For Australia’s media, right now it’s all election all the time. But curiously absent from the chatter is the big issue that Anthony Albanese, at least, raises whenever he grabs attention (including last week’s budget reply) — the Uluru Statement from the Heart, with its part-demand, part-offering of voice, truth, treaty.
Yet, when — if — future history gets a chance to look back at the Albanese government, it will likely be his management of the Uluru Statement he’ll be marked for.
Now, in an Australian contribution to the post-COVID reading list, Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia examines why. Part memoir, part history, part political philosophising, the book reaches for a 21st-century, Lucky Country-style look for what its subtitle calls “A search for the soul of the nation”.
“Australia,” she opens, “remains an oddly amorphous idea.” It’s both solid and provisional. “A derivative nation, ready to absorb and transform ideas carried on the wind like migratory birds.”
The solidity is the gift of “girt by sea” national borders (“A nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation,” as founding prime minister Edmund Barton put it) and the cultural commonalities resulting from the continent-wide spread of all three layers of human occupation: First Nations, British settlers and multicultural migration.
Whenever we try to go beyond the physical — “a land of sweeping plains” and all that — we quickly hit the provisional, rarely moving beyond “anodyne statements of universal values, pride in democratic institutions, and boastful backslapping about being the most successful multicultural nation in the world”.
Not bad things, of course. But not distinctively Australian either. As Schultz notes: “Australia routinely scores as one of the least distinctive in surveys that measure cultural similarities and differences … not uniquely tolerant, nor distinctively committed to respect, rule of law, equality or intellectual autonomy.”
Hammered into being Australian, these “values” — a Howard-era concept, Schultz reminds us — rarely go much deeper than “a fair go”, “mateship”, resilience — and luck.
Feels like we haven’t got much further than we were when Robin Boyd wrote some 60-odd years ago in his classic The Australian Ugliness: “There can be few other nations which are less certain than Australia as to what they are and where they are.”
Last month, we got another look at just how anodyne these “values” were when Princeton-educated media oligarch Lachlan Murdoch launched the Institute of Public Affairs’ Centre for the Australian Way of Life. He chewed them over and spat them out in an attempt to enlist the Australian “fair go” into yet another foreign war — the US culture war.
All nations are “imagined communities”, even when, as Schultz says of Australia, the preoccupation has a touch of the prosaic: “a country that works most of the time”.
Feels like settler countries like Australia just need more imagination than others. For Schultz, the spur for that imagination is hiding in plain sight: “Australia is only truly unique as home for 65 millenia to the world’s oldest continuing civilisation.” More than culture, it offers different ways of understanding land, relationships and governance.
She adds: “Until that truth is fully embraced, the paradox will prevail, erode the soul of the nation and leave Australia half-formed.” The path to the Australian soul lies through the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its program of voice, truth, treaty.
Schultz has been a journalist, academic and cultural policy worker. She was one of the coordinators of the Rudd government’s 2020 Summit. As founding editor of the Queensland-based Australian literary magazine Griffith Review, she has launched or boosted the careers of many of this country’s notable 21st-century writers, including Miles Franklin winners like Alexis Wright and Melissa Lucashenko.
She has been at the centre of the attempts to understand what it means to be Australian through culture, and draws on these experiences to map how Howard co-opted the once-radical settler myths with an Aussie-Aussie-Aussie nation-building to set against the challenges of growing migration diversity and the rising demands of First Nations peoples. But she cautions, “pride comes before a fall”.
She tracks the consequent culture war moments, large and small: the rise of Pauline Hanson, the Cronulla riots, the bullying of Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Scott McIntyre over the Gallipoli legend, the false allegations of Manning Clark’s Order of Lenin.
Sceptical of politics as it’s being practised in Australia, Schulz concludes with a demand for a new social contract, starting with little steps — “In Australia, climate change and the failure to recognise First Nations people are the talismans” — which can be addressed both locally and nationally.
While Australia’s media, obsessively focus on the short-term, ask, “Where’s the money coming from?”, maybe we should focus more on these issues that will shape Australia’s future history.
Love the cartoon!
Anyway, I think that the question ‘what does it mean to be a human being ‘ is more meaningful than the ‘what does it mean to be Australian’ question.
…. The media asking “Where’s the money coming from?” before “Where’s that last pile of money actually gone?”
The current Australian political culture is not under-pinning Australian democracy . . . it is undermining both democracy and unity. We claim one national entity, when in fact we have an uncommitted diversity that fosters disunity. There can be only one sovereign nation. One national flag. Neither can or should be shared. But every soul included.
We have always been vague and confused about what constitutes Australian culture, because we have always been collectively intellectually lazy. When I hear anyone these days proclaiming the lucky country, it amuses me that the mouthy zealot does not understand that by the term Donald Horne meant we were dumb but lucky, despite our national and cultural incompetence. For many years until the end of the 70s there was a political consensus of egalitarianism an insular cocoon within which we could drift happily, ignorant of out cultural shallowness. Then capitalism tore all that apart and atomised us into selfish idiots rather than contended egalitarian idiots. The political embrace of global neoliberalism simply accelerated the atomised disconnection of society and of community. Some of that community was salvaged in the disasters of the past 2.5 years. But capitalism will waste no time in erasing and delusions of a better life for all with vacuous greed and a race to destroy the earth.
