of debate. We wanted to hear what our students had to say and see what type of work they created.

There was no way we could have anticipated the outcome. The teaching staff discussed the un-Australian issue at length. One colleague, an established multimedia artist based in Sydney, thought that even the Australian flag had been recoded and was being used as a politically divisive image. For a short time in the early 1990s, he mused, people were starting to use the flag ironically. As a country we'd had a brief, happy time in the sun where wearing Australiana became cutting edge and cool. Then Pauline Hanson came along, draped in a flag, and the entire landscape of ideas and imagery changed. "It worries me," he joked, "that I live in this country, and I am happy to live in this country, but whenever I see a flagpole outside someone's house I think they're a fascist."

We were still haunted by the Cronulla riots and the way the Australian flag had been used as a battle standard by the far Right. One of my students became intrigued by newspaper images of the flag-wearing participants. She duplicated the image and arranged them into a slick, neon-coloured Andy Warhol grid: a techno vision of candy-coloured violence.

After Cronulla we watched as Big Day Out concert organisers first tried to ban flag wearing, then backed down when the prohibition was hotly contested.

On the day of the concert so-called generation Y turned out in force wearing the flag in just about every possible way imaginable. It was a public demonstration of collective defiance and a celebration of their right to choose their symbols.

As practising artists, my colleagues and I had followed the debate on sedition laws and their possible effect on artists with keen interest. We felt it was important not to be overly squeamish about reaching into the political arena for our event's theme. We reasoned that if you can't explore controversial issues at a university, where are you going to do it?

Although it is a widely used term, few people seem to be entirely sure of what un-Australian means. Although un-Australian has been formally defined as "not in accordance with characteristics said to be typical of the Australian community", at one point it was popularly used when a person or thing was not getting a fair go. Some sociologists claim that the term also refers to incivility or foreign influence.

The term first appeared almost a century ago when it was used to describe communists or radicals. Nowadays it has such wide and diverse usage that the Macquarie Dictionary is revising its definition.

When I first told my students about the un-Australian event, they all looked slightly confused. They had two weeks to come up with an artwork; they could work in any media: film, sculpture, digital imaging and so on.

The only technical restriction was that the final product must include paint in some way, but this could be broadly interpreted to include photographs of paint or film of a person painting, among other things. (Despite our cross disciplinary emphasis it was, after all, a painting class that I was teaching.)

To my surprise, the students responded to the un-Australian theme with vigour. After a brief period of confusion, they settled down and started actively debating what the term meant and how they could make a piece of art that related to it. They wrestled with the concept, worked through multiple ideas and sent me numerous email inquiries.

One man, struggling to define the term to his own satisfaction, asked participants of an Internet chat room what they thought un-Australian meant. He was swamped with intently felt replies. Too intent, he said; it took him hours to respond to them all. The same student found an organisation that promoted correct flag etiquette announcing one morning that the way the university flagpoles were being run was all wrong.

Another student thought the term un-Australian represented a xenophobic fear of the unknown. She said she thought that Australians were becoming quite paranoid, particularly in relation to immigration issues. She tapped paranoid into a search engine and came up with pages about alien invasion.

The piece of work that she eventually created was a movie poster featuring Sigourney Weaver playing the indomitable Ripley in the Alien film series. Against a background of a huge, swirling Australian flag, Ripley stood proudly clutching a stun gun and surrounded by aliens. "Ripley will save us!" the headline pronounced.

It all seemed to be going well and I was looking forward to the multimedia event. It was our first chance to publicise the work being done in the creative arts courses and we intended to invite as many press contacts as we could.

Then things took an unexpected turn.

A couple of my students carefully considered the theme and came up with images that, viewed in a different context, would look identical to right-wing propaganda. They had both taken exception to the views of Taj Din al-Hilali, who was then receiving a great deal of media attention.

The sheik is no longer the Sydney mufti. But at the time he was being roundly criticised for his comments about women, foreign policy and nationality. Probably the most publicised translated quote referred to scantily clad women as "uncovered meat" and drew a link between rape and a woman's dress. There was also a clanger about Australia's origins as a penal colony that raised multiple media hackles.

Both students came to me to discuss their planned works. One wanted to make a sculpture, like a flavoured milk carton, call it The un-Australian Shake, and have a picture of the sheik on the side. The other was interested in having an image of the sheik, surrounded with a collage of his most problematic quotes, with a big red stamp, similar to what you would find on a passport, branding him un-Australian.

The reader may think this is trivial, given that both images are fairly innocuous and one is quite funny, but after my conversation with the students I agonised over my response.

On one hand, I had a left winger's knee-jerk reaction to anything that looked remotely right wing. I had strong reservations about encouraging students to create work that could be interpreted as demonising Muslims or that ridiculed their religious leadership. The Cronulla riots had exposed deep fault lines in our communities and I was against anything that would broaden this divide, no matter how minor.

On the other hand, if I honestly believed in freedom of thought, speech and expression, how could I possibly try to dissuade my students from pursuing their ideas? It seemed unethical to ask an individual to express their point of view, then attempt to undermine it. Such an action was also hypocritical on a personal level; privately I had railed against the sheik's comments. If I tried to influence these students, no matter how subtly, I would be gutless and dishonest.

I tried to tell myself that it was OK to intervene because it was my job to do so. I had arrived at the doctrine of "you can have free speech, as long as you agree with me".

It's a cycle of reasoning that many, far superior minds have agonised over through the centuries. If your society chooses to curtail an absolute right to freedom of speech, where do you draw the line? Do you make exceptions in cases of national security? If so, who defines national security and who polices this definition? How can we reconcile a right to privacy with a right to freedom of speech? Where is the line between the public's right to know and an individual's protection against defamation?

Most important for me was how to teach people to think for themselves but still imbue their education with a commitment to democratic principles and respect for humanity. The last thing we want is students with carbon-copy minds.

I went back to my colleagues and discussed the issue. One colleague observed, quite pragmatically, that even if students did produce right-wing work, it would be regarded as ironic in the context of the event. It wouldn't have a literal reading, he argued, when placed alongside the other works (the "irony is all pervasive, all knowing and all powerful" response). Viewers attending a university event would just assume humour was intended.

Another colleague stood firmly behind the "no censorship" principle underlying the event. Her point was that our role was purely curatorial; we were not there to influence students' views, only to help them bring their ideas to fruition (the "Hitler's mother's midwife" response). "Artists need to become politicians in leading this debate about our cultural identity" was her robustly worded view.

Both students were, and are, bright and perceptive. They realised that their images might be considered politically incorrect and asked me directly for my views. For the briefest moment, and I am ashamed to admit this now, I thought about talking them out of it. What if it was embarrassing for the university? Or generated negative publicity for our program or if the public found these works offensive? Then I realised how spineless I was being. I told them they should make their work as planned and they did.

The episode got me thinking about censorship, self-censorship and the desire to conform. If someone like me, who has always prided themselves on being an independent thinker, is so quick to censor another person's point of view, then what about everyone else?

In the end there were barriers to staging the exhibition; we had wanted the event to be a largely student run enterprise but many people were too busy or not sufficiently enthused by the theme to participate. We had a small group of very committed students but not enough to organise the large scale multimedia spectacle we had envisaged.

At the time of writing this article the un-Australian event had been postponed indefinitely.