Sunday, January 17, 2016


AussieBum chief reacts to claims Australia Day undies are offensive to Indigenous culture



The "cultural appropriation" nonsense again

AussieBum's chief executive says he was naive to the fact its Australia Day underwear featuring dot paintings, boomerangs and a cartoon depiction of a traditional Aboriginal person could cause upset.

The company has received criticism for its festive undies on social media, kicked off by National Indigenous Television host Nathan Appo who tweeted: "I think it's disrespectful to indigenous people of this county on so many levels."

AussieBum CEO Sean Ashby said the company had received three formal complaints via email, the first of which he acted on, recalling an original design which featured the Australian flag on top of what looked like Uluru.

"It wasn't even Uluru, it was a mountain, however, I can also see it could be interpreted that way," Mr Ashby told the ABC.

"I saw [the design] as inclusive but then when I had one person email me and point out some really obvious issues, which quite frankly I was naive to ... the penny dropped and that product was taken straight off the line."

    "I find the 'Ausday' hipster and brief designs very offensive to myself and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Australians (many on social media already), and to all Australians, given there is a stylised, stereotypical and offensive version of an Aboriginal person standing on one leg," the complaint email read.

    "Along with the imagery of Uluru and boomerangs accompanying this image in the promotional material for this design, this amounts to cultural appropriation and racism, rather than celebration or respect for Aboriginal peoples and their cultures."

SOURCE


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cultural appropriation and racism nonsense by the professionally offended.
If aborigines do not like how they are seen, they might try to improve their life style to be more in line with the modern World.

Anonymous said...

AussieBum's chief executive should grow a pair. With his response it is evedent he's a gelding.

Anonymous said...

So an image of a boomerang is now racist.

I have two boomerangs on my lounge room wall, a pair of aboriginal clapper sticks on a shelf, a T-shirt with aboriginal dot design, a spear and thrower, and some gifts given me by an aboriginal neighbour, also a face mask from PNG, a PNG native bow, a dugong tooth carved into a crocodile by a PNG native, so I am definitely a rotten white male racist. But it gets worse. I also have an aboriginal dot painting... which I did myself. I suppose I should be in gaol.

Anonymous said...

Time that the Aboriginal society joined the rest of the world in the 21st century. Talk about cultural appropriation how about we discuss their usage of white technology?

Alpha Skua said...

Getting a little bit tired of whining liberal wanks