Foreign Correspondence

[fuagf]

Cultivating Identity
Thomas Keneally

"The growing population of immigrants in Greece — about 800,000 are registered, and an estimated 350,000 or more are in the country illegally — adds to the anxieties of many Greeks, who are seeing the government’s once-generous social spending evaporate. They complain that the foreign residents are depriving them of jobs and threatening the national identity."


Thomas Keneally considers the capaciousness
of the garden of our national identity

It is a truism that the people most certain about national identity are often the ones who draw its boundaries most narrowly, and who are moved to deplore whatever they see as lying outside those boundaries. But we must talk primarily about what we believe as a community, and not what we think we should believe. To try seriously to define identity is not primarily an exercise in morality or social improvement.

Former immigration minister Kevin Andrews

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Insert: Haneef to Stay in Custody in Australia Mon.July
16, 2007 2:39:17 AM, BRISBANE, Australia(AP)

[...]

"I reasonably suspect that he has, or has had, an association with persons engaged in criminal activity, namely terrorism, in the U.K.," Andrews told reporters in Canberra, the national capital. "That's the basis on which I have made this decision."
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=21257174 .. and reply .. Haneef case descends into farce .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/replies.aspx?msg=21257174 .. Andrews, a conservative troglodyte had nothing against Dr. Haneef, except his own prejudices and his perceived political needs.
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was certain about national identity in 2007, when he criticised the Sudanese community. I am attracted to the Andrews statement because I have travelled in the Sudan during the years of oppression and chaotic civil war, which have not ended despite the Peace Agreement of 2005.

Speaking of Sudanese immigrants, Andrews said, ‘Some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope.’ It is a cry that has been heard throughout Australian history, and no more so than in the past two decades. He accused the refugees of refusing to embrace the Australian way because of their ‘race-based gangs, altercations between various groups from Africa … Tension within families.’ It is true, however, that he was unable to back his claims with any figures. Nor did he mention any important aspects of advances in adaptation to Australia that Sudanese immigrants might have made that lay outside his certainties of identity.

And in part, too, he was hiding his department’s light under a bushel to the extent that Australia had shown compassion in taking its share of Sudanese refugees and thus rescuing them from camps like Kakuma in Kenya,

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Insert: KENYA: Sudanese influx strains Kakuma refugee camp
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95242/KENYA-Sudanese-influx-strains-Kakuma-refugee-camp

also, Syrians Hold On to Optimism at a Tent City in Turkey
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77756536&txt2find=tents
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of which his own department’s Sudanese Community Profile of 2007 reported, ‘There is frequent violence in the camp. Regular clashes occur among residents, many of them armed … Sexual assault is common. Children may have been born in the camps and are unfamiliar with any other lifestyle.’ Nor did he mention that given this unspeakable background, the Sudanese Association of Australia and similar bodies do what they can to bridge the gulf of experience between, on one hand, civil war and what can rightly be called ethnic cleansing by the Sudanese government and, on the other, a settled Australian life. The association’s aims include ‘to do all lawful things, in the best interests of the community’. In 2007 it signed a memorandum of agreement with Victoria Police, with the obvious aim of guiding Sudanese youth through the criminal justice system, but also of helping with law and order issues. It is not as if, as a community, they aren’t trying.

There has been no lack of commentators who have in the past two decades uttered very nearly the same sentences as Kevin Andrews about other Australian immigrant groups, particularly groups from countries such as Vietnam and Lebanon. These are nations where law and order has, as in the Sudan, broken down for long and savage periods.

It is true that the phases of adjustment of new arrivals to Australia have never been without some bemusement from established Australians and the arrivals both. These adjustments often take place far from the fashionable suburbs and undeniably put as much pressure on the long-settled locals as on the newcomers. They impose a temporary cultural bewilderment on those who consider themselves the true Australians, and call forth from them what has been till now a blessedly temporary hostility. But the locals also frequently offer, individually and through organisations, fraternal support as well. And the people who draw identity narrowly often depict the immigrant group as making no attempt to find their place in society. All is decency and Australianness on this side of the narrowly drawn fence, and ill-will on the other. I argue though that this mutual coming-to-terms is not a departure from the Australian way of life. It is and has been the Australian way of life for most of my existence. If one lives long enough, one sees that what at first we deplore, we end by celebrating, and what we don’t want a bar of becomes that of which we boast.

