What is Australia? Here’s a post-COVID look

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.