Having said all that, I agree that visionary leadership could create an authentically lucky country through the 2 big issues mentioned: 1 Embracing the Uluru Statement from the Heart & 2. Becoming the world leader in renewable energy and green production of essentials like hydrogen, lithium, steel, aluminium etc.
But we seem to remain collectively too stupid to realise those 2 massive opportunities for a truly great Australian future.
That visionary leadership will, therefore, arrive by purest luck, if ever.
Our population seems to have been cowed in fear, convinced that we can’t afford anything, and so should not attempt anything.
I still vividly remember the abject, visceral horror that met PM Turnbull’s suggestion that we should become an innovation-driven nation, in some quarters. Innovation? Doesn’t that involve change? Won’t that mean that my lot gets worse, somehow?
I remember feeling quite positive about being an Australian in the mid-90s, in the era of Keating’s big vision statements about how were were facing up to our destiny in Asia. I traveled a fair bit at the time, and had the impression that we were well thought-of abroad, too. I subsequently learned that many at home were horrified by the thought that we would interact more with Asia, and that that was one of the reasons he soon left office. Howard and think-small had won, and has been winning ever since.
No. I think you’re wrong. I remember feeling negative about Australia in the mid-90s. The Hawke-Keating era changes had years to play out and were bought with massive amounts of social security and other welfare and faux promises (SGC 1992 anyone?). Unemployment was high, stuck around 8%, we were coming off high inflation of the 1980s, had high interest rates, low rates of economic growth or sporadic growth rates. Everything was up in the air. HECS had been introduce in 1989 and we were told that we should try to become the clever country after the dreaded Dawkins reforms. Keatings big vision Asia is Australia statements were little more than him throwing the switch to vaudeville. We were promised 1 billion trees but didn’t even get 1 million of them. We had Richo making a hash of things. Keating didn’t leave office because of Australian’s dislike or distrust of Asia or suspicions of Asia. Keating is a Sinophile. To him it was economics and it dawned on him earlier than it dawned on Howard and co. Simple. Howard was there for people sick of Keating because at the time he seemed like too much pain for not much gain and as the economy improved, people bought his cut backs, rid the gravy train, guff about responsible economic management. It was Labor’s fault for not burying Howard in the 1980s. Howard was one of the worst Treasurers in Australia’s history but Howard was a simple man and a simpleton that many Australians saw themselves reflected in him. Keating lacked a narrative and all he did was give the Aboriginal population a chip on their shoulder but nothing substantial. Like Beasley. Like Rudd. Keating’s big vision statements were fake. Nothing to them. Insincere and Keating had had enough of politics then in any case.
You sound like a True Believer, thoroughly disabused by reality.
….hehehehehe…100%
This article is a bit of a mixed bag. It contains a range of contested issues. Rudd’s 2020 Summit was a gab fest of wannabes and a carbon emitting event if it ever got off the ground. I don’t credit Schultz much here. I dispute Schultz or your interpretation of Schultz’s analysis of Howard co-opting Australian myths to set against challenges posed by immigration and multicultural diversity. I believe Howard was a distinct racist in the old Empire man school but changed his tune as he and his followers convinced him and convinced themselves that such old school racism was bad for business. This is just old fashioned 1st year undergraduate Marxist university analysis and interpretation from Schultz. Immigration under Howard reached record levels ina manner never imagined by Hawkes or Keating in their wildest dreams. Schultz has missed the point entirely. Immigration and subsequent multiculturalism are necessary for business to keep labour costs down. That is why the ACCI, the BCA, various primary producer groups and individual businesses are harassing the government constantly to open the floodgates to immigration so they can exploit temporary migrants, working holiday makers, skilled visas, etc. Migration is a business model. Schultz is a letter day whinger and doesn’t explore Australia’s soul or heart. She just hates Australia. The Aboriginal issue is complex and embracing the Statement of the Heart is similar to Rudd’s embrace of the apology to the stolen generations – it doesn’t involve a cost. There is no liability on the part of government to compensate the Aboriginal population or affected individuals. I notice Labor never has fairly compensated the Aboriginal people who worked for nothing on farms and cattle stations and homes until 1974.
The issues of the Cronulla riots and One Nation and Pauline Hanson are just an excuse to pile on the bilge in her uninformed shallow diatribe. And you still have not answered which other country has such multiculturalism been successful. Of course Australia is not distinctly unique in its values or myths associated with those values but not alternative has been put and not other narrative has been drawn. Just a uniquely traditional and modern Marxist hate-fest on Australia.
So many words. So little to say.
Wow, lots of interesting views here, that’s one of many things I love and admire about here, Australia, you can have any views, no matter if I agree or don’t, then just “get on with it”… thanks for sharing folks ?
Pleeez try to hew your verbiage into paragraphs – the raw, unshaped wordslab bodes ill for any content that may be hidden therein.