I clearly remember immigrants I encountered as a child, an era in which Greeks and Italians were often referred to charmingly as ‘the Abos of southern Europe’. A family from the particular region of southern Europe, a region hard-soiled and harrowed with poverty, moved in next door to us in Homebush, New South Wales. We were somewhat astonished to discover that, as they reasonably enough had done on the hard earth they came from, they used their night soil as fertiliser for their garden. Being generous, they offered my mother some of the crop of their tomatoes, which were rich and plump. How’s that for cultural bewilderment? My mother was a progressive woman and accepted the gift with thanks. I cannot remember if we ate them or not. I know as well that both the daughters of that family went to university. Indeed, cultural accommodation on both sides has been vastly helped in my lifetime by equality of opportunity, another plank of Australian identity. We still believe that that equality exists. Many assert it does, and one hopes it does, though the figures themselves are not necessarily hopeful. And as we all know, equality of opportunity has been a hard struggle for the Aboriginal community and, is still being painfully worked out, with the balance of pain very unequal indeed.

But I argue that it is part of Australian identity to adjust to and come to treasure the stranger,
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Insert:
White supremacists can't handle the changing demographics in the U.S. - much like teabaggers.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78281504
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whereas many commentators consider distrust a valid statement of the same identity. While politicians and civic leaders, after all, often congratulate us on tolerance, at the same time there is that in us that likes to see Australia as a hermetically sealed entity, which even a few hundred hapless creatures on a leaky boat can puncture and violate. Another childhood story arises, as it always does when you’re my age. From the unforgettable first six months of 1942, I have never forgotten two particular Norman Lindsay covers for the Bulletin. One was of a rock- jawed digger with rifle ready to parry the advance of Japanese militarism down the archipelagos of South-East Asia, and quite up to the job. The other was of Australia as a threatened maiden (very well endowed, according to the Lindsay tradition) facing a leering Japanese soldier. I believe that it is contradictorily part of Australian identity to show a robust face to the world when it accords with our perception of events and to be the threatened maiden when it does not. I believe we became very much the threatened maiden during the Tampa incident on 2001,

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Insert: In August 2001, the Howard Government of Australia refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 438 rescued Afghans from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters, to enter Australian waters. This triggered an Australian political controversy in the lead up to a federal election, and a diplomatic dispute between Australia and Norway. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_affair
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when our imaginations were routed by the idea that we might be invaded by 438 powerless and disoriented Afghans whose un-Australian behaviour was emphasised for our benefit by the then prime minister, John Howard, and whose invasion might therefore be followed by hordes more.

So we are viscerally attracted to what we see as our stable identity, our enclosed garden of values. Indeed, we were promised an Australian garden at the time of Federation. It was to be a Caucasian garden, partially based on misreadings of Darwinism, on the science of phrenology, on the superiority of the Bible-based Christianity to other creeds, and a conscientiously held belief that intermarriage between Europeans and Asians was miscegenation, and so destructive of culture. It was also based on the shared value of keeping ‘coolie labour’ out of Australia. ‘The unity of Australia is nothing,’ said the remarkable Alfred Deakin, ‘if that does not imply a united race. A united race means not only that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas, and an aspiration towards the same ideals … a people qualified to live under the constitution.’ Deakin, first federal attorney-general, the first speaker in the Immigration Restriction Bill debate in 1901, declared that the Commonwealth did not want to offend foreigners, and did not himself argue racial superiority. It was purely a matter of protecting the equity of white Australians in their country. He confessed an intellectual interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, but he wanted to avoid for Australians the poverty he had seen in India.

Whiteness was an essential part of the Australian utopia, and in its name, Philippinos, Chinese and Japanese and the Pacific Islanders generally called Kanakas were about to be expelled from Australia by the proposed Act, or else their lives made so restrictive as to drive them out.

