Reducing my Australia to just three books makes me feel like someone panning for gold in a fast-moving stream filled with the precious metal. If I stand still long enough and shake the pan hard enough, surely just three exceptional nuggets will be left. It’s fair to say that I have a privileged perspective.
In my house I have three rooms and half a garage lined with books. Probably about half are by Australian authors, many by friends and colleagues, people I have published and with whom I have had long (and fleeting) conversations. They are about Australia looking in and looking out, filled with research, emotion and analysis. Beautifully curated catalogues of exhibitions, historical tomes, collections of essays, biographies, books about First Peoples, politics, media, women, migration, environment, policy, economics, war, royal commissions; a room of novels and short stories, shelves of poetry.
It was a collection that came into its own when I was researching and writing The Idea of Australia. So many telling details, and stories, waiting to be plucked and applied to my quest to try to make sense of this ancient young nation that is both a continent and an island, but is still a half-formed thing. Because it is in books, and the distilled intelligence and insights of their authors, that the seeds of the imagined nation germinate. Two recent comprehensive surveys of a century of novels and plays, Julian Meyrick’s Australia in 50 Plays (Currency) and Carl Reinecke’s Books that Made Us (HarperCollins), are good starting points.
The many books in my library show that the Australia imagined into being is at its best generous and diverse, respectful and inclusive, and at its worst fearful, ignorant and cruel. It is not perfect, but it is not owned by the oi oi oi brigade.
In getting to my three nuggets, I need to explain a little of my process, something of my journey and some of the questions left unanswered, which my chosen volumes address.
When I was a child, my parents had invested, by onerous hire-purchase, in the Australian Encyclopaedia. Like country children everywhere I had worked my way through the red bound volumes. It is possible they chose this imposing set instead of the more famous Britannica out of a burgeoning anti-imperialist sentiment, but truth be known, they were probably cheaper.
When I arrived at the University of Queensland in the mid 1970s, Australian studies were finding a place in the long-established humanities and social sciences curricula. It was not something that came easily; we students heard whispers of departmental debates. But it suited the times. The local version of the decolonising impulse that had reshaped the world after World War II: a growing curiosity about what being Australian meant detached from Britain.
At the time, there was still a long way to go. Much was still invisible. But it was possible to enrol in a contemporary Australian-inflected program in literature, history, government, sociology. In the previous decade a determined cohort of ambitious scholars had begun to open the field, to create a distinctive Australian scholarship. By the 1970s they were still searching for the theoretical framework that would later open many more doors.
In the literature honours class, we read the canon, comparing and contrasting it with the smaller list of ‘Australian classics’. We were encouraged to explore the writers who showed there was more going on beneath the surface than the old school realists had allowed—Patrick White, Christina Stead, Thea Astley, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), Thomas Keneally. A new generation of (then mainly) short-story writers and poets were finding places to be published and a hungry readership, including Frank Moorhouse, Kate Jennings, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Helen Garner, Michael Wilding, Kate Grenville and David Malouf.
Any sensitive young person who was paying attention knew that there was more to know than was allowed in the public discourse. But finding it and making sense of it was not easy. Silence prevailed. Censorship was still in the air. But awareness of First Peoples was pricking the consciousness and those trapped under the white blanket of assimilation were breaking free. Feminism and civil rights were in the air.
One of my classmates in that stuffy, windowless seminar room at UQ elegantly skewered this years later, and his book is one of my three nuggets. Ross Gibson’s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland was published by University of Queensland Press in 2002. It is, deservedly, still in print and available for sale. Sadly, Ross recently died, but his work lives on. Seven Versions elegantly and forensically identifies what was happening beneath the surface of regional Queensland and how the trauma and shame of it lingers, making the history unbearable and even the consolation of myth insufficient.
In the 1970s and 1980s in the slapdash, but punishingly real, autocracy of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the corrupt National Party and its enabling police force, one of the go-to subjects of newspaper feature writers, television current affairs producers and satirists was ‘is Queensland different?’ The answer was invariably ‘yes’, but the explanations were never really satisfactory. The thing the journalists missed was that Queensland was the site of the longest and most single-minded extermination of First Peoples on the mainland. The number killed during the second half of the nineteenth century is now conservatively estimated at 62,000—and that does not count those poisoned by opium or grog or locked in missions.
Even before the historiography settled on the scale of this protracted murderous assault, Ross Gibson took his readers on a journey through central Queensland and showed them the signs. The somewhat desolate landscape is brought to life as a ‘gigantic crime scene … a haunted place’. His publisher describes it as ‘part road movie, part memoir, part murder mystery’—and that is all true. It is also a poet’s work of scholarship. In this year of the Voice to Parliament, it deserves many new readers and will reward those who read this slender volume again.
Sensing what happened is one thing. Knowing it is another, and another still is trying to make sense of why. For all the noise about the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 and Cook’s journey up the east coast eighteen years before, the formation of the nation by act of the British Parliament in 1900 and a parade up Oxford Street and an official ceremony in a blustery Centennial Park on 1 January 1901, remains little known.
It deserves more attention. Therein lie the origins of many of the issues that still beset the modern nation. It’s possible that the Voice debate will provide an opportunity for some more insight into this complex process, but I am not optimistic. Hamilton is more captivating.
One of the defining characteristics of the Australian colonies was that people were hungry for news and information. It might have taken a while for the journals to get here, but when they did, they were devoured. People knew what was happening elsewhere, the debates and arguments, intellectual and political fashions and trends. A republic of newspapers, some called it.
By Federation Australia was arguably the most literate and numerate society in the world, with compulsory education and a record number of universities per capita. The colonies were established at a time when much was changing—religion lost its power, science was ascendant, revolutions flared and died, capital was global, slavery ceased, and pseudo-scientific ‘race’ became the new divide.
Those arguing for a federation of the colonies were keen to create a civic nationalism. Universal suffrage (for men) and the absence of an official religion (for reasons of political expediency) were two markers of this. It was only when the first federal parliament sat that the limits of this civic nationalism became clear. The carefully nurtured fear of racial difference was legislated and shaped the nation for (at least) the next 70 years. The deportation of South Sea Islanders who had been brought to work as (virtual) slaves, the White Australia policy and the disenfranchisement of First Peoples and ‘Asiatics’ when women were given the vote.
Australians were accustomed to paying attention to debates elsewhere, but in adopting racialist exclusion the new nation was ready to lead the world. My second nugget is therefore the extraordinary book by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, published by Melbourne University Press in 2008. It traces the ‘leadership’ of Australians in this brutal process, and documents how it shaped the nation and influenced others.
Much has been written, quite rightly, about the treatment of First Peoples, but the legacy of these policies touched many other people who did not fit the punitively narrow definition of English-speaking ‘whiteness’ over decades. It is a foundational flaw, and this important book explores how it happened.
Assimilation was a cruel policy of the past, but it is not completely buried, explored or compensated for.
My final nugget points to the future. It is Marcia Langton’s Welcome to Country, first published by Hardie Grant in 2021 and since republished several times. It is a joyous celebration of the true uniqueness of the country and its complexity.
It is just the antidote we all need. Marcia also survived those curious classes at UQ in the 1970s, when Australian studies was just beginning, and some still persistently believed ‘race’ defined difference. Her book, rich with collaboration, provides a path to engaging with the truly unique dimensions of this island continent’s history, people and possibility.
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Julianne Schultz is Professor Emeritus Media and Culture, Griffith University, founding editor of Griffith Review and author of The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation.
