‘History is not so much neglected as chained in a dark shed and threatened with a cricket bat if it dares to speak up.’‘History is not so much neglected as chained in a dark shed and threatened with a cricket bat if it dares to speak up.’Last modified on Sun 6 Mar 2022 16.33 GMT
When you dig down, hidden within these identity issues are serious questions of power: who wields it? Who lacks it? Who dies in our towns and cities and remote areas from not having any, and why? What needs to happen to make that stop – to spread the so-called “luck” around?Mainstream Australia rarely needs to consider who gets to be “lucky” – who gets to be included in the Australian “us”, in the words of Waleed Aly.
We’re big on pragmatism in Australia, big on tying things up with wire, of pushing past uncomfortable truths Unlike Horne’s seminal work, The Idea of Australia is clear-eyed about the hidden centrality of race among these national fissures. Australia is described, accurately, as a place where “forgetting is essential …This analysis puts the inability to negotiate a just settlement with First Nations front and centre. “Failure to negotiate treaty was unjust then and inexcusable now.” That national flaw – Australia’s original sin – has set a broader trend in motion.
In other words, working Australians have been suckered time and again into voting against their own self-interest. Simples! But as James Baldwin, a man who knew a great deal about fear, wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”The Idea of Australia ends on the central lesson of Covid: governments can do useful things if they choose to.