Deakin’s ideal Australia was Protectionist too, not globalised. His Australia would be one in which Protection created adequate wealth to justify fair wages. The harbingers of the utopia were tariffs, the ‘frugal comfort’ of the basic wage arising from the Harvester case of 1907, the pension, the franchise for women and other progressive reforms.

In our federal garden, the flora and fauna are familiar, the pathways are orderly, we have certainty as to where they will lead. People queue, according to enlightened traditions inherited from northern Europe, for water and for food, and they vacate seats on the benches in an orderly manner when their turn is up. But clamorous at the gate are people who, we believe, understand none of that, who not know the rules of the park and, we fear, harbour an active contempt for them. The fact that in the past many of those admitted from the great mass outside have not shown this contempt does not count in our fear of the people outside the gate at this very moment.

In my lifetime I have seen identity, the value of the enclosed garden, called up to resist the entry of Italians and Greeks because of their un-Australian manners; eastern Europeans because of their inscrutable languages and their hunger for success; Chinese because they broke the ethnic tapestry of Australia; Serbs and Croats because they hated each other; Vietnamese because they made gangs; Muslims because they are not only members of gangs but jihadists and, besides, wear the hijab. And so on. At every turn the garden has proven to be more capacious and adaptable than we thought it could be. The walls that seemed so solid and immutable actually shift. It is as if they were built of paper, not of stone. But, also at every turn, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, the rhetoric of exclusion has been persistent. It has always been interchangeable in the sense that if a particular statement of concern about perceived ethnic threat were deprived of its dateline, we would have a hard time saying in what era it was uttered.

We are familiar with Pauline Hanson’s condemnation of Asians: ‘they have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate’.

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'nudder insert:

Writing About the Extreme Right in Australia
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74405800

F6, Sarah, and her video, bring memories of, Pauline Hanson ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=48448508
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But in her maiden speech she also quoted a famous Australian as saying, ‘Do we want or need any of these people here? I am one red-blooded Australian who says no and who speaks for 90 per cent of Australians.’ That was Arthur Calwell, [ see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Calwell ] Labor Party leader, some forty-five to fifty years before Hanson. And who is being talked about in the following case? ‘The —— settlers of North Queensland are generally of an undesirable type and do not make good settlers … consideration should be given immediately to the racial stock of the immigrant.’ The missing word is ‘Greek’, and the statement is that of Thomas Ferry, commissioner of the 1925 Queensland Royal Commission on Numbers of Aliens in North Queensland. Endless instances of such repetitive rhetoric could be given.

There is no doubt that even now, in this century, in our struggles with the rawness and newness of events, we often cling to the Federation garden as if it did contain all our identity, hermetically sealed. But if one looks at the general results of immigration, and the sometimes total, the sometimes only partial triumph of necessity and goodwill over fear, an aphorism of art critic Robert Hughes comes to mind. Hughes wrote, ‘A culture raised on immigration cannot escape feelings of alien-ness and must transcend them in two possible ways: by concentration on “identity”, origins and the past, or by faith in newness as a value in itself.’ In the latter spirit, such programs as the Good Neighbour schemes of the 1940s and the contemporary Rural Australians for Refugees show a faith in newness as a value. And to underscore the point, they show that faith in the new is part of Australian identity too.

No-one is saying that Australian acceptance is a perfect virtue, but as a social force it has had notable successes. Contrary to the idea of total triumph, of course, one has to mention the Cronulla riots, the recorded cries of ‘Go home, Lebs!’, the replies of ‘These skippy Aussies want war’, and the associated violence. The tabloids seemed to salivate at the possibility of days of mayhem, anticipating perhaps the months that the very differently based French race riots had run in 2005–06. After Cronulla, there were days of unrest and mutual insults and even a display of firearms, fortunately not fired, outside the Lakemba Mosque where the Imam called for peace. The odious thunderbolts of shock jocks lit the sky. Apart from the police lockdown of the beach community, leaders from both sides, including such core Australian bodies as Lifesaving Australia, worked to settle the matter peaceably.

