Credit: Peter Shanks

Look, it’s usually tremendous fun to bait Nick Cater, the Exeter graduate and BBC/News Corp life, who pretends to be an Aussie. He’s the epitome of the British middle-class organisation man, cringing his way from new university to public megacorp, to Australian media monopoly – and then in his 50s, imagining that he’s Chips Rafferty riding his okaparinga, droving shiralees in the mulga or something.

Most times this doesn’t matter. He can tell us how the Australian spirit is evidenced in Phar Lap kicking the winning goal for St Kilda in the 1981 Stawell Gift etc etc, and we can nod along. But then, of course, he gets onto “white civilisation” :

… whatever tragedies befell the Aboriginal people, they were not enslaved. The leaders of early settlement were steeped in the classical liberal values that emerged, uniquely, in Britain, with the Enlightenment.

Gosh, there’s a lot to unpack there. We can’t even stop to remark that the Enlightenment was French and Dutch in origin, that to use the term “classical” and presume that it precludes slavery is an interesting position on your own history, to observe that the British had brought slaves with them – convicts, convicted of petty crimes in the draconian legal regime with which the 18th century Britain used to tame its growing urban working class – or that Governor Phillip, far from extending legal citizenship and the rights of man to Aboriginal people, used terror raids and random killings of them, to clear the land around Sydney. We can’t even pause to mention that in attacking the global scourge of slavery, he quotes Thomas Jefferson.

But what is most otiose about this fantasy is that slavery is exactly what Aboriginal people were subjected to, as dominance began to be legally formalised in the later 19th century. Deprived of citizenship, subjected to an explicitly genocidal program of racial elimination, communities broken up to provide housemaids and station labour, it was legal to “pay” Aboriginal people in goods, and illegal for them to leave their employers’ property without permission. This system continued into the 1950s. That is “not slavery” only by quibbling legal definitions. Apartheid laws on Aboriginal movement within Australia continued until 1967 — there are many people still around who could not, as adults, get on a train into Sydney, without a permission slip from the local authorities. Very enlightened.

Really, there are some things to be said about the way in which the “event” of January 26, 1788, is constructed by both sides, and the excessive moralising injected into brute historical events — but is this needy drivel the best the right has to offer in defence of Australia as constituted? If a sense of connection to the country as is depends on this saccharine fantasy — a product largely of Pol Pot’s last fanboy, Keith Windschuttle, Australia’s pre-eminent political fantasist across five decades – then it’s in more trouble than I thought. Still, good to start the whitewashing now; when that $50 million statue/boondoggle of Captain Cook goes up, Cater and co. are going to be applying the whitewash on an almost daily basis.