The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation eBook : Schultz, Julianne: Amazon.com.au: Books

The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation 

eBook : 

Schultz, Julianne: Amazon.com.au: Books




The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation Kindle Edition
by Julianne Schultz (Author) Format: Kindle Edition


4.3 out of 5 stars 28 ratings

Kindle
$16.14Read with Our Free App
Paperback
from $36.66
2 New from $36.66

Former publisher of Griffith Review Professor Julianne Schultz challenges our notions of what it means to be Australian and asks timely and urgent questions about our national identity.

'Schultz reflects on how we might shake off our fears, our mediocrity and our moral torpor, and rediscover the country we once promised to be' 

KERRY O'BRIEN

'A penetrating analysis' MELISSA LUCASHENKO

'A triumph of art, politics, literature, history, and the deepest scholarship...A towering achievement.' JENNY HOCKING

What is the 'idea of Australia'? What defines the soul of our nation? Are we an egalitarian, generous, outward-looking country? Or is Australia a place that has retreated into silence and denial about the past and become selfish, greedy and insular?

A lifetime of watching Australia as a journalist, editor, academic and writer has given Julianne Schultz a unique platform from which to ask and answer these critical questions. 

The global pandemic gave her time to study the X-ray of our country and the opportunity for perspective and analysis. Schultz came to realise that the idea of Australia is a contest between those who are imaginative, hopeful, altruistic and ambitious, and those who are defensive and inward-looking. She became convinced we need to acknowledge and better understand our past to make sense of our present and build a positive and inclusive future. She suggests what Australia could be: smart, compassionate, engaged, fair and informed.

This important, searing and compelling book explains us to ourselves and suggests ways Australia can realise her true potential. Urgent, inspiring and optimistic, The Idea of Australia presents the vision we need to fully appreciate our great strengths and crucial challenges.

'Timely, bracing, and ultimately hopeful' YASSMIN ABDEL-MAGIED

'Disruptive, bold and brilliant' CLARE WRIGHT

'A brilliant successor to Donald Horne's The Lucky Country' TOM GRIFFITHS

'A contemporary classic in the making' CHRISTINE WALLACE

'Utterly compelling, engrossing and extraordinary' ANNE TIERNAN

'A wonderfully enthralling read' ROSLYN ATKINSON

'Subtle, powerful and compelling' GLYN DAVIS

'Essential reading' FRANK BONGIORNO

'A stunning book' ANN CURTHOYS

'A marvellous read' TONY KOCH

'Beautifully written' MATT FOLEY
===

563 pages
Products related to this item
Sponsored

Product description

About the Author
Professor Emeritus Julianne Schultz AM FAHA is the Chair of The Conversation. She was the publisher and founding editor of Griffith Review, and is Professor Emeritus of Media and Culture at Griffith's Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, and a member of the advisory board of the Gradient Institute. She is an acclaimed author of several books, including Reviving the Fourth Estate (Cambridge) and Steel City Blues (Penguin), and the librettos to the award-winning operas Black River and Going Into Shadows. In 2009, Julianne became a Member of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and the community, and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities the following year. She has served on the board of directors of the ABC, Grattan Institute and Copyright Agency, and chaired the Australian Film TV and Radio School, Queensland Design Council and National Cultural Policy Reference Group. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09MQ3M6HV
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Allen & Unwin (1 March 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2684 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 563 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 69,519 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)

6 in Australian & Oceanian Studies
66,181 in Kindle eBooksCustomer Reviews:
4.3 out of 5 stars 28 ratings

About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Follow

Julianne Schultz


Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs, and more


Customer reviews
4.3 out of 5 stars

========


Top reviews

Top reviews from Australia


Jim
5.0 out of 5 stars A future made clearReviewed in Australia on 15 April 2022
Verified Purchase
This book will make the future we need in Australia much clearer because it shines the precise light of truth on our past. We can build a soul for the nation, it is there in the positive communities we have, the stories we tell, the courage to respect diversity. Thank you, Julianne Schultz, the door is open.

2 people found this helpful

HelpfulReport abuse

Kim Wingerei
4.0 out of 5 stars A broad canvas used to paint Australia for what it is and what it isn’tReviewed in Australia on 7 August 2022
Verified Purchase
But also an opportunity missed. The author has done a great job of bringing together all the various strands of the narrative that makes Australia what is is, and especially how it has gone backwards over the last few decades. But she is let down by poor editing, both in some detail and in missing structure; and - as is so often the case with ambitious works such as this - failing to bring it all together to point more strongly to what the answers could be and how to find them. Thus I was left disappointed, wanting more.


