Academic, writer, journalist and editor Julianne Schultz's book The Idea of Australia looks at what her country represents.
Is it an egalitarian, generous, outward-looking country? Or is Australia a nation that has retreated into silence and denial about the past and become selfish, greedy, and insular?
Julianne Schultz Photo: supplied by Allen & Unwin
Schultz is emeritus professor of media and culture from Queensland's Griffith University , and the publisher and founding editor of the Griffith Review.
In Australia there is a lack of political willingness to engage with what English philosopher Jeremy Bentham called the ‘incurable flaw’, she told Kathryn Ryan.
“There was no treaty formed with the First Nations people who had lived in this land for millennia.
“Bentham said in 1804 that that failure was an incurable flaw that would forever blight this land. And it is remarkable that here we are in 2022, and it has still not been fundamentally addressed.”
That political nervousness continues to blight the nation, she says.
“Not just for First Nations people, but for the fabric, the soul of the nation.
“On one level feel profoundly disappointed and somewhat ashamed that that's not been able to happen. But I also think that because it's now in the domain of a cultural movement, that it will happen.”
She cites Rachel Perkins, an Australian film producer who participated in a summit at parliament house discussing the future of Australia in 2020.
“She said the thing that makes it absolutely unique is that 65,000 years or more of continuous settlement, occupation, culture and engagement, that is something which no other country has.
“And until that unique foundation stone is formally recognised, acknowledged and structurally built into the place. The capacity to do anything else will always be hamstrung by that stain in a sense.”
The great post war migration to Australia was characterised by an assimilationist model, she says.
"That assimilationist model lasted right through until the late ‘60s, early 70s - you absorb an Australian way of being and, you leave all your baggage behind. And we make something else here.
“It worked for a lot of people, especially people coming from places that were very devastated by war, and other catastrophes, to be able to start afresh was something that was very attractive to very, very many people.”
Since then, Australia has closed itself off much more to immigration, she says.
"The process of migration has become much more bureaucratic, much more complex, and much more about work. it was always about work, it's about getting a labour force, but there was an ethos for very many years where people could bring their families and the very easy movement of New Zealanders, for instance, many of those things have now become much, much more complicated.”
There are now scores of different visa categories, she says, almost all of them dependent on work.
"People no longer have the sense that I grew up with that if you come to Australia the pathway to citizenship will be pretty straightforward, you will be able to re-establish yourself and your family in this land, it's now much more transactional.”
John Howard ushered in an era of change in Australia from the mid-nineties onwards, she says.
“He assumed power after a period of enormous change, and it wasn't just economic change, although that had been very significant, [Paul] Keating adopted a sort of neoliberal agenda with a human face. And I think Australia did that humanising the neoliberalism really much better than almost anywhere else.
"John Howard came in not promising all that much. But set about really stopping the transformation of the society that was well underway.
“What had started to happen during that whole Keating period was the expansion of rights, the detachment from Britain, we only stopped formally singing God Save the Queen in 1988, we only then finally stopped going to the Privy Council as the Court of Appeal in 1988.
“It was a very long, slow separation from the UK and culturally the place was changing, the Mabo decision recognised pre-existing native title.”
Howard came in with an understated agenda, but essentially with the aim of reasserting the status quo by co-opting the old myth of Australia as egalitarian, she says.
“Being open, everyone's as good as their mate, being open and being adventurous. A lot of that stuff, which was quite collective in its sentiment. What John Howard did very effectively was to privatise that, to make it about individuals, rather than about the collective.”
Australia’s vastness has also shaped its national psyche and its economy, she says.
“Land is really the key to wealth in Australia, whether that's from mining or from property …almost everyone carries around a third of a hectare in their own little backpack, essentially such is the disproportion of land people.
“And that's meant that the economy, I would argue, is much less sophisticated than it would have needed to be in a society, in a country, where there was not so much land that seemed to be available just for taking and squandering.
“That failure to get beyond the basic colonial society of land use-based model means that Australia hasn't really achieved the potential that its people offer.”
The media, always a source of power in Australia has become very concentrated, she says.
"In the 19th century, when people reported back to London, to America and so on about the colonies, they described it as a land of newspapers.
“By the turn of the century of the 20th century, it was the most literate [country] in the world. And it had the highest proportion of newspapers, every town had a newspaper or two, and they exercised great influence.”
Since then, there has been an ever-shrinking consolidation of ownership, she says, and a readiness of owners to use that political power.
“Politicians are very much intimidated by it and in thrall to those people with power, that's a great loss, because it means that the pathways for different conversations are not as available as they once were. And they need to be if a society is seeking to mature, and I think that concentration of power is not good for a healthy society.”
