<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252">
<style type="text/css" style="display:none;"><!-- P {margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;} --></style>
</head>
<body dir="ltr">
<div id="divtagdefaultwrapper" style="font-size:10pt;color:#000000;font-family:Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;" dir="ltr">
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0">I just wanted to share this transcript of Richard Flanagan's very powerful address to the National Press Club earlier this week - I have no words to add.</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/18/richard-flanagan-national-press-club-speech-full-politics-black-comedy" class="OWAAutoLink" id="LPlnk840200" previewremoved="true">https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/18/richard-flanagan-national-press-club-speech-full-politics-black-comedy</a> </p>
<div id="LPBorder_GT_15241930322780.8369720291863045" style="margin-bottom: 20px; overflow: auto; width: 100%; text-indent: 0px;">
<table id="LPContainer_15241930322660.26191263592750813" role="presentation" cellspacing="0" style="width: 90%; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative; overflow: auto; padding-top: 20px; padding-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 20px; border-top: 1px dotted rgb(200, 200, 200); border-bottom: 1px dotted rgb(200, 200, 200);">
<tbody>
<tr valign="top" style="border-spacing: 0px;">
<td id="TextCell_15241930322730.8217329954315464" colspan="2" style="vertical-align: top; position: relative; padding: 0px; display: table-cell;">
<div id="LPRemovePreviewContainer_15241930322730.6975720135410239"></div>
<div id="LPTitle_15241930322730.9685234833389569" style="top: 0px; color: rgb(0, 177, 235); font-weight: 400; font-size: 21px; font-family: wf_segoe-ui_light, "Segoe UI Light", "Segoe WP Light", "Segoe UI", "Segoe WP", Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">
<a id="LPUrlAnchor_15241930322750.4405907028064213" href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/18/richard-flanagan-national-press-club-speech-full-politics-black-comedy" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Richard Flanagan: 'Our politics
is a dreadful black comedy' – press club speech in full</a></div>
<div id="LPMetadata_15241930322750.2577319408094385" style="margin: 10px 0px 16px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-weight: 400; font-family: wf_segoe-ui_normal, "Segoe UI", "Segoe WP", Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 14px;">
www.theguardian.com</div>
<div id="LPDescription_15241930322770.8357387764681008" style="display: block; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-weight: 400; font-family: wf_segoe-ui_normal, "Segoe UI", "Segoe WP", Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; max-height: 100px; overflow: hidden;">
Indigenous Australia, Anzac Day, the descent of democracy – in a National Press Club address Flanagan examines a divided Australia which he says can be free only if it faces up to its past</div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p></p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"><strong style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px;">Heather Gridley</strong><br>
</p>
<div id="Signature">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">
<div style="font-size:13px; font-family:Tahoma">
<p><span style="font-family:Verdana">Honorary Fellow</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Victoria University</span><br>
</p>
<p><font face="Verdana">Melbourne, Australia</font></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Verdana">E: </span><a tabindex="0" href="mailto:heather.gridley@vu.edu.au" target="" style="font-family:Verdana" id="LPNoLP">heather.gridley@vu.edu.au</a></p>
<p><font face="Verdana">Ph: +61 419113731</font><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<br>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">
<hr style="display:inline-block;width:98%" tabindex="-1">
<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size:11pt" color="#000000"><b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, 18 April 2018 9:58 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> Heather Gridley<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Flanagan</font>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div dir="auto">
<div>
<p class="x_p1"><span class="x_s1">Richard Flanagan: 'Our politics is a dreadful black comedy' – press club speech in full.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">Indigenous Australia, Anzac Day, the descent of democracy – in a National Press Club address Flanagan examines a divided Australia which he says can be free only if it faces up to its past.<span class="x_Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Richard Flanagan: ‘Since the marriage equality vote it’s clear that Australians are not the mean and pinched people we had been persuaded and bluffed for so many years that we were.’ Photograph: Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p1"><span class="x_s1">I told a friend the other day I was to be speaking here in Canberra today and she told me a joke. A man is doubled over at the front of Parliament House throwing up. A stranger comes up and puts an arm around the vomiting
man. I know how you feel, the stranger says.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">It’s not a bad joke. But it felt familiar. I went searching my book shelves, and finally found a variation of it in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, set in communist Czechoslovakia in the dark years after