Australian tolerance on the Snowy River Scheme in the 1950s was described in the following terms by the journalist and novelist-to-be George Johnson: ‘The average man … is willing to accept the migrant if he brings with him no threat to the standard of living and a readiness to become a “fair dinkum Aussie”.’ Admittedly, the term ‘fair dinkum Aussie’ begs the question. As one commentator said, the demand that newcomers become fair dinkum tout de suite ‘dehumanised migrants … Its fundamental implication was that migrants were at best inferior and undesirable, and at worst, positively dangerous and threatening.’ Well, there is some truth to that, but Johnson does seem to have summed up a proposition that has operated in the relationships between established Australians and newcomers throughout the major shocks of immigration to Australia since the Second World War.

Many migrants claim that under that kind of rough contract, and under broader gestures of welcome as well, they soon enough felt acceptance more than condescension. I would say that a ‘functional tolerance’, a pragmatic, sometimes rough-handed, sometimes grudging tolerance, has produced in Australia—and in world terms—fairly speedy acceptance of new groups. To deny that is to deny the assertion of many a happily settled immigrant. It is to deny the goodwill, for example, of Dr Stepan Kerkyasharian, speaking in Yass last Australia Day: ‘As a migrant of Armenian heritage, I feel great pride to have been accepted into this nation. And I am not alone.’ Functional tolerance means that though there may be for a generation a notable concentration of an immigrant group in certain suburbs, classic ghettos of the kind found in France or Germany do not exist. And there exists in Australia a remarkably easy progress to citizenship once residence is achieved— always admitting that achieving residence is the hard task.

This kind of acceptance of the recently arrived—pragmatic, sometimes patronising—is often less hypocritical than the oratorical but underachieving tolerance of other societies. The late Edek Korn of Sydney, a Schindler survivor, is simply one of the immigrants I have known to whom tolerance was one of the most important aspects of Australian identity. But it was sometimes of a backhanded nature. Something of a sage, Korn told me, ‘Australians are funny people. When they don’t know you and don’t like you, they call you a wog bastard. But when they get to know and like you they call you a wog bastard.’ He told me too that his wife came home in a state of amazement from her first Australian job in a factory. ‘They hate the Polish Catholics as much as they hate Polish Jews.’ To Leosia Korn it was equality at last.

Again, this is not to deny that many, and perhaps most, newcomers have had wounding and savage words flung at them on their way into the Australian garden, within which the level of urbanity fluctuates somewhat. An Australian-born woman of Malaysian Chinese background once told me that while shopping in the Hanson days of the later 1990s, she was shouted at and advised to go home. It is a safe bet that a woman in the hijab has been abused somewhere today while taking her children to or from school.

Not unrelated to our other beliefs in identity, it was always assumed by Australians that anti-authoritarianism was a potent part of our character, an index of our egalitarian tradition. But that has now been de-emphasised in historiography. Russel Ward, the author of The Australian Legend, has been attacked almost as much as, for varying reasons, Geoffrey Blainey and Manning Clark, for such arguments as that the Australian ‘believes that Jack is not only as good as his master, but is probably a good deal better, and so he is a knocker of eminent people … He is fiercely an independent person who hates officiousness and authority.’ Despite all, there is some truth there, for other visitors from Anthony Trollope to James Michener mentioned Australian manners of egalitarianism and mockery of authority.

Mockery of the pompous is often seen as an inheritance of bushrangers and the world wars. An Australian stretcher bearer whose journal I was reading recently wrote, ‘Sensation in Cairo yesterday. An Australian saluted an officer.’ The historian C.E.W. Bean said that officers quickly discovered that to set certain places out of bounds for the recruits of 1914–15 simply provoked the recruits to enter those areas. I was raised on my father’s Second World War stories of how he and his friends would borrow officers’ uniforms so that they could go to the officers-only bar of Shepheard’s Hotel. If there happened to be officers from the best British regiments drinking there, then the chance to outrage them was considered a bargain. We’d like to think that in this century we retain some of that larrikinism and capacity for mockery in our identity portfolio. Reasonably we are not so keen on anti-authoritarianism when it involves the invasion of suburban parties and attacks on police vehicles sent to impose authority. We ought to remember that when the word ‘larrikin’ was first applied to the Australian urban working-class, it was meant to be an unflattering word.