HelpfulReport abuse

Tigermike Book Musings
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars a most readable contribution to reflecting on the ‘soul of our nation’Reviewed in Australia on 28 June 2022

A recently released nonfiction work, The Idea of Australia: a search for the soul of the nation by Julianne Schultz is a most interesting analysis of Aussie culture. Comprising twenty chapters and some personal referencing and storytelling, Schultz explores various themes. The meaning of being an Australian is revealed through its traditions of equality and fairness but also through the lenses of culture, dispossession, media and the “incurable flaw” at the basis of our nation. Basically, it comes down to a dichotomy of the imaginative, hopeful, altruistic and ambitious nature of some Australians or those who are defensive and inward-looking. In moving forward in these troubled times, she asks which of these two types do we want to be? With plentiful footnotes and an expansive index, this is a most readable contribution to reflecting on the ‘soul of our nation’. A highly recommend work with a five star read rating.


HelpfulReport abuse

Jennifer
TOP 10 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars ‘Culture is the real barometer of change. Politics often follows.’Reviewed in Australia on 24 July 2022
Verified Purchase
After reading enthusiastic reviews of this book by those whose opinions I value, I bought a copy for myself. I read slowly, to think about some of the important albeit uncomfortable questions Professor Shultz raises.

I agree with at least some of Professor Schultz’s conclusions, especially with this: ‘the idea of Australia is a contest between those who are imaginative, hopeful, altruistic and ambitious, and those who are defensive and inward-looking.’

Perhaps, now that we have had a change of government, there is reason for optimism. Perhaps. I agree that we need to acknowledge and better understand our past so that we can make sense of the present and build a positive and inclusive future. But I worry that the current economic climate and the ongoing pandemic will make this even more difficult.

We need to consider the long-term underlying issues while at the same time reacting to urgent emerging needs. We need to plan as well as react.

I would recommend this book to every Australian.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

===

The idea of Australia: forgotten history, power for power’s sake and the collapse of the egalitarian myth

‘The necessary fictions of Australia’s official foundation story, the one that starts with European sailors and offers a cursory nod to those who were already here, have become an increasingly threadbare, lazy shorthand for a much more complex identity.’ Photograph: Sean Gladwell/Getty Images

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

by Julianne Schultz

Sun 27 Feb 2022 06.00 AEDT

100

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.

In Australia, O’Toole’s question is more often phrased as a negative accusation: that’s unAustralian. In the early months of the pandemic former prime minister Tony Abbott declared it was time to again ask: who are we? It was ironic that he should ask. His side of politics had scoffed at this question for decades as they wrapped themselves in the flag, with its dominant Union Jack, and repeated selective tales of the past. Discussions about national identity were dismissed as “obsessive” and “frantic”, an endless seminar. The necessary fictions of the official foundation story, the one that starts with European sailors and offers a cursory nod to those who were already here, have become an increasingly threadbare, lazy shorthand for a much more complex identity. A nation that does not know its history well enough to interrogate it, extract meaning from it and challenge its received wisdoms cannot imagine a robust future.

In the early months of the pandemic former prime minister Tony Abbott, pictured left with Scott Morrison and John Howard, declared it was time to again ask: who are we?

In the early months of the pandemic former prime minister Tony Abbott, pictured left with Scott Morrison and John Howard, declared it was time to again ask: who are we? Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

So much has been forgotten, or never known. False statements enter public discourse from the mouths of people who should know better with only belated clarification. Could any other prime minister so misunderstand the celebrated journey of his nation’s foundation as Scott Morrison did when he suggested a re-enactment of James Cook’s “circumnavigation” of Australia? Cook, for whom Morrison’s electorate is named, did not circumnavigate Australia. Matthew Flinders and the Kuring-gai man Bungaree first made that voyage. Yet the prime minister was prepared to allocate $6.7m to build a replica of the Endeavour to “re-enact” the mythical voyage as a learning experience for the nation.

Advertisement

Can we just dismiss the ignorance of a nation’s leader who could suggest that slavery never existed, when the legislation to deport indentured labourers from the Pacific (slaves by any other name) was one of the first bills to pass the national parliament a little over a century earlier?

While the stories on the main stage all too often resemble the carcass of a dead animal on a drought plain, those percolating elsewhere are rich with nuance, inclusion and possibility. The ancient stories of the peoples our official narratives tried so hard for so long to extinguish are being coaxed back from memory and official records; languages once banned are now taught in schools and appear routinely on signs, television titles, and even envelopes. Australia Post announced in 2021 that mail would be delivered to addresses that included First Nations place names 25 years after the revealing patchwork map was published. The lands and languages of First Nations peoples were now named. Speakers once shamed and jailed are now honoured for rescuing words and stories to buttress the uniqueness of a continent that is now a nation.

