Pat Grant's Blue and Australian Identity

Pat Grant's Blue is possibly one of the most intelligent deconstruction of Australian identity and latent bogan racism ever written. It's also a very good comic book that's well produced and drawn instead of being a narrative with a graphic novel tacked onto it. The story of young kids adjusting to adulthood as times change around their fictional isolated country beach town while immigration of blue people from an unnamed nation sets tensions between cultures to a boil explores the uncomfortable and weird subtext of racism in Australia that seems odd because these people are fighting for a way of life that wasn't very culturally enriched to begin with. They fear losing their precious meat pies and sausage rolls while disparaging newly introduced cuisine to their local area that's made by immigrants that don't speak their language, but it's left unsaid whether the noodles in a bowl they make is better than what the yobs had before. In the final panel of Blue the central bogan character is seen eating one of these bowls even as he literally whitewashes the blue alien graffiti off a wall, which is re-claimed by a passing by blue person as he abandons his post. The graphic novel before us could be misinterpreted as a right wing screed against immigration but the author states in the end notes he's not a right wing crank at all, and given Shaun Tan took a look at this thing before he was willing to publish it says a lot about where this Pat Grant guy's intentions lie. He's so successfully captured the mindset of a bogan racist within a fictional universe with blue alien people that he could be mistaken for a racist himself.

But in the endnotes, Genealogy Of The Boofhead: Images, Memory And Australian Surf Comics, included in the back of the graphic novel, Pat Grant's true genius as historian as well as cartoonist emerges.

I knew I wanted to write about localism, racism and the creepy politics that play out in small town supermarkets and surf club car parks, but the ideas I came up with didn't work until I combined them with the story of some spotty kids who walk up the line to see some human wreckage. - Pat Grant

 Yet the disturbing undertones of Australia as a culture of bogans isn't fully appreciated with the text of the Blue graphic novel alone until the themes of this work are further elaborated on in the endnotes:

Today's 12-year-old will never understand what it was like growing up in an isolated Australian coastal town in the 90s. The nearest comic book store was six hours' drive from my home. The internet was five years late and another five had to pass before it was fast enough to be useful. The media we had access to on the north coast of New South Wales was as bland and lacking in sustenance as the white bread in our lunchboxes. To add to this, Australia does not have a wealth of comic art history. In fact, this country has a bad record when it comes to any kind of history. Our way of writing history is to destroy old things pertinent to our landscape and experience, and to import readymade mythologies from overseas. There's not a lot of comic art floating around Australia, in the way that there is in the US, nor is there a culture of collecting it. If we had a silver or golden age of comics, it's unknown to me. And while there are attempts at a publishing industry like that in the States, a truly Australian comics culture has been something of a chimera. That's not to say there weren't or aren't amazing artists or devoted fans, but when it seems you're on the rock farthest from the bright center of the comic-book universe, Tatooine syndrome tends to prevail. Success on the sandy planet isn't much success at all, and there's always another womp rat in a Southern Cross singlet looking to tear you down. - Pat Grant

There is so much in that singular statement that expresses so much of the older, Generation X mentality towards Australian culture that says more than I ever could about how the Australian creative character feels stunted, and no matter how much you wish to create something beautiful and thoughtful  some yob in a Southern Cross singlet will kick down the elaborate and wondrous castle you have built on the sand. The beginning sequence of panels where a newcomer to the beach inquires what his peers are up to, explaining he's from Sydney and he's come to visit the beach. But when the locals who have built what they declare is not a sand castle, but a keep, grow bored with their own creation, they kick down the object of their creativity, leaving the newcomer to gaze upon the ruin of something that he showed interest in. The symbolism of these sequential images is palpable given the above statement, which I haven't entirely finished unpacking. Perhaps Pat Grant is implying that the Australian culture has been neglected and destroyed once the yobs who made it popular are bored with it, and furthermore his statement seems to imply that any Australian attempt at creating any kind of art that wants to compete on a world scale with imported works has to cope with the looming boofheads who will tear down any attempt to create a civilised world in the Land Down Under.

Pat Grant is entirely correct in one assumption. The isolation of a pre-internet Australia will never again exist for my generation and the ones coming after it. Where Pat Grant's generation must have seen apathy, cynicism and painful resignation to the lack of change and caring about our own history, I've seen slowly disappearing, if a bit gradually from the ranks of my own peers. The best and brightest of my peers I hang around with aren't going to risk trusting their future with the yobs who would tear down everything beautiful. There is a deep distrust of politicians currently with people my age, however it is not a cynicism rooted in the idea that nothing will ever change. It's the idea that we know how to run the country better than the boofheads in Parliament, and because we have no Bill Of Rights to call our own because of our archaic Constitution written in a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were considered subhuman and terra nullis was the order of the day, we feel completely powerless to change anything until we can finally take the reigns for ourselves.

The awkward embarrassment young people with intelligent minds feel about Australia isn't just the racism or the misogyny and the lack of a true established culture we haven't imported from elsewhere, it's the result of several generations of Australians living under the dinosaur era isolation mentality that refuses to die in spite of the internet. We feel like our politicians have to die off before the threats to our sanity and our reason expressed to the decaying wreck of bogan rule before anything good or beautiful can exist here. We care little for our history because we're screaming for a future where intelligence is valued and art can prosper to arrive.