We are in fact more susceptible to authority than the stories I just told would indicate. Even a child must be detained in an immigration centre if his parents or he seek asylum. It is true that Prime Minister Gillard’s policy is not to put children behind heavy-security razor-wire for years, as happened in previous regimes. But even in February 2010 there were more than a thousand children under eighteen years detained in various immigration detention centres, of whom nearly 400 were unaccompanied children. And the Prime Minister had not, at the time of writing this, ruled out the possibility that children and pregnant women will be sent to Malaysia under her new scheme. This should be authoritarian enough for everyone. Jump the queue at the ice-cream stand and you’ll get what’s coming to you, even if you’re a kid. The instances of authoritarianism towards Aboriginals, from sequestering of wages and child kidnapping, are numberless.

And now authoritarianism is set to have a good century. Already, with opposition stated only by a few brave commentators, substantial intrusions into our rights of free expression, habeas corpus and legal representation have been passed by the federal houses in the name of anti-terror. This was accomplished with barely a bleat from the federal opposition of the day. Those who did try to say something were attacked as abettors of Osama bin Laden. The auguries for more authoritarian legislation in this century are splendid, and our gestures of anti-authoritarianism may be ignored and may prove to have dimmed.

The aspect of identity that fascinates, teases and comforts me above all is the enduring utopian view of Australia that rose in the late nineteenth century. There are a number of Utopian writers of the period who still resonate and whose vision of Australia is not unlike ours. ‘Australia’, Bernard O’Dowd’s famous poem first published in the Bulletin and beloved by progressive politicians, famously raised the issue of whether Australia would be ‘a drift Sargasso, where the West / In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?’ (that is, a repeat of all the Old World injustices). Or would it be the ‘Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?’ The culture of the surf, which took over Australia almost immediately after Federation, reinforced O’Dowd’s sentiments about the Sun-God’s race. John Farrell, another Bulletin poet, wrote of Australia:

*He [God] wrought her perfect, in a happy clime And held her worthiest, and bade
her wait Serene on her lone couch inviolate The heightened manhood of a later time. *

That ‘heightened manhood’ was to be the Australian, unique among humankind, the Sun-God’s child. ‘The pioneers’, said Farrell, ‘reared a sunnier England, where the pain / Of bitter yesterdays might not arise …’

In the mid 1890s, before she went to Paraguay and the New Australia that William Lane tried to build in the jungle, the young schoolteacher Mary Cameron, the future Dame Mary Gilmore, was escorted by Henry Lawson to see the misery of Sydney slums. ‘He used to take me out to see the wrong things, the things repressive of the rights of Australia; the things like a blot upon her and which prevented her being herself. The low-wage workers … underground cellars lit only by a grating in the street, the huddled houses … the pale seamstresses … the neglected children of the Quay and elsewhere.’ It is significant that young Mary saw Australia’s destiny as a blessed place, and that it was only ‘the things repressive of the rights of Australia’ and ‘the things which prevented her being herself’ that stood in the way.

To some, Federation represented the culmination and basis for Utopian Australia. A clergyman at All Souls Anglican church in Leichhardt in 1898 foresaw federated Australia as ‘a great and magnificent country … a kind of Paradise for the world, the envy of the nations’. It was Sir Henry Parkes of the 1891 convention, at which a provisional constitution was hammered out, who proposed the utopian name ‘Commonwealth’ for the ultimate proposed federation. The word, say Quick and Garran, ‘did more to arrest the public attention and kindle the public imagination than any other word in the English language could have done … It stands today for the type and the ideal of Australian nationhood.’ Though in the minds of many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Commonwealth had more to do with the equitable sharing out of the federal customs revenue, it also resonated in the minds of radicals such as Kingston from South Australia and of visionaries such as Deakin as a dream of just terms in a society.