the Prague Spring. In Kundera’s version the two men are standing in Wenceslas Square.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Both jokes are about failing regimes that have lost the essential moral legitimacy governments need to govern. We don’t have to like or agree with a government but we still accept it has the right to make decisions in our
name. Until, that is, we don’t. And it occurred to me that in both jokes it’s not just those in immediate power but a whole system that is beginning to lose its moral legitimacy.<span class="x_Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">As a young man I was studying in England, which I didn’t much enjoy, and spent most of my time in Yugoslavia, which I got to know through my wife’s family, who were Slovene, and which I enjoyed very much. Yugoslavia was then
a communist dictatorship, but it occupied a curious place, halfway between the Soviet and capitalist system.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Yugoslavs were a well-educated, cultured people. But the system, like that of the Czechs, lost its legitimacy after Tito’s death in the mid 80s. A credit crisis became a full blown economic and then political crisis. Opportunistic
politicians, devoid of solutions to the nation’s problems, instead pitched neighbour against neighbour. And suddenly nothing held.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">I witnessed a country slide into inexplicable nationalisms and ethnic hatreds, and in the space of a very short time, into genocidal madness.</span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">It made me realise at a young age that the veneer of civilised societies is very thin, a fragile thing that once broken brings forth monsters.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Czechoslovakia took a different route. After the final toppling of the system with the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the revolution’s leader, Vaclav Havel, wrote presciently of how the west should not gloat over the fall of the
old Soviet states. Eastern Europe was, he observed, simply a twisted mirror reflecting back a slightly more distorted image of what might come to prevail in the west. If the west only gloated and did not learn from what that image portended of its future,
it too might find itself one day facing a similar existential crisis.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">The veneer of civilised societies is very thin, a fragile thing that once broken brings forth monsters</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">In the heady 1990s Havel’s warnings sounded absurd and overwrought. And yet it came to pass as Havel warned: the west did gloat, declaring the end of history, and in its triumphalism dangerous new forces were allowed to fester
unchecked, their scale and threat only becoming fully apparent in the past few years.</span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Now in Russia, in Turkey, in Poland, in Hungary and the Czech Republic we see the rise of the strongman leader, some like Putin, already effectively dictators, others like Erdogan and Orban well on the way. In Slovakia a leading
journalist was recently murdered after exposing links between leading Slovakian politicians and the Italian Mafia.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">There are no saviours of democracy on the horizon. Rather, around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is always anti-democratic in practice, populist in appeal, nationalist in sentiment, fascist in sympathy, criminal
in disposition, tending to spew a poisonous rhetoric aimed against refugees, Muslims, and increasingly Jews, and hostile to truth and those who speak it, most particularly journalists to the point, sometimes, of murder.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">Around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is ... hostile to truth and those who speak it</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And yet this new authoritarianism is resonant with so many, acting as it does as a justification for rule by a few wealthy oligarchs and corporations, and as an explanation for the growing immiseration of the many.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">In Australia though we feel ourselves, as ever, a long way away. We feel we are somehow immune from these dangerous currents. After all, we have had routine forays into populist extremism from the mid 1990s with the likes
of Hansonism without it ever threatening our democracy. Our politics may be dreadful, a black comedy pregnant with collapse, its actors exhausted, without imagination or courage or principle, solely obsessed with pillaging the tawdry jewels of office and fleeing
into distant sinecures as ambassadors or high commissioners, or with paid up Chinese board posts, while outside the city burns. But it is all very far from a dictatorship.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Leadership nowhere to be found</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Our society grows increasingly more unequal, more disenfranchised, angrier, more fearful. Even in my home town of Hobart, as snow settles on the mountain, there is the deeply shameful spectacle of a tent village of the homeless,
the number of which increase daily. We sense the rightful discontent of the growing numbers locked out from a future. From hope.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Instead of public debate, scapegoats are offered up – the boatperson, the queue jumper, the Muslim – a xenophobia both parties have been guilty of playing on for electoral benefit for two decades. Instead of new ideas and
new visions we are made wallow in threadbare absurdities and convenient fictions:
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/australia-day" id="LPlnk485699" previewremoved="true">
