Muristek
The idea of Australia: forgotten history, power for power’s sake and the collapse of the egalitarian myth
In this extract from her book, Julianne Schultz says the topography of an evolving national identity reveals peaks of great change and long valleys of fearful, censorious complacency
Stories make us fully and uniquely human. They are the way we make sense of the world, our lives and relationships. They may not always be true, completely, or even substantially. They may be tinged with hyperbole and hope, fiercely contested or modified by hand-me-down retelling. Key characters and memories are conveniently or painfully lost in the miasma of pride, shame and trauma. But the best stories retain a flicker of emotional truth, a resonance that outlives the events, people and places they describe. The questions they raise are, as the philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “part of the process of deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become”. Some provide the key to atonement, others a safe or challenging place to consider the lessons of the past. Others, over time, make the journey to myth, where they console and distract from more confronting truths.
This applies to nations as well as individuals, families and communities. Stories “underlie the necessary fiction that is ‘us’”, the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote as he pondered what is the Irish story. The challenge is to allow multiple stories. Identity is not an either/or. It is possible to be attached to different places, beliefs and ways of being at the same time. To share an inner life with others of a complex place where belonging, not exclusion, prevails.
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