Fintan O’Toole has described the profound challenge to national, personal and community identity that followed the collapse of respect for the Catholic Church as Ireland’s pre-eminent institution. “People do need a sense of collective purpose, a sense that there is something that they belong to and that belongs to them,” he wrote. “All the evidence is that if one set of stories no longer makes sense, people do not simply become realists. They become prey to any old story at all, especially one that has potent contrast between Us and Them.” This is not the only response.

Advertisement

Inquiries in Australia have also revealed the limitations of once trusted organisations. Institutions created to make a democratic system robust, accountable and ethical could no longer be relied on. Brutal stories of abuse and betrayal that were once held as tightly as state secrets were revealed in heartbreaking royal commissions and aired on endless news bulletins, helpfully tagged with the numbers of charities to call to manage the grief. Joyful stories of opportunity and transformation also jostle, but don’t fit the catastrophic definitions of news and are harder to hear. Still, most Australians supported their sons and daughters being able to marry irrespective of sexual preference. Stories that stretch narrow stereotypes are welcomed. Stories that extend belonging do not destroy society, as some feared, but make it stronger and more interesting.

In 2007, I, like many Australians, voted for a change of government. I enjoyed trying to figure out who among my neighbours were the 338 people who had pushed the Labor vote up 17% in one of the most traditionally Liberal polling booths in Sydney. Earwigging at the corner shop, on dog walks around the harbourside parks or on the ferry meant they weren’t hard to identify. Even in this rich old suburb named for a tyrannical governor, home to more than its fair share of life’s winners, I was not alone in feeling that the momentum, which had made the country I knew as an adult more interesting than the one I had known as a child, had stalled.

‘Harsh, officially sanctioned suffering is as much a part of the formation of a national ethos as self-reliant pragmatism,’ writes author Julianne Schultz.

‘Harsh, officially sanctioned suffering is as much a part of the formation of a national ethos as self-reliant pragmatism,’ writes author Julianne Schultz. Photograph: Nikki Short/Allen&Unwin

Well before the new nation first raised its flag with a nod to empire and geography, the idea of Australia was a contest between the inward- and outward-looking, between ambition and complacency, between human rights and disempowerment, between labour and capital. There is a clear pattern: inquiry comes in energetic waves and then dissipates. Conversations begin and are all too often shouted down or dismissed. Surveying the topography of an evolving national identity reveals peaks of great change and long valleys of fearful, censorious complacency.

The journey to redefine the nation began after prime minister John Curtin announced in late 1941 that Australia would look to the United States for her defence. This was an important marker in the beginning of a reconstruction that would gather momentum for decades. As decolonising movements swept the world, a positive, inclusive, home-grown nationalism eventually delivered new stories and long overdue reforms. The often painful assimilation of new Australians in time gave way to a celebration of multiculturalism; the economy diversified, more people were better educated, Australia became confidently in and of the region rather than looking across continents for a European home.

Advertisement

As the new nationalism of the 1970s gave way to the Labor government’s modified neoliberalism of the following decade, Australians grew richer, less defensive and even more engaged with the world. When the Coalition government returned to power in 1996, the principles of the market economy were given even freer rein. It was surprising to see the myths of the Australian legend reinvented by John Howard.

The symbolism was clear when the quintessentially suburban prime minister donned an Akubra, opting for the “Squatter” design. What the new nationalists had evoked in books and on screen as a myth of egalitarianism morphed into a story of self-interest and individual success. Symbolism became another commodity. RM Williams boots embodied this evolution. The now expensive designer boots were first made from a single piece of leather during the Great Depression by a man in the remote Flinders Ranges who felt the force of that catastrophe. By the time they became a national icon, the company was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand man in Australia. Then another luxury brand owned by Louis Vuitton, and the footwear of choice for prime ministers and presidents. More recently, the boots became a bauble for another rich man who made his extraordinary fortune shipping iron ore to China. The irony was unmistakable.

The egalitarian myth was stripped of its collectivist spirit to become a glossy fantasy. In the same sweep, unionists became self-employed tradies, private and religious schools created one of the world’s most segregated education systems, union membership plummeted, fragile institutions of First Nation self-determination were dismantled, cities bristled with McMansions in ever-growing suburbs and the bush was transformed by industrial mining. The malleability of myth was best demonstrated in 2010 when some of the world’s biggest companies, whose wealth came from the minerals they extracted from the land, invoked the spirit of the Eureka Stockade to campaign against a super profits tax, taking a Labor prime minister down with them.

A new age in Australia should have dawned with the centenary of Federation in 2001. Committees were formed, conventions held to consider not just the creation of a republic but a fundamental rethink of the constitution, recognition of First Nations people and more. Then the agenda shrank and became increasingly preoccupied with process. The first step – to create a republic and replace the monarch with a local head of state, an idea that once enjoyed overwhelming support – failed, even with the support of the Murdoch press. As time went on, Australia become more divided and cynical, less imaginative and generous. Politics become more transactional, more “professional”, less visionary, too often captive to bullies, designed to resist the change that is essential in any living system.

