By now, those who have been campaigning for years, for renaming of buildings, places on the map, statue “reframing” etc, must be feeling a little ambivalent. The issue has finally taken off, but not as a result of campaigns — such as that run by Gary Foley and Tony Birch to rename the former Redmond Barry building at Melbourne University — but as a result of global news coverage of statue removals in Virginia and elsewhere in the South.

‘Twas ever thus in Australia. When we’re not leading, our politics appears to be dictated in an automaton fashion. This time, however, it has joined to something local — the campaign to rename/reassign Australia Day, creating a movement of some power and authority. To a degree it may be another and wholly unintended consequence of the same-sex marriage plebiscite. Putting that issue to a contested, jerry-built process has meant that the bases of social life, fundamental arrangements, have to be debated and discussed. The pro-marriage equality movement has become positive and focused; the No case is talking about people being able to marry bridges.

Once you open the process of questioning one social institution, the whole question of how something comes to be a social institution at all, comes to front and centre. The argument for the plebiscite was that people should have a say about any momentous changes to the way our society is constituted; now they’re having it about why some momentous changes people would like to see aren’t on the agenda. Had the Coalition had a parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage, it would have slipped through without creating any sort of political turbulence, as it did when the Cameron government took it through in 2014.

[Change the date of Australia Day for patriotism’s sake!]

The right have added to the force of this new push by being utterly absurd about the moderate proposals being put forward to alter the framing of various statues. Stan Grant suggested that a Captain Cook statue with the words “discovered Australia”, be relabeled. There’s plenty of ways to make an accurate, descriptive labeling, avoiding the Eurocentric notion that Aboriginal people didn’t exist until white people saw them. But for all the fuss you’d think Grant had torched the Polly Woodside with a Molotov, all bandanna-ed up. The intent is obvious, especially as regards Grant; the once consumer friendly commercial TV star, now trying to negotiate a path where he can communicate complex ideas to a large audience base, is on the way to being constructed as an “angry Aborigine”, another disappointment.

The right are pushing absurdity, if they think they can simply, err, stonewall this one. They’re framing this as if indigenous/settler politics are still being played out in the 1970s, a militant movement facing an overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic society, one narrative against another. It’s only when such a simple relationship exists — conqueror and conquered, sovereign people and subject people — that entities such as statues can project authority. That’s part of the rhetorical trick of statues. They look as though authority flows from them, literally as the voice of the dead (it’s possible that many people, in the earliest city-states, did hear statues talking to them — i.e. their own internal monologue projected out onto them). But once the relatively unified cultural base on which they stand shatters, their authority and “voice” vanishes too.

That effect in Australia has less to do with the direct challenge to them — in some ways the ’70s campaigns were more high-profile and militant — than it does the shift in Australian society, via 70 years of continuous non-Anglo immigration: Mediterranean, then east Asian, Indian and African. Right up to the 1990s, the Anglo-Celtic (and far more Anglo than Celtic) narrative held, and so too did the statues’ authority. But as the immigration rates continued, at some point the society wheeled around — especially in Melbourne and Sydney, where most of these things are. Suddenly they were surrounded by non-Anglo people in their tens, then hundreds of thousands going to work, to school, wherever.

Few if any such people are protesting against the statues. But that’s exactly the point. It’s the growing indifference underneath them, that is making them easier to topple literally or figuratively. They won’t topple, or relabel themselves, but the fact that they are now not sites of answers, but of questions, means that defenders of them are suddenly on the defensive. They should be welcoming relabeling proposals such as Stan Grant’s as part of a genuine dialogue, not insisting that we have to accept the edicts of 1910.

[Fuck off, we’re full (of contradictions): the discontents of Australia Day]

Not ironically at all, John Howard has made a relatively rare public statement decrying the urge to “rip up history,” etc. It is extraordinary. The major event of the Howard era, for historians of the future, will be that large-scale immigration hit the tipping point when non-Anglo population went from being significant, to still-marginal, to being a dominant group as a collective. They will further note that Howard, after the 1996, and the 2001 victories, was the only politician in Australia with the moral and political authority to change this. He didn’t. Did he imagine that the country wouldn’t change? It seems so. 

The right developed a myth to try and combine large-scale immigration with a notion of Anglo-Celtic continuity — that “multiculturalism” was not an inevitable product of multi-ethnic immigration sources, but a piece of social engineering dreamed up by pointy-heads. Without it, apparently, everyone from everywhere, would be changing their surnames to “Watson”, and having a lamb roast on Sundays. Of course, the reverse was the case. As society has become multicultural in practice, it’s the right who have come up with one bad social engineering idea after another, from Brett Nelson’s “Simpson’s Donkey” celebrations, to Howard’s meddling with a conservative-drafted national curriculum that still wasn’t conservative enough, to the promulgation of “enduring Australian values”. That does not mean progressives will get their way on everything, or even most things — as I’ve noted the crucial knowledge-class divide is key to understanding the capacity for sudden reversals. And doubtless the hard-right and white supremacists will rally and counter-attack.  

But the right would be well-advised to get used to the idea of negotiating these things out. These political events are not merely sudden upsurges or random collocations of energy. They are, in part, the after-effects of something that has already happened, and which now cannot be undone. Perhaps as a compromise we could agree to a large statue of John Howard, in Earlwood, his childhood home, where in the 1950s his mother’s decision to go to a Methodist rather than Anglican church was a matter of some agonising — Earlwood, where 40% of the population were born overseas, 28% of the residents are Orthodox, and 22% speak Greek at home (and 7% Arabic, and 5% Italian). The plaque could read: “John Howard Prime Minister 1996-2007. He destroyed Anglo-Celtic Australia for ever.”

I very much hope we put it up in his lifetime.