<span class="x_s4">Australia Day</span></a>, the world’s most liveable cities, secure borders.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Our institutions are frayed. Our polity is discredited, and almost daily discredits itself further. The many problems that confront us, from housing to infrastructure to climate change, are routinely evaded. Our screens are
filled with a preening peloton of potential leaders, but nowhere is there to be found leadership.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">Our screens are filled with a preening peloton of potential leaders, but nowhere is there to be found leadership</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Holderlin, the great 19th century poet, wrote of the “mysterious yearning toward the chasm” that can overtake nations. Increasingly, one can sense that yearning in the overly heated rhetoric of some Australian politicians
and commentators. That yearning can overtake Australia as easily as it has many other countries, damaging our democratic institutions, our freedoms and our values.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Politics, which ought to have as its highest calling the task of holding society together, of keeping us away from the chasm, has retreated to repeating divisive myths that have no foundation in the truth of what we are as
a nation, and so, finally only serve to contribute to the forces that could yet destroy us. Or worse yet, openly stoking needless fear and, with the refugee issue, a xenophobia for short-term electoral advantage.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The consequence is a time bomb which simply needs as a detonator what every other country has had and we have not: hard times. But hard times will return. And when they do what defence will we have should a populist movement
that trades on the established scapegoats arises? An authoritarian party with a charismatic leader that uses the poison with which the old myths are increasingly pregnant to deliver itself power?</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The challenge that faces us, the grave and terrifying challenge, is to transform ourselves as a people. This fundamental challenge is not policy, it is not franking credits nor is it tax giveaways or rail links, necessary
or not as these things may be. It is to realise that if we don’t create for ourselves a liberating vision founded in the full truth of who we are as a people, we will find ourselves, in a moment of crisis, suddenly entrapped in a new authoritarianism wearing
the motley of the old lies.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">For we are a people of astonishing perversity.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">We are an ancient country that insists on thinking itself new. We are a modern nation that insists our recent arrangements are so time honoured that none of them can ever be changed. We are a complex country that insists on
being simple minded. We regard simplicity as a national virtue, and when coupled with language unimpeded by the necessity for thought, is regarded as strong character. Which may explain our treasurer Scott Morrison, but little else.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And for the past two decades we have doubled down and doubled down again on old myths – lies – that become more dangerous the longer we allow them to go unchallenged.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Six days from now, on the eve of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/anzac-day" id="LPlnk152543" previewremoved="true">
<span class="x_s4">Anzac Day</span></a>, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, will launch a war memorial-cum-museum in France. Costing an extraordinary $100m, the Monash Centre is reportedly the most expensive museum built in France for many years. It will
honour those Australians who so tragically lost their lives on the western front in world war one and, more generally, the 62,000 Australians who died in world war one.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Would that someone might whisper into the prime minister’s ear the last lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem about those same fatal trenches:</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">My friend, you would not tell with such high zest</span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">To children ardent for some desperate glory,</span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The old Lie: </span><span class="x_s5">Dulce et decorum est</span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s5">Pro patria mori.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Owen’s last Latin phrase – the old lie, as he puts it – is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Except the Australians didn’t even die for Australia. They died for Britain. For
</span><span class="x_s5">their</span><span class="x_s2"> empire. Not our country. A double lie then: a lie within a lie.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">Except the Australians didn’t even die for Australia. They died for Britain</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">But, as Tony Abbott asked when, as prime minister, he announced the building of the museum, what was the alternative in Britain’s time of need?</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Well, we might answer, staying home for one thing, and not dying in other people’s wars.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And yet the horrific suffering of so many Australians for distant empires has now become not a terrible warning, not a salient story of the blood-sacrifice that must be paid by nations lacking independence, not the unhappy
