Fumbling for an Australian Identity

We aren't British, multiculturalism is flaccid, and Aboriginality is not enough

The white civilization taking shape, both in the towns and in the bush, was an amalgam of those which had grown in England, Scotland and, to some degree, Ireland in the preceding centuries. In the main it was solidly Protestant, virtuous, hard-working, courageous and persevering against great odds. The pioneers were prepared to suffer hardship in order to get a foothold in the Australia they were in the process of building… In their determined quest to conquer and possess the land, to wrest out a living in commerce and minor industry, to build schools, churches, roads and court houses, Australians began again the work their ancestors had taken centuries to do in their homelands. Within a half century of settlement, the foundations of a British civilization had been laid down on a continent which was months removed by sea from its cultural origins.

— John Molony, History of Australia, 1988

The demand for a white Australia in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was a principal factor in the federation of the Australian colonies, and one of the first legislative acts of the new federal parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. The Bulletin, mouthpiece of the radical nationalism of the period, carried on its masthead the motto 'Australia for the White Man', which it discarded only in 1961 after a change of ownership. The Brisbane Worker hailed the legislation as saving Australia from 'the coloured curse', and in 1905 the federal conference of the Australian Labor Party declared that its policy was 'the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity'. Officially, the Labor movement was in favour of White Australia because an influx of Asian labour was a threat to the living standards of Australian workers; unofficially, the economic motive and the racialist motive were inextricably interwoven.

— Equality and Authority: a Study of Class, Status and Power in Australia, Solomon Encel, 1970

Related:

Zionism for Aboriginal Australians

Warren Mundine in Black and White

Australia’s Rule by Bureaucrat

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There is a strain of Australian intellectualism and polite society that yearns for a national identity tied to the country’s first inhabitants.

Here’s Mark McKenna in From The Edge:

Australia has only just freed itself from the shackles of racism. The White Australia Policy was not dismantled until the 1960s, and then only in piecemeal fashion, just as it has only begun to incorporate indigenous knowledge of country, a term that expresses both the human and natural worlds, livelihood, culture, belonging, and spirituality into the national imagination. One of the great unknown questions of Australia’s future is whether Australia’s indigenous and non-indigenous cultures will ever come together in a shared profound understanding of the continent.

Australian academics and politicians tend not to have too much time for Christianity these days — the marinade in which our society soaks — but beeline straight for the nearest pagan woo. You can just feel the good vibes ooze out of the words “indigenous knowledge of country” or “shared profound understanding of the continent”. This vibes-based history and fantastical search for meaning in Australia’s pre-colonial history has a hard currency among many of Australia’s cultural, political, and business elite.

The Gadigal people — who I hear acknowledged most in Sydney, now immortalised by a major metro station — comprised 50¹ individuals in 1788 when the First Fleet arrived. That is not missing any zeroes. Fifty. The entire Eora ‘nation’² that lived in Greater Sydney, of which the Gadigal were a band, made up a few thousand. For over 40,000 years these people eked out a meagre and grim existence filled with the violence, infanticide, rape, and bare subsistence of probably all peoples from 40,000 years ago. The fevered imaginations of (mainly white) Australians looking for a native identity project their fantasies onto these ancient peoples and elevate them to a kind of priesthood. Masters of mystical secrets, ‘custodians’ in the vein of dryads and water nymphs, rather than nomadic peoples doing their best to survive.

We acknowledge a band of 50 individuals from over two centuries ago every day in Sydney? I’ve lived in this country for most of my life and this cultural obsession and fantastical projection still baffles me. It seems to be getting more potent. How did we get here?

British Australia

The Australian people has sprung from transplanted British stock. During the first forty or fifty years of the transplanting, this stock was of predominantly poor quality; but throughout the last 100 years it has been generally clean and vigorous.

Among the Australians pride of race counted for more than pride of country. They exulted in the ‘process of consanguineous peopling of the land,’ in the crimson thread of kinship which ran through them all; and declared that the unity of Australia meant nothing if it did not imply a united race.

‘The Empire,’ protested [former Prime Minister] Deakin, ‘is great because it is British.’ To such an Empire, refashioned in the image of Australia, how easy it was to be loyal. Imperial patriotism became an extension of Australian nationalism… as [former Prime Minister] Hughes declared in 1921, ‘We are a nation by the grace of God and the British Empire…”

— W.K. Hancock, Australia, 1930

Prior to the 1960s Australia was an explicitly British project. Australians were more British than the British. Federation united Australia’s political parties and constituents around a shared vision of Australia’s role in the world: a scion of the British people, a part of the grand and noble project of British imperialism.

