"I’m sorry for not caring about the blight on our nation that Heinz is about to launch upon us by..."

I’m sorry for not caring about the blight on our nation that Heinz is about to launch upon us by promoting ketchup. I’m more concerned about ignorant politicians who rabbit on about ‘they need English, they need English’ when talking about Aboriginal Australians, as though they don’t recognise it for themselves. And rabbiting on about ‘schools need to have a focus on English’, as though there are remote schools that don’t focus on English.

If only we Aussies weren’t all so overwhelmingly monolingual and realised that you can function happily knowing two or more languages. And are we so insecure about our cultural identity that the first sign of a relatively useless term like tomato sauce being at risk can cause anxiety about the downfall of Australian life as we know it?

I spend a lot of time around elders who over the course of their lifetime have watched entire languages slowly fall out of use under the pressures of English, assimilation, awful language policy, economic rationalism and ridiculous levels of ignorance from Westerners until it all becomes too much and the only people they have left to speak their language to is, at best, the 70+ year olds there are still alive, or at worst, only themselves.