beginning of an unbroken habit, but, bizarrely, the purported origin story of us as an independent people.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p5"><span class="x_s6">The growing state-fu<a href="http://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstqfs7bqz3vNRsGxeaQutdOdmbaIO3LfwgL5M3u1deq7aPMYoifng1SEujs9qdH3-PP4b_B1JXYGiR1ZOt0iHkXNE6SeHGCcLiUIE-BPLtYnrV3OmRUVZc_2Oq71O_EDR9AgUe1p9ybaR0GV2ehis71Clxucs2nuW2yYEBcGLrNd4DkgBlRFBrWIU4ItYBJk4nF7O-gFUeQoXDQFzFX5PKgXkX4M9xzZnWmnmGhYxxAISgPrI-6k2EKpIXTvAQtZaYAcJMg2iHaTQ2qp3oqAIQhUKTF_nRzsrsAp78iKA&sig=Cg0ArKJSzPEmvf3_6ozKEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjsv2Nam_yTtGSYRxlcgP_iGfklRvq9E9qT9vdWSW8vKWYwubZySGbleB_-qJTrlLpCMjUH8-fKHrX-aoKJpAguFhQ_pfUMQxPSLwXi0m2UuqYiZJHpwP-1FPGWYduMMy57z00kQtsuKEAyfpLenK_wwXzk0trpBIhprzAqM_IrLdOfo5KO7K-JffZmwxGQGSfnehaKIl7-rZBGR9z-ELR5YziBKpqSyT-C4Jo1AlxYxSL5WK78tpMLtFvvNSUJbyvbR9fx7bq6e3JdeiF8U4ZwA7V9NiJ2yW82VR98WcktEKb8PYU_7ZrPhEGaIuWHowWg3XQ_kEgBT8TN53ZjsPn5F8sMsab_fvJEPYBmasJzDVRNv-RJ1-Ne58K7tDT3Djk_cFn5p7ozCbKN4bDZXiaZQtg3Eu9jC6riBUI25HyAb0-YVRYWyL6dfmetkTmtIfjJJXOTPirSmGQ7ffV2gdnoskZLKTz1qEhYfaKu3mq6CKwVRNjk4fK93r3HTJh-uSHnMAeYSRmk9q29Si6PMkiYaoBRZCkFvfJtHuuBqIEeYwdWPLtdBqRnFZgpOdOLwV0t02voxKPCTQwqU5W1S8O8lK8cSGkURXLJd1zqZ5mpMZLRTzFh50DSTNcmk2EU4G9PyyqVjQwzNjQEwOVDBh9HkcMfMTCV6IhVWLvuM37fQQCIvWhHcFDrG5BoyxmAMp-PXk6DbuZJAh_fEdP_eMvGf2po4e2gY8mLkvsKS9CJ487IecEbs_CyEmpzPvdc1HOMS38UpgUOy7XfMZlkfzGOVfTHK_qQpZ48SoEKqQzRHDWxNreFrB-CfXG88qa7h4i-UGjhayGvgQGa2DhoGK43KeEZtykrPXYlwmy-WKoFsgXJRpjFcIH8GwmNF0atFnRm15WGGWfl5JjZhWSttZFvcTCXITYzfcFJTjehPYjpLq-s-_fqQZ21oDR9wD&sai=AMfl-YSeLIoicUSA5w2422gFj93n0HvCeGo3m97vASbKOMCssok6B2fQQoV24wFEB8iMPgd7-nDScsUREi9Uh4GanpefhzbfNDzO5Xc9W64cZgUPMfqvc7OrXQtf_lTFDxr08E5a&sig=Cg0ArKJSzABo9zoHfP5_EAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://servedby.flashtalking.com/click/7/90955;3087810;0;209;0/?ft_width=300&ft_height=250&url=18798712" id="LPlnk401808" previewremoved="true"><span class="x_s4">nded
cult of Anzac will see $1.1bn spent by the Australian government on war memorials between 2014 and 2028. Those who lost their lives deserve honour – I know from my father’s experience how meaningful that can be. But when veterans struggle for recognition and
support for war-related suffering, you begin to wonder what justifies this expense, this growing militarisation of national memory or, to be more precise, a forgetting of anything other than an official version of war as the official version of our country’s
history, establishing dying in other people’s wars as our foundation story.</span></a></span></p>
<p class="x_p6"><span class="x_s2"><a href="http://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstqfs7bqz3vNRsGxeaQutdOdmbaIO3LfwgL5M3u1deq7aPMYoifng1SEujs9qdH3-PP4b_B1JXYGiR1ZOt0iHkXNE6SeHGCcLiUIE-BPLtYnrV3OmRUVZc_2Oq71O_EDR9AgUe1p9ybaR0GV2ehis71Clxucs2nuW2yYEBcGLrNd4DkgBlRFBrWIU4ItYBJk4nF7O-gFUeQoXDQFzFX5PKgXkX4M9xzZnWmnmGhYxxAISgPrI-6k2EKpIXTvAQtZaYAcJMg2iHaTQ2qp3oqAIQhUKTF_nRzsrsAp78iKA&sig=Cg0ArKJSzPEmvf3_6ozKEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjsv2Nam_yTtGSYRxlcgP_iGfklRvq9E9qT9vdWSW8vKWYwubZySGbleB_-qJTrlLpCMjUH8-fKHrX-aoKJpAguFhQ_pfUMQxPSLwXi0m2UuqYiZJHpwP-1FPGWYduMMy57z00kQtsuKEAyfpLenK_wwXzk0trpBIhprzAqM_IrLdOfo5KO7K-JffZmwxGQGSfnehaKIl7-rZBGR9z-ELR5YziBKpqSyT-C4Jo1AlxYxSL5WK78tpMLtFvvNSUJbyvbR9fx7bq6e3JdeiF8U4ZwA7V9NiJ2yW82VR98WcktEKb8PYU_7ZrPhEGaIuWHowWg3XQ_kEgBT8TN53ZjsPn5F8sMsab_fvJEPYBmasJzDVRNv-RJ1-Ne58K7tDT3Djk_cFn5p7ozCbKN4bDZXiaZQtg3Eu9jC6riBUI25HyAb0-YVRYWyL6dfmetkTmtIfjJJXOTPirSmGQ7ffV2gdnoskZLKTz1qEhYfaKu3mq6CKwVRNjk4fK93r3HTJh-uSHnMAeYSRmk9q29Si6PMkiYaoBRZCkFvfJtHuuBqIEeYwdWPLtdBqRnFZgpOdOLwV0t02voxKPCTQwqU5W1S8O8lK8cSGkURXLJd1zqZ5mpMZLRTzFh50DSTNcmk2EU4G9PyyqVjQwzNjQEwOVDBh9HkcMfMTCV6IhVWLvuM37fQQCIvWhHcFDrG5BoyxmAMp-PXk6DbuZJAh_fEdP_eMvGf2po4e2gY8mLkvsKS9CJ487IecEbs_CyEmpzPvdc1HOMS38UpgUOy7XfMZlkfzGOVfTHK_qQpZ48SoEKqQzRHDWxNreFrB-CfXG88qa7h4i-UGjhayGvgQGa2DhoGK43KeEZtykrPXYlwmy-WKoFsgXJRpjFcIH8GwmNF0atFnRm15WGGWfl5JjZhWSttZFvcTCXITYzfcFJTjehPYjpLq-s-_fqQZ21oDR9wD&sai=AMfl-YSeLIoicUSA5w2422gFj93n0HvCeGo3m97vASbKOMCssok6B2fQQoV24wFEB8iMPgd7-nDScsUREi9Uh4GanpefhzbfNDzO5Xc9W64cZgUPMfqvc7OrXQtf_lTFDxr08E5a&sig=Cg0ArKJSzABo9zoHfP5_EAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://servedby.flashtalking.com/click/7/90955;3087810;0;209;0/?ft_width=300&ft_height=250&url=18798712" id="LPlnk667437" previewremoved="true"></a></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And so, the Monash Centre, for all its good intentions, for all the honour it does the dead, is at heart a centre for forgetting. It leads us to forget that the 62,000 young men who died in world war one died far from their
country in service of one distant empire fighting other distant empires. It leads us to forget that not one of those deaths it commemorates was necessary. Not 62,000. Not even one.</span></p>
<p class="x_p6"><span class="x_s2"><a href="http://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstqfs7bqz3vNRsGxeaQutdOdmbaIO3LfwgL5M3u1deq7aPMYoifng1SEujs9qdH3-PP4b_B1JXYGiR1ZOt0iHkXNE6SeHGCcLiUIE-BPLtYnrV3OmRUVZc_2Oq71O_EDR9AgUe1p9ybaR0GV2ehis71Clxucs2nuW2yYEBcGLrNd4DkgBlRFBrWIU4ItYBJk4nF7O-gFUeQoXDQFzFX5PKgXkX4M9xzZnWmnmGhYxxAISgPrI-6k2EKpIXTvAQtZaYAcJMg2iHaTQ2qp3oqAIQhUKTF_nRzsrsAp78iKA&sig=Cg0ArKJSzPEmvf3_6ozKEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjsv2Nam_yTtGSYRxlcgP_iGfklRvq9E9qT9vdWSW8vKWYwubZySGbleB_-qJTrlLpCMjUH8-fKHrX-aoKJpAguFhQ_pfUMQxPSLwXi0m2UuqYiZJHpwP-1FPGWYduMMy57z00kQtsuKEAyfpLenK_wwXzk0trpBIhprzAqM_IrLdOfo5KO7K-JffZmwxGQGSfnehaKIl7-rZBGR9z-ELR5YziBKpqSyT-C4Jo1AlxYxSL5WK78tpMLtFvvNSUJbyvbR9fx7bq6e3JdeiF8U4ZwA7V9NiJ2yW82VR98WcktEKb8PYU_7ZrPhEGaIuWHowWg3XQ_kEgBT8TN53ZjsPn5F8sMsab_fvJEPYBmasJzDVRNv-RJ1-Ne58K7tDT3Djk_cFn5p7ozCbKN4bDZXiaZQtg3Eu9jC6riBUI25HyAb0-YVRYWyL6dfmetkTmtIfjJJXOTPirSmGQ7ffV2gdnoskZLKTz1qEhYfaKu3mq6CKwVRNjk4fK93r3HTJh-uSHnMAeYSRmk9q29Si6PMkiYaoBRZCkFvfJtHuuBqIEeYwdWPLtdBqRnFZgpOdOLwV0t02voxKPCTQwqU5W1S8O8lK8cSGkURXLJd1zqZ5mpMZLRTzFh50DSTNcmk2EU4G9PyyqVjQwzNjQEwOVDBh9HkcMfMTCV6IhVWLvuM37fQQCIvWhHcFDrG5BoyxmAMp-PXk6DbuZJAh_fEdP_eMvGf2po4e2gY8mLkvsKS9CJ487IecEbs_CyEmpzPvdc1HOMS38UpgUOy7XfMZlkfzGOVfTHK_qQpZ48SoEKqQzRHDWxNreFrB-CfXG88qa7h4i-UGjhayGvgQGa2DhoGK43KeEZtykrPXYlwmy-WKoFsgXJRpjFcIH8GwmNF0atFnRm15WGGWfl5JjZhWSttZFvcTCXITYzfcFJTjehPYjpLq-s-_fqQZ21oDR9wD&sai=AMfl-YSeLIoicUSA5w2422gFj93n0HvCeGo3m97vASbKOMCssok6B2fQQoV24wFEB8iMPgd7-nDScsUREi9Uh4GanpefhzbfNDzO5Xc9W64cZgUPMfqvc7OrXQtf_lTFDxr08E5a&sig=Cg0ArKJSzABo9zoHfP5_EAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://servedby.flashtalking.com/click/7/90955;3087810;0;209;0/?ft_width=300&ft_height=250&url=18798712" id="LPlnk966918" previewremoved="true"></a></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Lest we forget we will all chant next week, as we have all chanted for a century now. And yet it is as if all that chanting only ensures we remember nothing. If we remembered would we 100 years later still allow our young
men to be sent off to kill or be killed in distant conflicts defending yet again not our country, but another distant empire, as we have in Iraq and Afghanistan?</span></p>
<p class="x_p6"><span class="x_s2"><a href="http://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstqfs7bqz3vNRsGxeaQutdOdmbaIO3LfwgL5M3u1deq7aPMYoifng1SEujs9qdH3-PP4b_B1JXYGiR1ZOt0iHkXNE6SeHGCcLiUIE-BPLtYnrV3OmRUVZc_2Oq71O_EDR9AgUe1p9ybaR0GV2ehis71Clxucs2nuW2yYEBcGLrNd4DkgBlRFBrWIU4ItYBJk4nF7O-gFUeQoXDQFzFX5PKgXkX4M9xzZnWmnmGhYxxAISgPrI-6k2EKpIXTvAQtZaYAcJMg2iHaTQ2qp3oqAIQhUKTF_nRzsrsAp78iKA&sig=Cg0ArKJSzPEmvf3_6ozKEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjsv2Nam_yTtGSYRxlcgP_iGfklRvq9E9qT9vdWSW8vKWYwubZySGbleB_-qJTrlLpCMjUH8-fKHrX-aoKJpAguFhQ_pfUMQxPSLwXi0m2UuqYiZJHpwP-1FPGWYduMMy57z00kQtsuKEAyfpLenK_wwXzk0trpBIhprzAqM_IrLdOfo5KO7K-JffZmwxGQGSfnehaKIl7-rZBGR9z-ELR5YziBKpqSyT-C4Jo1AlxYxSL5WK78tpMLtFvvNSUJbyvbR9fx7bq6e3JdeiF8U4ZwA7V9NiJ2yW82VR98WcktEKb8PYU_7ZrPhEGaIuWHowWg3XQ_kEgBT8TN53ZjsPn5F8sMsab_fvJEPYBmasJzDVRNv-RJ1-Ne58K7tDT3Djk_cFn5p7ozCbKN4bDZXiaZQtg3Eu9jC6riBUI25HyAb0-YVRYWyL6dfmetkTmtIfjJJXOTPirSmGQ7ffV2gdnoskZLKTz1qEhYfaKu3mq6CKwVRNjk4fK93r3HTJh-uSHnMAeYSRmk9q29Si6PMkiYaoBRZCkFvfJtHuuBqIEeYwdWPLtdBqRnFZgpOdOLwV0t02voxKPCTQwqU5W1S8O8lK8cSGkURXLJd1zqZ5mpMZLRTzFh50DSTNcmk2EU4G9PyyqVjQwzNjQEwOVDBh9HkcMfMTCV6IhVWLvuM37fQQCIvWhHcFDrG5BoyxmAMp-PXk6DbuZJAh_fEdP_eMvGf2po4e2gY8mLkvsKS9CJ487IecEbs_CyEmpzPvdc1HOMS38UpgUOy7XfMZlkfzGOVfTHK_qQpZ48SoEKqQzRHDWxNreFrB-CfXG88qa7h4i-UGjhayGvgQGa2DhoGK43KeEZtykrPXYlwmy-WKoFsgXJRpjFcIH8GwmNF0atFnRm15WGGWfl5JjZhWSttZFvcTCXITYzfcFJTjehPYjpLq-s-_fqQZ21oDR9wD&sai=AMfl-YSeLIoicUSA5w2422gFj93n0HvCeGo3m97vASbKOMCssok6B2fQQoV24wFEB8iMPgd7-nDScsUREi9Uh4GanpefhzbfNDzO5Xc9W64cZgUPMfqvc7OrXQtf_lTFDxr08E5a&sig=Cg0ArKJSzABo9zoHfP5_EAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://servedby.flashtalking.com/click/7/90955;3087810;0;209;0/?ft_width=300&ft_height=250&url=18798712" id="LPlnk323892" previewremoved="true"></a></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">If all that chanting simply reinforces such forgetting, then what hope have we now in negotiating some independent, safe path for our country between the growing tension of another dying empire, the American, and the rising
new empire of the Chinese? Because instead of learning from the tragedies of our past, we are ensuring that we will le<a href="https://servedby.flashtalking.com/imp/7/90955;3087810;205;gif;DBM;LYWProEX1300x250Desktop/" id="LPlnk445881" previewremoved="true"><span class="x_s4">arn
nothing.</span></a></span></p>
<p class="x_p6"><span class="x_s2"><a href="https://servedby.flashtalking.com/imp/7/90955;3087810;205;gif;DBM;LYWProEX1300x250Desktop/" id="LPlnk327981" previewremoved="true"></a></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The forgetting extends to the horrific suffering of war. The prime minister who will, no doubt, speak sincerely and movingly of the torn bodies and broken lives of the Australians who fell in France, is also the same prime
minister who wants to see the Australian arms industry become one of the world’s top 10 defence exporters, seeking to boost exports to several countries, including what was described as “the rapidly growing markets in Asia and the Middle East”, in particular
the United Arab Emirates, a country accused of war crimes in Yemen.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Anzac Day, which is a very important day for my family, was always a day to remember all my father’s mates who didn’t make it home. But it was also a moment to ponder the horror of war more generally. But of late Anzac Day
has become enshrouded in cant and entangled in dangerous myth. If this seems overstated ponder the bigoted bile that attended
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/28/the-yassmin-abdel-magied-bash-a-thon-is-all-part-of-the-anzac-day-ritual" id="LPlnk471994" previewremoved="true">
<span class="x_s4">Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s tweet last Anzac Day</span></a> in which she posted “LEST.WE.FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)”</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">I read this as a plea for compassion drawing on the memory of a national trauma.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Most refugees on Manus Island and Nauru are fleeing war, Syria has half a million dead and more than 11 million people exiled internally and externally because of war, and Palestinians, whatever position one takes, suffer