Australia’s sacrifice at Gallipoli and substantial contribution to the western front in WWI continued to reflect that sentiment. So again in WWII. But this time, with the dismantling of the empire and the arrival of the Americans to defeat the Australia-bound Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Coral Sea — after General MacArthur escaped to Australia from a fallen Philippines — we pivoted to our new imperial masters.

As America assumed its cultural, political, and economic hegemony in the west, so we took our cues from the new centre of power. When it caught a cold, we sneezed. America’s cultural revolution in the 1960s bled into Australia. The US passed its Civil Rights Act in 1964, so in 1967 Australians voted overwhelmingly in favour of a constitutional amendment granting the federal government powers over Aboriginal affairs (as opposed to just the states³) and to include them in the census.

With black-white relations ablaze in the US and broadcast around the world, the White Australia Policy suddenly appeared in an awkward new light. No longer did it merely reflect the nation’s extension of British civilisation. No longer was it acceptable to have an explicitly white democratic project. Instead it was viewed in the light of American black-white relations and her history of slavery and its descendants. A policy like ‘White Australia’ is painfully legible to American culture wars in a way the Indian caste system or Latin American ethno-classism or Chinese and Japanese ethno-chauvinism still are not. It clearly would not fly. There was a new Pharaoh in America.

Post-WWII Australia

Since then we’ve been fumbling for a new identity. Along with continued subsidies for British migration (Ten Pound Poms), waves of Greek and Italian and Yugoslavian migrants post-WWII introduced a new flavour of civilisation. A few boatloads of Vietnamese too. Australia steered away from Britishness and towards something new. In 1975 the government established SBS, a multilingual radio service focused on migrant communities. SBS television launched in 1980, followed by world news and subtitled foreign films in 1991. By then the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Rainbow Nation was sweeping away Apartheid in South Africa. The messianic age of peace and prosperity and the lion lying down with the lamb and so on had begun. Australia wanted its part of the zeitgeist, its share of the arc that bent towards eternal paradise on earth. It grasped at it beneath the banner of ‘multiculturalism’. No one quite knew what that meant, but they felt it complemented Australia’s ‘fair go’ ethos and tolerant self-conception. The migration spigot was opened further and further over the decades to make Australia the advanced nation with the highest foreign-born population in the world. There was nothing in particular Australians decided to become: they simply were. They were tolerant. They were multicultural. They were most definitely not racist. No active verbs in sight, just taking it as it comes. This cultural period left Patrick White in the past, and replaced him with stories of cultural clash and migrant anxieties like in the excellent Australian comedy The Wog Boy and The Slap.

Immigrant stories were an important but not the dominant new source of Australian identity though. That came down to the blackfella.

Native Australia

In the 1990s Reconciliation (with a capitalised R) became the new movement for spiritual enlightenment and absolution. Like ‘motherhood’, it’s impossible for a respectable person to be against ‘Reconciliation’. (A poor analogy perhaps; these days many ‘respectable’ types have found a way to be against motherhood.) The High Court in Mabo (1992) found pre-existing native title rights exist on land under certain conditions, leading to the Native Title Act 1993. (So far 54% Australia’s landmass has been successfully claimed under Native Title, 27% exclusively.) Following the Bringing Them Home Report (1997) which found widespread removal of Aboriginal children during the early and mid-20th century as part of the Stolen Generation, 250,000 Australians participated in the Reconciliation Walk over the Sydney Harbour Bridge during Reconciliation Week in 2000. Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology for the Stolen Generation represented the crescendo of the Reconciliation movement.

And yet, Reconciliation never arrives, because it is not a destination, but a process (and an industry). Like the eternal wifely rebuke, it’s not about solving the problem, but endlessly talking it out (and cashing it in). Reconciliation makes more sense as a new strain of Australian Protestantism: messianic in nature, forever promising paradise yet retreating with every step forward. Colonisation was our original sin. Now there is an annual National Sorry Day (a Day of Atonement). A Reconciliation Week, a NAIDOC⁴ Week (I’m not sure what it’s about but the acronym is a favourite among Australia’s bloated corporates). It even has its own Indulgences — paid for by the taxpayer.

This Reconciliation faith does not simply seek atonement for past wrongs — it also elevates a reimagined version of indigenous history into a near-mystical realm. The search for meaning in Australia’s pre-colonial past has produced its own priesthood: authors, educators, and activists who craft a history not as it was, but as it ought to have been — one of wisdom, sustainability, and lost knowledge.