In the 1890s depression, as in the depression of the 1930s, the working man’s paradise, the Commonwealth proposed by Parkes and the ‘sunnier England’ invoked by Farrell, came under acute pressure. Yet the idea that most sufferings and indignities were somehow un-Australian but were ‘things that prevented Australia from being her true self’ remained very strong. I know this from the atmosphere in which I grew up in a bush infancy and a suburban boyhood.

If one goes forward some decades from Federation to a summer Saturday afternoon, well described in David Day’s biography John Curtin, when Japanese landing craft lay off Malaya and the Japanese fleet was fuelling its aircraft for a historic attack on Hawaii, we find an atheist and socialist prime minister named John Curtin attending the rededication of the Presbyterian church near Canberra by his clerical friend the Reverend Harrison. On that afternoon Curtin saw the faces of Presbyterians who had settled the plains of Canberra in the nineteenth century, and he felt stirring in him the concept that this was a race too precious to be obliterated by the tide of Asian militarism.

This powerful assumption that Australia was precious because it was a unique social experiment, a social experiment that could easily be borne away by internal malice or external threat, was a concept in which I and others of my generation were raised by parents who did not, at first sight, have a vast stake in Australian privilege. My actions have been influenced, when they rise at least for a few moments above my natural apathy, by the old proposition that special concepts of fairness operated here. My parents were not fools. They were aware of profiteering when they saw it, and the fact that the basic wage was very basic indeed unless margins for skill and competence were added. But like Mary Gilmore they looked upon the wrongs as un-Australian and the rights as Australian. The belief was as powerful in them as it had been in Gilmore when she saw in slums and workshops ‘the things repressive of the rights of Australia; the things like a blot upon her and which prevented her being herself’.

These days two major Federationist boasts, Protection and White Australia, are far gone. And yet the utopian impulse remains. The present prime minister believes as strongly in the specialness of Australia as nineteenth-century utopians did, and so believes too in the special nature of Australians themselves. To celebrate Australia Day, Julia Gillard concentrated on the natural catastrophes of last year. ‘Some people said it is incredible, the generosity of strangers. But they weren’t strangers really. They were Australians.’ She quoted the historian Gavan Dawes, who wrote of Japanese prisoner of war camps that even while starving, the national groups of prisoners ‘remained inextinguishably American, Australian, British. The Americans were the great individualists of the camps. The British clung onto their class structure like bulldogs. And the Australians kept trying to construct little male-bonded welfare states.’ Julia Gillard says that now we have moved beyond ‘simply male bonding’ and ‘welfare states’, but the special ethos of solidarity among Australians remains. It was there in the 1940s, and is here in the twenty-first century in events such as the floods. Indeed the floods provided all of us with examples of Australian fraternity. The question of whether this was peculiarly an Australian brand of goodwill or a goodwill innate in Homo sapiens sapiens seems merely a quibble in the face of what people did voluntarily in Queensland.

In this century, though, is the invocation of utopian brotherhood a delusion to be pitied? Is it mere mythology (if mythology can be mere), is it mythology in the modern and regrettable misusage by which the word is a synonym for a lie? I believe that the utopian myths can be a positive force in Australia, especially now, to help guarantee some minimum standards of dignity. They can also be a cover for a cynical claim that our society is fairer and more equitable than it is. But as frequently as that expectation of the fair go might have been thwarted in this century, do we want it to vanish?

At the end of the recent Queensland floods, a householder who had believed himself covered for the ruin of his house by floodwater found that his insurance policy failed, through a technicality, to protect him. He told an ABC interviewer, ‘I mean, this is Australia, isn’t it?’ He, like the rest of us, assumes that special arrangements of fairness, and treatment along sensible, practical, fraternal lines, are part of the Australian fabric and inheritance. He is no doubt cruelly cured of that illusion now. Yet our continuing and incurable belief in millennial Eden, in Commonwealth and uncommon institutions, remains. When we reach for the fair go, however, are we reaching for a chimera. Professor Belinda Probert writes, ‘Looking back from 2001, it is hard to know which is more remarkable: the stability of the class compromise achieved at Federation or the speed with which it has unravelled over the past twenty years.’

