What does Pride mean to you? The 2023 Mardi Gras Parade?
Maybe it’s the 2014 film Pride, when a group of LGSM activists raised money to help families affected by the British miners’ strike in 1984.
But why the red carnation? Because it’s a symbol of pride. I say a symbol because the few readers of these posts could come up with other flowers denoting pride. It’s also the national flower of Spain (today’s useless fact). Different colours are significant for many reasons. Take the green carnations notably worn by Oscar Wilde and those close to him in 1890s London. Then there is white for purity and for Mother’s Day; not everywhere though. Here, Down Under, Chrysanthemums or ‘chrissies’ are regarded as the traditional Mother’s Day flower because they end with the word ‘mum’. Believe that if you like, but it may be because they are abundant in early May?
Were you to ask half a dozen unconnected people what Pride signified for them you’d likely end up with six totally different answers. You could stay with nature:
( A pride of lions courtesy Encyclopaedia Britannica)
At a mundane level it could simply stand for its acronym Personal Rights in Defense and Education, the organization formed in Los Angeles, California in 1966 by Steve Ginsburg.
For many in this corner of the world it would be the iconic Sydney Mardi Gras Parade held last February. It was the first time the parade had returned to the streets of Sydney since the beginning of the pandemic. More than 12,000 marched, walked and danced their way down a packed and festive Oxford Street.
Not so well advertised was the exhibition overlapping the parade. Time Out magazine had this to say: Following a renowned five-year-long world tour, Fleurs de Villes, the whimsically splendid, bespoke flower show that has taken floral folks by storm from Edinburgh to Miami, returned to Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens but, this year, with a distinct pride-esque twist.
Rainbow-coloured umbrellas were in evidence in London, where a million flocked for the first parade since the lockdown. The festive parade was marred only by the demonstration by Just Stop Oil. Good advertising for Coca Cola though.
Today’s grammar lesson: An abstract noun is a thing that we can’t see, feel, smell, touch or taste i.e. PRIDE, which is what this post is about. A few years ago a report from the Australian National University found that 90% of Australians had pride in their country, especially for achievements in the arts, sciences and, unsurprisingly, sports. The report begged the question as to who gets to be Australian. To try and answer this question would be to open a can of worms and is not the intention of this post. The Guardian (Australian edition), which seems to reflect accurately the state of the national psyche, said a few years back that ‘National pride in Australia is abstract at times and distracts from important issues….. Australians have become too concerned with creating proud Australians and have stopped focusing on what it actually means to be proud.’ There you have it.
Courtesy pixabay
But, financial uncertainty has affected national pride and sense of belonging in Australia, according to the ANU. The COVID glow that made this soar is fading as economic uncertainly unsettles Australians’ confidence. For Madame and me this has manifested itself in an unusual way. When we arrived Down Under the bank interest rate was at an historical low of 0.10%. In May it was raised to 0.35% per annum – their first rate increase since November 2010. Today it is 4.1%. We were looking at property with a view to buying, but there are so many government imposed restrictions that this is on the back burner, but more about those in a later post.
Our on-line searches showed that the majority of estate agents started their sales pitch with ‘We proudly present this beautiful family home…….’ or something along those lines. Occasionally they proudly ‘represented’ a property. Does that mean that the first sale had fallen through? It’s confusing: are they representing or re-presenting and does it matter? Interestingly, as interest rates have risen so has this type of presentation dwindled, but pride has not vanished from the supermarkets……
nor from the farmers…..
……….and dairy farmers……………
Wasn’t sure about this one, but this is what the company says: ‘Each box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes begins with corn sourced and grown on Aussie farms, prepared at the mill and transported to our factory in Sydney.’ That’s all right then.
Our local Woolworths stocks a range of salt from Southeastern Australia. Murray River Salt is a proud, family owned and operated Australian small business refining and marketing natural pink salt.
even manufacturers of paint brushes are proudly Australian owned……….
… and so on until you’re hard pressed to find something Australians are not proud of!
Pity about this though.
Another Down Under diary 