This is why schools and public discourse increasingly venerate a fantasy history, propagated by figures whose claims to indigeneity have been denied by the very Aboriginal communities they claim. The projection is clear: where there was once a fragmented, subsistence-based existence — no better or worse in dignity than any other ancient people — there must now be Empire, Science, Great Civilisation. This is not a history of indigenous people as they lived, but as white Australians need them to have been: the noble custodians of sacred knowledge, transfigured into a spiritual panacea for modern alienation.

Most Australians have never met an Aborigine in real life, other than perhaps in passing. But for one segment of Australia’s creative and political class, they’ve come to represent a source of spiritual succor. This makes sense: for a new native Australian identity, why not turn to the literal natives of the land? Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 Tourism Australia ad is a perfect encapsulation of this conception of indigenous Australians: a kind of mystical faery or bush leprechaun here to assuage the pangs of modernity for the new working woman. This is, of course, as condescending as it sounds. (I remember watching that Tourism Australia ad when it aired — I couldn’t believe they got away with it.)

This has since reached its zenith among ABCistas, merging with other progressive causes into a melded Great Monocause, manifest perfectly in this transgender duet with Aboriginal Elders or this great paganistic mural of two young gay Aboriginal boys that rises above Sydney like the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby:

Of course, this is part of a global trend (why did Global Monocause HQ add black and brown stripes to the latest LGBTQ2I+ flag?). And it’s not just the ABCistas. There are (white) fund managers in Sydney who begin candidate interviews with a land acknowledgement. For my sins I attended a writer’s festival in Melbourne a decade ago where the (white) presenter began with a land acknowledgement… in haiku. Recently I heard a (white) teacher acknowledge the indigenous people in the room — a room full of mainly rabbis. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Part of the appeal here is atavistic: it combines pagan forms of ancestor and nature worship, ancient sources of spiritual succor.

Whilst this vein of indigenous worship seems to be compelling enough for large swathes of Australia’s cultural elite, it does not really fly for most Australians. As of 2021, 3.8% of Australians identified as Aboriginal. There are many more Chinese Australians (5.5%). Australians feel goodwill towards Aboriginal Australians and — just quietly — a great deal of pity. Solomon Encel in his excellent 1970 anthropology of Australian class and society Equality and Authority placed most Aborigines on the sixth and lowest ‘depressed’ rung of Australian classes. Hence the $40-odd billion that goes to indigenous beneficiaries every year and countless reports over many decades of poor indigenous conditions and outcomes and efforts to improve them. So where Australian elites prefer to fantasise about spiritual awakenings in the bush and thrust ever-escalating ceremonies on the public at sporting and corporate events⁵, most Australians accept these payments and cultural incursions as a mix of repentance and beneficence (“it’s the least we can do”⁶).

This national and institutional posture is not harmless. Over a trillion dollars across over half a century has nourished impoverished communities as much as rain on sand. Native Title ensconces regional Aboriginal communities in their own ethno-communist dystopia and funnels cash through a few feudal family heads. The industry entrenches activist groups whose incentives are tied up with the perpetuation of Aboriginal immiseration over its resolution. Decades of firehosing cash at the issue may also be inflating the Aboriginal population, like how autism diagnoses in Australian children have increased ten-fold in the decade since the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in 2013.⁷ In fact the self-discovery of middle class urban Aborigines may be the main reason indigenous outcomes data is improving at all. As former Cabinet minister John Anderson writes:

The reason there is any improvement in the Closing the Gap measures is that more people – middle-class and urbanized – are identifying as Aboriginal for the status and benefits. In fact, the estimated Aboriginal population of Australia between 1901-1966 was a steady 80,000; it is estimated to reach 1mil by 2031.

It’s encouraging at least that strong indigenous voices like Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price are pushing back against the fetishisation of stagnation and the shackles of victimhood.

Who are we?

None of this is a basis for a national identity.

A Chinese Australian has as much to do with Australian Aboriginal culture as, well, any Chinaman. And a Pom, for that matter. That is why the Voice referendum failed. Because whilst for progressives it was just another escalation in their Reconciliation jihad, for most Australians it was a step too far: an encroachment on the functioning of their state and British institutional inheritance.

Americans have had a very different journey around national identity. They were Albion’s stock, but in a revolutionary stroke they broke the chains that bound them to Britain and very explicitly set off on their own course, one bound for greatness and defined by exceptionalism. They conquered their land. They defeated terrifying and formidable native empires, as well as the Spanish, the French, the Mexicans, and then the Confederates, to forge a single union imbued with divine purpose. Americans have a deep sense of agency. They are on a divine mission to shape the future to their will.