greatly from ongoing conflict.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And yet as the attacks on Abdel-Magied showed, some were seeking to transform Anzac Day into a stalking horse for racism, misogyny and anti-Islamic sentiment. For hate, intolerance and bigotry. For all those very forces that
create war. The great disrespect to Anzac Day wasn’t the original tweet but the perverted attacks made on it, in, of all things, the name of the dead. Those who think they honour Anzac Day by forgetting contemporary victims of war only serve to make a tragic
mockery of all that it should be.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">Freedom means Australia facing up to the truth of its past</span></p>
<p class="x_p5"><span class="x_s6">We should, of course, question these things more. We could ask why – if we were actually genuine about remembering patriots who have died for this country – why would we not first spend $100m on a museum honouring th<a href="https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstvAnjyC5CxtKLbThX4dj09iN9LBe9Q76kZ7Lxn78LPsl0IdNmlSRny8bZ79Izhd-25kF-AMXC_XVdhHl8l0j2rxe4_xWZt0-p35Zo6jql8lFeVxX6grTxZc_GiKLIJpI3dHhggu3KVLJIPvmTgOgpv4Qe7xR6ZLVdiyMzDs6b5v8RAPAVscdnKp-MT3e15KrJf2h-yyuqYRmGk6BEzQWqVLd3TkG8MXUYcG9RaY6fU5GgWsUErimWb76YzmRPT1kLSyem2EKFtxXg5yZwSuED086mwirJ6ucKXJBN8WA&sai=AMfl-YT7MarJEBc5wllIPxEeYwxI3EVb9z2skpyDPtdmtJXlrRmRYyMLLrMvIia82SZ-DwptyD35Ma12MDs_03W2rigdBCeBGmuIKtKsU1yeV0-tuCGe6MVN1pvrSNFn&sig=Cg0ArKJSzMAOpTHPN57uEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/adServer.bs?cn=brd&FlightID=24609158&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=1246014272" id="LPlnk357665" previewremoved="true"><span class="x_s4">e
at least 65,000 estimated Indigenous dead who so tragically lost their lives defending their country here in Australia in the frontier wars of the 1800s? Why is there nowhere in Australia telling the stories of the massacres, the dispossession, and the courageous
resistance of these patriots?</span></a></span></p>
<p class="x_p6"><span class="x_s2"><a href="https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstvAnjyC5CxtKLbThX4dj09iN9LBe9Q76kZ7Lxn78LPsl0IdNmlSRny8bZ79Izhd-25kF-AMXC_XVdhHl8l0j2rxe4_xWZt0-p35Zo6jql8lFeVxX6grTxZc_GiKLIJpI3dHhggu3KVLJIPvmTgOgpv4Qe7xR6ZLVdiyMzDs6b5v8RAPAVscdnKp-MT3e15KrJf2h-yyuqYRmGk6BEzQWqVLd3TkG8MXUYcG9RaY6fU5GgWsUErimWb76YzmRPT1kLSyem2EKFtxXg5yZwSuED086mwirJ6ucKXJBN8WA&sai=AMfl-YT7MarJEBc5wllIPxEeYwxI3EVb9z2skpyDPtdmtJXlrRmRYyMLLrMvIia82SZ-DwptyD35Ma12MDs_03W2rigdBCeBGmuIKtKsU1yeV0-tuCGe6MVN1pvrSNFn&sig=Cg0ArKJSzMAOpTHPN57uEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/adServer.bs?cn=brd&FlightID=24609158&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=1246014272" id="LPlnk335090" previewremoved="true"></a></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The figure of 65,000, I should add, is one arrived at by two academics at the University of Queensland and applies only to Indigenous deaths in Queensland. If their methodology is correct, the numbers for the Indigenous fallen
nationally must be extraordinarily large.</span></p>
<p class="x_p6"><span class="x_s2"><a href="https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstvAnjyC5CxtKLbThX4dj09iN9LBe9Q76kZ7Lxn78LPsl0IdNmlSRny8bZ79Izhd-25kF-AMXC_XVdhHl8l0j2rxe4_xWZt0-p35Zo6jql8lFeVxX6grTxZc_GiKLIJpI3dHhggu3KVLJIPvmTgOgpv4Qe7xR6ZLVdiyMzDs6b5v8RAPAVscdnKp-MT3e15KrJf2h-yyuqYRmGk6BEzQWqVLd3TkG8MXUYcG9RaY6fU5GgWsUErimWb76YzmRPT1kLSyem2EKFtxXg5yZwSuED086mwirJ6ucKXJBN8WA&sai=AMfl-YT7MarJEBc5wllIPxEeYwxI3EVb9z2skpyDPtdmtJXlrRmRYyMLLrMvIia82SZ-DwptyD35Ma12MDs_03W2rigdBCeBGmuIKtKsU1yeV0-tuCGe6MVN1pvrSNFn&sig=Cg0ArKJSzMAOpTHPN57uEAE&urlfix=1&adurl=https://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/adServer.bs?cn=brd&FlightID=24609158&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=1246014272" id="LPlnk127884" previewremoved="true"></a></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">As one prominent commentator noted, “Individually and collectively, it was sacrifice on a stupe<a href="https://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/adServer.bs?cn=bsr&FlightID=24609158&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=1246014272" id="LPlnk806235" previewremoved="true"><span class="x_s4">ndous
scale. We should be a nation of memory, not just of memorials, for these are our foundation stories</span></a>. They should be as important to us as the ride of Paul Revere, or the last stand of King Harold at Hastings, or the incarceration of Nelson Mandela
might be to others.”</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The commentator was Tony Abbott, announcing the French museum, speaking of the dead of world war one.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And yet how can his argument be said not to also hold for the Indigenous dead? After all, Sir John Monash became a great military leader in spite of considerable prejudice. And so too Pemulwuy and Jundamurra.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Of course, such a reasonable and necessary proposal as a museum for the Indigenous fallen would at first be greeted with ridicule and contempt. Because in the deepest, most fundamental way we are not free of our colonial past.
Freedom exists in the shadow of memory. For Australia to find out what freedom means it has to face up to the truth of its past. And it’s time we decided to accept what we are and where we come from, because only in that truth can we finally be free as a people.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">For Australia to find out what freedom means it has to face up to the truth of its past</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Sixty years ago, the scientific consensus was that Indigenous Australians had been in Australia for only 6,000 years. But through a series of breath-taking discoveries, science has confirmed what Indigenous people always knew:
