For a long time I have not felt part of Australia, not felt Australian, not wanted to be known as Australian. The national events and achievements to which we’re meant to thrill always felt to some degree embarrassing and ridiculous, from the winking kangaroo mascot at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games to the boxing kangaroo and the idolisation of Alan Bond, a corporate criminal, to the endless Anzackery of recent years and our determined involvement in America’s forever wars to the point of war crimes.
Over the last three decades, as we became a meaner, more militarised, more racist and more arrogant country, the national honours every year felt an ever greater national humiliation as billionaires’ children, prominent politicians and big-time burghers took out the top gongs. We gave Cathy Freeman the bottom gong, Margaret Court the top. Go figure: it’s not hard. Ben Roberts-Smith was lauded as a national hero and put in charge of the Australian of the Year and you felt it, you understood what was being said.
And when they gave Australian of the Year to an Indigenous man who tried to use the award to throw light on the appalling situation of his brothers and sisters, the nation – or the ugliness of us – turned on him. Meanwhile Australia Day, which once seemed to have the small virtue of irrelevance and meaninglessness, now had too much meaning and none of it was good.
We had become known internationally as small and nasty – the nation that pioneered the punishment of the innocent and the weakest in the theatres of cruelty that were Nauru and Manus, the nation that burnt and yet kept on subsidising the biggest fossil fuel export industry in the world, the nation of war criminals, human rights offences, and, in the Christchurch mass murderer, of murderous white nationalists. The radical right, the white supremacists with their program of violent overthrow, began claiming national symbols, national meanings, national identity, and the Liberal party – the dominant party of government since 1996 – began claiming the cries and slogans of the far right as their own.
In 2018 government senators voted for a motion declaring “It is OK to be white”. Though later disowned, at the time the vote was supported by the likes of Christian Porter and Matthias Corman. Only a few weeks ago our acting prime minister – Michael McCormack, the man who last year blamed the summer apocalypse on exploding horse shit – happily deployed the radical racist right slogan “All lives matter”. Our prime minister, when not on holiday, will happily tell Cricket Australia what to do rather than censure his own MP, Craig Kelly, who, in the week of the attack on the US Capitol – its home of democracy – repeated Trump’s big lie that the election he overwhelmingly lost was stolen. Trump was impeached, Kelly was protected.
But out there, beyond all the officially sanctioned lies, there was still an extraordinary land that shaped us all, though we could never see it.
And when Covid came, in spite of the weakness of our leaders we somehow found it within ourselves to act communally. I keep thinking about what my father told me and my brothers and sisters over and over when we were children, about the Death Railway, how the poor English POWs at a nearby camp, trapped within their class culture, “died like flies” as their officers sat in their tents with their food and medicine that could have saved their men.
The Australians at his camp, Hintok, under the leadership of, yes, a doctor, Edward “Weary” Dunlop, acted communally. Allied officers who, under the Japanese, did not have to work and received a small payment from the Japanese, were at Hintok expected to work and expected to contribute to a levy to pay for black market food and drugs for all.
This communal instinct is not the same as socialism. I suspect it’s not even political. Tom Uren, the great Labor leader lionised as the heart of the Left, said he learnt his socialism as a POW at Hintok under Dunlop’s leadership. Dunlop said he lost his socialism at Hintok.
Nor is communalism an unmitigated good; its corollary is Australian conformity, that disease of our people that cannot bear dissenting voices and difference.
Yet, for all that, once more the English are dying and the Australians are surviving. Once more, more or less, the doctors are here being listened to. We have discovered we are not poor clones of America, nor yet a modified British culture, but something different, but as ever we are unable to give tongue to that difference.
We are something other, and that other is deeply rooted in two things: this extraordinary land and 60,000 years of its human occupation. These two things have a claim on us, whether we wish to acknowledge them or not. We can pretend to deny them, to dismiss them, to claim it’s pretty ordinary to talk at all about such things.
We can continue to allow our politicians to seek to politicise everything and with their power to buy votes, electorates and government, and then dismiss as politics anyone who questions the association between their symbols – like Australia Day – and everything from the Big Bash to the Hottest 100. We can allow them to make an arts degree twice the price of a medical degree just to remind anyone who thought the life of the mind and soul mattered that here, in their Australia at least, these things did not and would not prevail.
But what the prime minister calls politics is no more or less than our story, which remains stifled and gagged, rendering us unable to honour it in its full complex majesty, tragedy and wonder.
Telling our story is not politics. Seeking to deny our story is power asserting itself over the past – which could also serve as a definition of politics in Australia in 2021.
For if we continue to remain unknown to ourselves, we are condemned to an ever more fractured, divided and unjust country whose future path is illuminated by the guttering lights of the USA, Hungary, Poland and Turkey. We need to understand these things so that we might understand ourselves and make something better of our country before we too find ourselves treading that same dangerous path.
That understanding is about something larger and greater than national symbols. But the national symbols still matter. Until they and we come together they block understanding, they deny truth, they divide us, and they feed the worst of what we are rather than the best.
Whatever the lyrics of our funeral dirge of a national anthem are, they are not about us. The national flag doesn’t depict a nation but the colony we will forever remain until we have our own symbols.
There is no longer a serious debate about Australia Day. A national day’s only purpose is to unite its people. On that measure – the only measure for a national day – Australia Day is an abject failure. A national day the biggest public gatherings of which are in opposition to its existence is not deserving of the name.
The date of 26 January has always been known by our leaders to be an insulting nonsense to Indigenous people. When in 1888, NSW celebrated a centenary of British colonisation, Henry Parkes, on being asked if Aboriginal people would be included, replied: “And remind them that we have robbed them?”
But still our leaders choose to remind them.
Australia Day as it is cannot unite us because it annually tears the great wound of our soul apart by reminding Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that we can never be one until we acknowledge our Indigenous past – and that means the invasion and its attendant horrors and continuing injustice as well as its glory: what Galarrwuy Yunupingu rightly described as “the great gift” of 60,000 years of an extraordinary civilisation.
And thinking about these things, what keeps rolling around in my head are Archie Roach’s words from a story in the Age about the national anthem’s inadequacies:
“We belong to an ancient land, we belong to an ancient story … that’s not just talking about First Peoples. I believe that everybody who lives in this country, whether they understand it or not, they belong to that story.
“I always talk about us being authors; all of us being authors of a new story for this country. And I really believe that. One story, one song. If anything, that’s probably the best [hook]. We belong. We belong to this country, we belong to this story, we belong to this song. Yeah.”
But how can we be authors of our own story when only the politicians and their class define what our story is and deny everyone else their voice, and above all Indigenous Australia the voice it has asked for?
Because Archie’s song is really the song. The only song. And we all belong to it. Beautiful Archie. Soul man, soul brother, soul father to the nation waiting to be born.