Australians do not have that. We have never had a sense of exceptionalism. We’ve never given ourselves the right to greatness. We have built no monuments in the desert. We’ve hewed closely to the main cities we established well over a century ago. We may be an energy superpower, but we dare not wield it in the manner of an Arab prince (the Gulf Arabs, behind perhaps only China, are sprouting new cities in the desert). The colony was a misbegotten whelp, established for her mother’s refuse. It was born a police state, evolved into a British administocracy, and eventually turned its lot in with American-led tumult in race consciousness and mass migration to end up here: no longer British but with a British Head of State, not indigenous but with an irradicable stain on its conscience, and more ‘multicultural’ but sensing that conception alone is directionless and flaccid.

If Americans are imbued with divine exceptionalism and agency, Australians are elite managers. Australia manages the present. We’ve had two centuries of managed success. We survived the first colonies’ starvation pangs. Endless land and grazing pastures brought wealth we managed through. We found gold and managed the ensuing boom via taxes and immigration restrictions. Federation was a powerful and pragmatic instrument to maintain the status quo. We’ve responded to the crises of the twentieth century by following the lead of our imperial sponsors, first British then American. We are a pragmatic people who respond to each issue as it arises, managing our way through. Puny voices in Australia might call for great action (we should build cities! We can be 10x richer! We should terraform the desert!), but it’s not clear at all we can change our institutional imperative to just manage through.

We’re managing through our identities. The Britishness, the ‘multiculturalism’, the search for spirit in Aboriginality and history — none of these identities really go away, instead they accrue and hang about. Consider the SBS — it’s still around! Can you imagine? In a world of infinite social media and global streaming, the government is still doling out foreign language content via a pre-internet conceived radio and television channel for migrants. Such is the nature of things and the paucity of agency. There are no ‘live players’ — all the functioning institutions we have were created by men with agency long ago, and the current mob awkwardly operate them along pre-laid rails. There is no sense of purpose.

Maybe national identity is not something you arrive at and the wives are right: it’s all in the journey. Australianism is a thing, of course. We are distinct, we have a national character, national memories, a shared tongue and twang. And as we dig into our Britishness, and whatever multiculturalism is, and whatever we see in our indigenous peoples, we create something new.

And so, Australia ambles on. Australia is not a nation that arrives; it is a nation that manages. We do not stride toward a grand destiny, nor do we throw ourselves headlong into reinvention — we adjust, we administer, we accommodate. The nation’s myths remain half-formed, its self-conception still fumbling between pragmatism and nostalgia, guilt and detachment. If the Britishness lingers, the multiculturalism muddles, and the indigenous veneration drifts between reverence and performance, it is because management, not revolution, is the truest Australian tradition. If Americans wield destiny and Arabs build empires in the sand, Australians simply keep the lights on, nodding politely at each new identity that drifts through. We are a people not of manifest destiny, but of pragmatic endurance. Whether that is enough remains an open question. But like all peoples made in the image of God, Australians are imbued with agency. If we will it, it is no dream.

1. Tragically, smallpox reduced them to 3 by 1790. Per John Maloney’s The Penguin Bi-Centennial History of Australia.

2. Let’s not get into the total misapplication of the word ‘nation’ in the borrowed-from-Canada ‘First Nations’ — a European concept emerging in the 18th and 19th centuries.

3. As an example of disparity between states with respect to laws concerning Aborigines, Aboriginal men could vote in South Australia as early as 1856, with Victoria and NSW quickly following. Aboriginal women could vote in South Australia from 1895 — amongst the earliest women in the world to be granted the franchise. Western Australia and Queensland didn’t extend the franchise until 1962 and 1965 respectively, reflecting darker attitudes towards Aborigines in those states.

4. Do not ask why it stands for the very Soviet sounding National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee.

5. I am told that Rio Tinto enforced an Acknowledgement of Country at the start of every meeting over 30 minutes after they blew up the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in May 2020.

6. This is exactly why some friends said they were voting ‘Yes’ in the Voice referendum (yes, sadly I can’t even convince my own mates). Something must be done > the Voice is something > the Voice must be done.

7. Autism rates have increased from 0.3% in 2011 to 3.2% in 2021 for children aged under 14 years per Maathumai Ranjan and Robert Breunig, Individualized Disability Support Schemes and Their Impact on Autism Diagnoses (Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, 2024).