Could any other prime minister so misunderstand the journey of his nation’s foundation as Scott Morrison when he suggested a re-enactment of James Cook’s ‘circumnavigation’?

Advertisement

Similar patterns played out in other nations where the market was given its head and myths commoditised in the neoliberal realignment in the last decades of the 20th century. In Britain, and America as well, institutions of self-government were undermined. Public good became harder to define and even harder to defend. Apathy was fostered and trust eroded. George Packer the American author of Last Best Hope, is deeply troubled by the deliberate destruction, in the name of the market, of institutions of self-government in his country. He fears visionless political leaders “hold on to power and fatten corporate allies. Corruption – financial, political, intellectual, moral – set in like dry rot in a hollow log.” It sounds familiar.

The big patterns were not so clear in the 2007 election when Prime Minister Howard lost his seat and even the most traditionally conservative electorates signalled they were ready for a change. It was time to resume the discussion about how to thrive in the 21st century. A decade earlier Pauline Hanson was condemned in the national parliament for her inflammatory racist views, but her views had been normalised. They were embodied in 2005 in the most serious racially charged riot in Australia’s postwar history. The sunburnt blond boys of Cronulla battled to force the swarthy lads from further west off their patch of sand. Many feared irreparable damage had been done.

Still, I hung on to the knowledge that things had once been worse, more closed down, less welcoming for those who did not quietly fit themselves into the mainstream. In 2007, when people lined up to vote and buy a sausage sandwich, there was still a sense of hope. In my mind, despite the disappointments of the previous decade, the arc was still bending upwards towards a more inclusive and respectful society.

Listening to a group of brilliant young people, men and women a generation younger than me, at the 2020 Summit in Parliament House in 2008, brought me up with a start. They said they were almost embarrassed to be Australian. They felt no affinity with the Crocodile Dundee/Throw a shrimp on the barbie/Where the bloody hell are you? version of the country. The idea of Australia they saw being projected did not reflect the diversity they knew, or the stories they wanted to hear and tell. The “history wars” had raged during their schooling with officially sanctioned attacks on the historians who revealed darker tales. These brilliant young people felt Australia’s reluctance to face the past meant the nation was going nowhere. They preferred to think of themselves as citizens of the world, ready to detach, and make their lives elsewhere. This was before banking fraud triggered the global financial crisis, before Trump, before Brexit, and before professionalised politics spun the revolving door so fast it spat out five Australian prime ministers in a decade.

Advertisement

I could see how this had happened. The momentum that had driven national transformation had slowed in 1996 with a change of government. It stalled in 2001 when Australian leaders refused assistance to hapless boats of refugees and hundreds drowned in the ferocious waters of the Indian Ocean. The language of exclusion and fear that characterised the Federation parliament was again invoked. Those poor Hazari asylum seekers were wrongly accused of throwing their children overboard, echoing the claims a century earlier that “blackbirded” Melanesian labourers in Mackay ate their babies.

Cover image of The Idea of Australia by Julianne Schultz

Photograph: Allen&Unwin

Old tropes shaped by fear once again became the new normal. When Howard announced in 2001, with righteous fury, that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”, the angry political rhetoric that enabled the White Australia policy again bubbled to the surface. Not since Governor Phillip had sought offshore islands to punish the most intractable convicts had there been such a search for islands – this time as a dumping ground for the unwanted. It was not just rhetoric. Legislation was passed that adjusted Australia’s territorial boundaries. Boats were turned back and discussion about “on-water matters” banned. Tears welled in politicians’ eyes as they talked about the drownings at sea, and their tone switched to anger when describing evil people smugglers. Meanwhile, refugees whose lives had become intolerable in their homelands suffered under Australian administration. It was a textbook example of George Orwell’s definition of political speech as the euphemistic defence of the indefensible.

We don’t like to dig too deeply into these stories. Unlike some nations that suffer under the burden of too much history, it sometimes seems Australia doesn’t have much. Instead the habit of a lack of curiosity has prevailed, preferring to look away, perhaps fearful of what might be found. But harsh, officially sanctioned suffering is as much a part of the formation of a national ethos as self-reliant pragmatism. It recurs in public and private life.

The times should favour openness, but secrecy – the first cousin of incuriousness – is deeply embedded. This is fertile territory for the oldest tropes to bubble up like groundwater, bitter with excess salt and polluted by the detritus of mining and industrial agriculture. I wonder how these institutional cruelties endure when they are nurtured by neglect, and how they might be displaced by ideas that enable us to create an Australia that knows its past well enough to foster an enduring open, innovative, generous society.

This is an edited extract from The Idea of Australia – A Search for the Soul of the Nation, published by Allen & Unwin, out now