The OECD defines poverty as 40 per cent of the median household income. On this level the compact lingers on with Australian families on welfare being paid nearly 50 per cent of that amount, in part through Bob Hawke’s much mocked but socially effective No Australian Child Shall Live in Poverty program. This compares to 20 per cent of median household income in the United States. It is in neither case an arrangement I would want to live under, but at least the fair go proposition is arguably not quite dead in this case. On a closer look though, the figures are skewed by other factors. The Brotherhood of St Laurence released an oft-quoted and frightening report on Australian equality in 2005–06. Based on the figures of the Bureau of Statistics, it found that the wealthiest 20 per cent of families owned 61 per cent of household wealth,

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'nother: so in 2005-06 in Australia the bottom 80% owned 39%, in comparison to ..

Table 1: Distribution of net worth and financial wealth in the United States, 1983-2007

Total Net Worth

2007 .. Top 1% .. 34.6% .. Next 19% .. 50.5% .. Bottom 80% .. 15.0%
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
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and the poorest 20 per cent held 1 per cent. Four and a half million people lived in households whose gross income was less than $400 a week. Now, as in Lawson’s day, we can assert that: ‘They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own / That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown.’

It is true that all of the social democracies are suffering from the pressures which some blame on the economic fundamentalism that produced the GFC, some on globalisation, others both. But in the face of the economic orthodoxy that did bring us the GFC, which still, unrepentant and unrenounced, commands economic decision-making on this planet, and under the similarly unapologetic authority of ratings agencies before which governments quake, can the dream of social uniqueness remain a core belief of the majority of Australians? And can it be invoked by the Australia Day speakers as confidently and validly as it has been in the past?

There are other fascinating aspects of our identity I could look at—the impact of Australia’s un-European milieu on us or the impact of dryness that is so brilliantly recounted in Michael Cathcart’s history of Australia, The Water Dreamers. Even in that regard there has been a shift in my lifetime from the Dead Heart, Lake Eyre, a sump at Australia’s centre where rivers go to die to wonderful Uluru, an upside- down lake, bounty, altar where the despair of nineteenth-century explorers has now been replaced by a sense of wonder. And still it seems that part of our character is to dream of the tropical north blooming. There is similarly the question of what impact our sharing of English, the new global lingua franca, has on our culture and whether such a thing as the Australian voice can survive.

Meanwhile, one of the best remaining chances for Australian equity is the very expectation we all have as citizens of decent minimum levels of public health, public education and public communications. These issues represent a divide in American politics, but here in Australia they represent a consensus. Both Bob Katter

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Robert Carl Katter (born 22 May 1945) is an Australian federal politician, a member of the Australian House of
Representatives since March 1993 for the Division of Kennedy, and the leader of Katter's Australian Party.


Bob Katter at the tallyroom for the
2012 Queensland state election
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Katter
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and the Labor Left opposed the Telstra sell-off for fear communications would suffer. Detail is a matter of political argument, but the basic propositions about state responsibility are not. Abstracting for the moment from the debate on a Bill of Rights, it is also along the same lines that free speech exists. Notable and heinous restrictions were imposed upon it under post-9/11 legislation, and generally reasonable ones under anti-vilification laws. Free speech is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, though in 1994 the High Court detected an implied freedom there. But it is, above all, because people believe free speech is unarguably guaranteed that it exists to the extent it does.

And so perhaps might Utopianism in Australia defy world forces in this century, at least for a time. The fear that it will be squeezed from our marrow by the force of new realities is one we are uneasy to face, for without it we will definitively become, in spirit and in culture, someone’s merely unequal and dreary province. Our glittering array of resources gives us a chance for equity and also a chance to deal people out of the equation. Thank God a resources tax is at least canvassed. Otherwise we could be headed in the direction of Brazil, with only Deakin’s fig leaf to protect us from the blaze of a brutal world.

This essay is based on a keynote lecture Thomas Keneally gave at the University of
Melbourne’s Festival of Ideas in June on Australian Identity in the twenty-first century.

Copyright Thomas Keneally 2011

http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/cultivating-identity/

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