that they have been here for at least 60,000 years.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">It makes you wonder if the $500m earmarked for renovating the Australian War Memorial would not be more wisely spent on a world class national Indigenous museum that honours a past unparalleled in human history? Surely, when
we have the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth, is not such a major institution central to our understanding of ourselves as a people? Is it not necessary, and fundamental to us as a nation?</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">It is, after all, extraordinary, and beyond a disgrace that there is in the 21st century no museum telling that extraordinary story, so that all Australians might know it, so that the world might share in it, and so that we
might learn something of the struggle and achievement, the culture and unique civilisations that were and are Indigenous Australia.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">We have turned our back on this profound truth again and again, because to acknowledge it is also to acknowledge the other great truth of Australia: that the prosperity of contemporary Australia was built on the destruction
of countless Indigenous lives up to the present day, and with them dreamings, songlines, languages, alternative ways of comprehending not only our extraordinary country but the very cosmos.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And yet if we were to have the courage and largeness to acknowledge as a nation both truths about our past, we would discover a third truth, an extraordinary and liberating truth for our future, about who we are and where
we might go.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">We would discover that though this land and its people were colonised, a 60,000-year-old civilisation is not so easily snuffed out. And the new people who came to Australia, in their dealings with black Australia, were also
indigenised, and, in the mash up, Indigenous values of land, of country, of time, of family, of space and story, became strong among non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous ways, forms, understandings permeated our mentality in everything from Australian rules
football to our sense of humour.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">As much as there was a process of colonisation, there was also a history of indigenisation – a frequently repressed, often violent process in which a white underclass took on many black ways of living and sometimes, more fundamentally,
thinking and feeling, in which may be traced continuities that extend back into deep time.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">We would discover that we are not Europeans nor are we Asians. That we are not a new country. We are in the first instance a society that begins in deep time. That is the bedrock of our civilisation as Australians, our birthright,
and if we would accept it, rather than spurn it, we might discover so many new possibilities for ourselves as a people.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">A war of extermination</span></p>
<p class="x_p7"><span class="x_s2"></span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">My own island is a good example of both processes. There took place there what was described, not by a contemporary left-wing academic, but an 1830s Van Diemonian attorney general, as “a war of extermination” of the Tasmanian
Aborigines. A terrible war of which fewer than 100 people survived, the forebears of today’s 25,000-strong Palawa population.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">To this day Tasmanian society is shaped by the tragedy of a land where the English, as a ship’s captain’s wife, Rosalie O’Hare, confided in her diary in 1828, “consider the massacre of these people an honour”.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">But it was, for a critical time, also a land where many ex-convicts, to quote a contemporary witness, “dress in kangaroo skins without linen and wear sandals made of seal skins. They smell like foxes.” They live in “bark huts
like the natives, not cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus, and small porcupines”. In coming to understand how to live in this strange new world, they took on Aboriginal partners, ways of life and thinking.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">No less an authority than John West, the first official editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote in 1856 that whites living outside of the two major Van Diemonian settlements “had a way of life somewhat resembling that of
the Aborigines”.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The bush became freedom, and for a time the Van Diemonian authorities feared a jacquerie in which the ex-convicts would make common cause with the Aboriginal population.</span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">It was a messy, often brutal, inescapably human response to extraordinary times and places, out of which emerged a new people. It was a revolution of sense and sensibilities so extraordinary it is even now hard to fully compass
its liberating dimensions.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">If this history is frequently terrible, it is also finally a history of hope for us all. For it shows we are not dispossessed Europeans, but a muddy wash of peoples made anew in the meeting of a pre-industrial, pre-modern
