Who are we? It’s the hardy perennial, but insufficiently parsed, question looming over this polarising day that ever more contentiously continues to mark the supposed birth of Australian nationhood. It demands a soul search.
But this day of imperial triumphalism, bunting and tall ships – and conversely, trauma and historical nearsightedness – is renowned for neither national self-awareness nor self-reflection.
We will get to unreconciled colonial/frontier history shortly. But to begin with, it helps to accept a few other disquieting and fundamental truths.
The modern Australian state began as a colonial outpost built on a genocidal landgrab. It remains at once weirdly lackadaisical and resentful (in a kind of sun-kissed “if it ain’t broke …” defensive way) about proposed constitutional change to usher in either a republic or, first things first, perhaps, to acknowledge 60,000-plus years of Indigenous civilisation in the founding document of the settler state.
We cling, limpet-like, to the archaic vestiges of a distant dysfunctional hereditary monarchy – emotionally and psychologically lashed to that small island in Europe. Today is a lot about that. But we are also geopolitically and militarily hocked to Washington no matter what would-be dictator runs the place.
Thanks to an undying sentimental reverence for an outdated US-Australia alliance (largely unquestioned and unqualified, it seems, since the US rode to our rescue about 80 years ago), we have been drawn into endless imperial wars. Consequently, we have effectively ceded Australian territory to the Pentagon to use as a US intelligence spy base and – perhaps the biggest folly of all – committed to the $368bn-plus Aukus deal that may never provide a single nuclear submarine to this nation but will nonetheless draw it into its specious conflicts.
Perhaps the most startling part about being something of an emotional little Britain, while simultaneously being so damn obsequious to the US, is that we now find ourselves so unquestioningly, so profoundly, militarily shackled to the unpredictable whims of the dangerously expansionist, felonious, 47th president of the United States.
Will he or won’t he invade a Nato ally? Take the Panama canal back by military force?
Australia is deeply invested in whatever tumescent military impulse Trump may act upon (and so far, since inauguration day at least, the man previously regarded as perhaps the world’s greatest bullshit artist and ambit-claimer is making very good indeed on election promises, no matter how disagreeable they are). And yet our political leaders either blithely cheer him on and show signs of conducting themselves partly in his image ahead of our own forthcoming election – or dare gaslight us to effectively chill TF out because all that really matters in the end is the alliance.
It’s hard to chill, of course – or to look away or be blithely reassured that A is OK – when the president’s most fervent supporter, the richest and perhaps most truly powerful man in the world, celebrates the inauguration with a Nuremberg-style salutation (twice!) evocative of the rise of the Third Reich.
For my part I’d like a national leader or two in this country who’d call it all out: to reflect the concerns of many here that we might mature into something more than (in the words of security analyst Clinton Fernandes) a British settler colonial state and a sub-imperial blunt instrument of the US, come what may.
But face it: that is a big part of who we are, as the modern Australian nation celebrates today while remaining in fervent denial of its deeply racist beginnings and legacies.
Doubtless there’ll be nods to that violent dispossession and to timeless Indigenous continental custodianship today. You can be assured, however, they’ll be tempered with a big series of buts.
But Australia “peacefully” (unless you are Indigenous) forged a modern federation based on immigration, egalitarianism, acceptance and inclusiveness.
But the modern Australian nation was celebrated the world over for its beautiful cities and, not least, its civilised and world-leading advances on workers’ rights and pay, women’s suffrage, public education, voting transparency and governance.
Notwithstanding these national shibboleths, the truth is that such laudable institutional advances too often deliberately excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in a white federation whose very foundation blocks were designed to discriminate against First Nations and others with black skin.
The legislation establishing the White Australia policy was, after all, first passed by the neophyte Australian federal parliament in 1901, its vestiges extant until little more than just 50 years ago. Meanwhile, 2024 marked the bicentenary of the establishment of the New South Wales Legislative Council – forerunner to every state and territory (and later the federal) legislature in what became the nation.
Its first act was the appointment of governor Col William Stewart, integral to establishing the NSW mounted police, whose first duty was to fight a war against the Wiradjuri that began with their pastoral dispossession in Bathurst.
A mature nation with a strong sense of its own self, a place shrugged off of the blinkers of colonial myopia and imperial obsequiousness, dares to subject itself to thorough self-examination of historical past and present.
Are we there yet?
It’s a pertinent question, today of all days.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
