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Australian underwear company AussieBum have been criticised for their Australia Day underwear. The new range features dot paintings, boomerangs and a cartoon depiction of an Aboriginal person. The associated advertising campaign also featured an Australian flag at the top of a red mountain that looks like Uluru.
Social media was fast to react, with NAtional Indigenous Television host Nathan Appo tweeting, “I think it’s disrespectful to indigenous people of this country on so many levels.”
AussieBum CEO Sean Ashby told the ABC that the company has received three formal complaints, the first of which he acted on by recalling the original design.
One of the complaints stated that the design amounted to cultural appropriation and racism. “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.
Ashby admits that he was naive to “some really obvious issues”. However he says that when the penny dropped the product was taken straight off the line.
“At the end of the day it really was just naivety to an issue in Australian culture and one that is so sensitive,” Mr Ashby said referring to an exclusion of Indigenous people in society.
The underwear’s detail was first noticed during hype around the advertising model’s missing belly button. “I’m concerned with @aussieBum’s Australia Day underwear campaign. Where’s his belly button?!?” TV personality Dr Brad Mackay tweeted.
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