European culture with a remarkable Indigenous culture and an extraordinary natural world.</span></p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">George Orwell once said that the hardest thing to see is what is in front of your face.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">This is what is in front of ours.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s5">We became our own people, not a poor imitation of elsewhere.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">We pretend that our national identity is a fixed, frozen thing, but Australia is a molten idea. We have only begun to think of ourselves as Australians within living memory. There was no legal concept of an Australian citizen
until 1948. Twenty years later, the Australian population was still divided into three official categories by the ABS in its official year book: British: born in Australia; British: born overseas, and foreign.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Indigenous Australia wasn’t even recorded as a general category.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Indigenous Australia has, after great thought and wide discussion, asked that it be heard, and that this take the form of an advisory body to parliament – a body that would be recognised in the constitution.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p3"><span class="x_s3">Indigenous Australia wasn’t even recorded as a general category</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">“What a gift this is that we give you,” Galarrwuy Yunupingu has said, “if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way.”</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">The gift we are being offered is vast; the patrimony of 60,000 years, and with it the possibilities for the future that it opens up to us. We can choose to have our beginning and our centre in Indigenous culture. Or we can
choose to walk away, into a misty world of lies and evasions, pregnant with the possibility of future catastrophe.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">But this gift needs honouring in what Yunupingu calls a “meaningful way”. It needs honouring with institutions, with monuments, with this profound history being made central in our account of ourselves and, above all, with
what the Indigenous people have asked for repeatedly: constitutional recognition.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">In truth, we can no longer go forward without addressing this matter. We cannot hope to be a republic if this is not at the republic’s core, because otherwise we are only repeating the error of the colonialists and the federationists
before us.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">At a moment when democracy around the world is imperilled we are being offered, with the Uluru statement, the chance to complete our democracy, to make it stronger, more inclusive, and more robust.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And we would be foolish to turn that offer down.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">That saying the things that I have said today might be deemed unreasonable, or shrill, or farfetched, should remind us all of how intolerable the situation remains in this country for Indigenous people, how unbearable it must
be for Indigenous people to know that their patrimony, their 60-millennia-old culture, which they are willing to share, which has shaped and continues to shape much of what is best in Australia, will, however, continue to be treated as marginal, and they,
again, humiliated.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Even if you have no respect for Indigenous Australia, you should care for the future of your country. And now, more than ever, we need ways of bringing us together, not, as, for example, Australia Day presently does, dividing
us. We need a large and open vision sustained in truth, not myths that encourages dangerous illusions.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">I know these are large ideas. But perhaps they are the ideas for these times. None of these things are easy. None will be quickly arrived at.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">But the alternative is worse; the alternative is the slow collapse, it is the many cracks which are already appearing; the inequality; the grounds for an authoritarian revolt, for a hopelessly divided country. It is Holderlin’s
yearning for the chasm.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">Definitions belong to the definer not the defined. For 20 years Australians lived with the definition that they were selfish, xenophobic, self-interested and incapable of being roused on larger issues.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">But the marriage equality debate proved it was not so. Since the marriage equality vote it’s clear that Australians are not the mean and pinched people we had been persuaded and bluffed for so many years that we were.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">We are not small-minded bigots. We are, as it turns out, people who care. We are people who feel and who think. Australia is not a fixed entity, a collection of outdated bigotries and reactionary credos, but rather the invitation
to dream, and this country – our country – belongs to its dreamers.</span></p>
<p class="x_p2"><span class="x_s2"></span><br>
</p>
<p class="x_p4"><span class="x_s2">And if after more than 20 years of groundhog day we are finally ready to once more go forward as a people it’s time our dreamers were brought in from the cold, and with them Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s great gift of the Australian
dreaming.</span></p>
</div>
<div><br>
<br>
<img naturalheight="1" naturalwidth="1" id="x_A7B0E3ED-4C12-4BDE-ABAE-A41CE18F59DE" style="padding: 0px 1px 1px 0px; user-select: none;" tabindex="0" src="cid:A7B0E3ED-4C12-4BDE-ABAE-A41CE18F59DE"></div>
<div><br>
<br>
Sent from my iPad</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>