Tim Watts

The Golden Country: Australia’s changing identity

© 2019

The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Victoria

Book Review: The Lying Rodent Notwithstanding …

The book is excellent as far as it goes but will require a new edition to adjust for migration intake in the post-Covid era. That new edition might remedy drawbacks by inclusion of an index and the use of a proof-reader to nip problems (such as those on page 146) in the bud.
Watts sums up the crux of his argument for Australia to become a ‘Golden Country’ when he notes that “In the Gettysburg Address … Abraham Lincoln used the moment of dedication of a soldiers’ national cemetery to declare that the Civil War had given the nation an opportunity for ‘a new birth of freedom’, a new opportunity to live up to its founding national ideals. There has been no equivalent watershed moment in Australia in which the mistakes of the White Australia era were cast off, and our founding values reinterpreted and renewed for the future.” (page 195)

The ‘Golden Country’ to which the author refers is a place where white European Australia and what used be thought of as the yellow peril, Asia, are blended in the melting pot to yield a honey coloured people of a nation more or less integrated with its geographic region.

The brake on our casting off the mistakes of the White Australia era is personified by the man George Brandis denied calling a Lying Rodent.

Notes

Page 5

“Colonial politicians of all persuasions, the trade-union movement and nationalist bush bards alike subscribed to the view infamously expressed by the Bulletin in 1887 that ‘No nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour, is an Australian.’ For the bulk of the first two centuries after European arrival, Australia’s national identity was defined in explicit racial contrast to the people of the neighbouring Asian nations.”

120

“Howard crippled our symbolic nation-building capacity when we most needed it. … We haven’t worked through what our changing demography means for our national identity in the context of a century of nation building in the image of White Australia.”

Demographically we’re increasingly the Golden Country of a European outpost gradually integrating with the people of the geographic region – Asia.

“ethno-nationalist populism”

121

What is it to be Australian? [glib]

“A 2017 survey found that the top four characteristics reported by Australians as being ‘especially Australian’ were ‘belief in the fair go (89 per cent), ‘love of the great outdoors’ (89 per

122

“cent) [why aren’t we interested in doing something about the perilous state of the Murray-Darling River system then?], ‘a sense of humour (89 per cent) and ‘interest in sports’ (82 per cent).”

“Australians view themselves as egalitarians in norms and manners, connected with the land and the outdoors, open to newcomers to our country, but anxious to preserve Australian values as they are.”

[Surely, this should read “Australian values as they are imagined to exist”?]

TW goes on to acknowledge the significant distinction between what people say as against what they do and concludes that “The emerging Golden Country of our communities is still experiencing a national hangover from the White Australia of the past.”

125

Tim Soutphommasane believes that “the polarisation of the discussion of race in Australia between ‘self-flagellation’ and ‘parochial defensiveness’ stops us from being able to have a constructive national conversation about the experiences of people of colour.”

And since when has the debate been reduced to that polarisation? Since “John Howard was elected in 1996

126

and framed the question as that between attacking the character of the Australian people as a whole or respecting the pride people have in their nation – “a deft rhetorical sleight of hand. … Howard effectively made the denial of racism in Australia a precondition of being a virtuous Australian.”

128-130

Discussion of so-called ‘casual-racism’ with respect to the “What country did you come to Australia from?” question unconvincing; eg., if I ask a person with a strong accent where he’s from before he came to Australia that would constitute casual racism according to the criterion that it sets up the person as ‘the other’; too much post-modernist assumption and not enough analysis to my way of thinking.

130-1

The notion of the ‘bamboo ceiling’ is more analytical and easier to come to grips with.

137

Migration academics describe “John Howard’s migration reforms as ‘a multicultural society with monocultural institutions’.”

146

Proof-reader failure.

163

“Turning back from the migration policies that have facilitated the emergence of the Golden Country in our communities would be an extraordinary act of national self-sabotage. It would reverse all the positive economic outcomes Australia has enjoyed over the past two decades. In the short term, a precipitous reduction in our migration program would cause

164

“a labour-market crunch, hurting productivity and slowing economic growth. Over the medium term it would exacerbate our ageing-population problem and put more stress on the federal budget.”

184

“The Australian Legend is no longer fit for purpose, but what are we creating in its place?”

186

“Donald Horne … argued that notions of Australian identity based on history, culture and values would inevitably regress into ethno-nationalism” that we need [185] an “identity based on shared ‘civic faith’, “shared commitment to the rights and obligations of citizenship in a liberal democracy.”

TW believes this is too academic a proposition for Australians and suggests instead that “we need to build something new, with the same kind of emotional and symbolic power, to bind us together.

“The emotional glue that binds individuals together as a nation is a shared culture. It’s what David Malouf describes as a ‘community of experience’ or ‘our common response to place, to land and landscape in all its diverse forms over the continent, to the events we call history, to the institutions that determine our relations to one another and through which we try to make a good and just society, to

187

“all we have added, over 200 years of our being here.’”

190

Cover illustration explained: it’s Nikki Lam’s adaptation of and “response to Max Dupain’s classic piece of Australian iconography, Sunbaker (1937).”

195

“In the Gettysburg Address … Abraham Lincoln used the moment of dedication of a soldiers’ national cemetery to declare that the Civil War had given the nation an opportunity for ‘a new birth of freedom’, a new opportunity to live up to its founding national ideals. There has been no equivalent watershed moment in Australia in which the mistakes of the White Australia era were cast off, and our founding values reinterpreted and renewed for the future.”