An incurable flaw? The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation

by Julianne Schultz

Review by Jenny Bird

A lot has happened in Australian politics since The Idea of Australia was published on 1 March 2022. Within three months of its launch, the Australian Labor Party won the federal election. Anthony Albanese’s new administration ended nine years of Coalition government, a chapter that political historian Dr Christine Wallace described as a ‘curdling disappointment’, a period when social transformation stalled.

Now, nearly twelve months on, I wondered if the despond that so many from the left of politics felt during those nine years had leaked into Schultz’s book, and whether the 2022 election result had made The Idea of Australia read as old news. My doubts were unfounded. In an interview with Schultz at the National Library, Dr Wallace described her as dropping ‘a compressed bomb into the Australian polity.’ At 400 pages I’m not sure I agree with the ‘compressed’ part, but a ‘bomb’ it is indeed. Are we really the lucky country? The smart country? Do we really give everyone a fair go? The answers are no, sometimes, not quite, ‘slightly better than average’, can do better.

Over the summer I read a chapter a day. My admiration for Schultz’s ambition, her research and her writing grew. The scope of the material covered in the book is staggering. Schultz has reflected that being the editor of sixty-two volumes of Griffith Review where she read thousands and thousands of essays and stories about Australia helped her paint the large canvas that is this book.

What could have been a ‘heavy read’ is not, even over summer. Schultz writes as a journalist not an academic, a self-confessed synthesiser rather than an archivist. She describes the book as a ‘braid’ of three things: the past, the present and her own personal interaction with both. She plaits the most disparate of events, ideas, debates together. She finds new and fresh patterns in things. She spares nothing in her analysis of the role of the media in Australian politics, particularly Murdoch.

The Idea of Australia frames the moribund years of the last Coalition government (tracing back to John Howard and Pauline Hanson in the 1990s) as the most recent of many ebbs and flows in Australia’s social and political history. Schultz describes recurring patterns of progressive social reform, expansion and inclusion followed quickly by periods of contraction. Peaks of nation-building possibility, captured so proudly, for example, in the opening ceremony to the 2000 Olympics (‘bold, imaginative, generous, inclusive’) rise and quickly fade away. Then we try again.

According to Schultz, we have ‘failed to fully launch as a nation’, failed to confront and heal two key foundational flaws in our nation building.

The first is the ‘incurable flaw’ described by the great nineteenth-century British political philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that New South Wales was illegally founded. Schultz interrogates the structural forces that keep us from fully facing the facts and the associated shame of this core wound, with chapters titled ‘Terra Nullius of the Mind’ and ‘Architecture of Silence’.

The second foundational flaw is the uncomfortable fact that one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Australia’s newly formed federal government was the Immigration Restriction Act (1901) (the White Australia Policy). Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister, initiated the bill just nine sitting days after the new parliament was opened. He argued ‘I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality.’ At the time he was concerned mainly about the Chinese, but it took well into the 1970s to be fully dismantled and came to exclude anyone who wasn’t ‘white’.

As I read on, I became convinced that The Idea of Australia has a significant role to play as a primer for the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. My fear that the book might read as tired and redundant gave way to excitement. Coincidental to my reading, the public debate over the referendum jump started over the summer. The subtitle of this book: ‘A search for the soul of a nation’ became prescient. The relevance and usefulness of the book sharpened. It helps frame the predictable battle lines that will play out during 2023 in the lead-up to the referendum.

Whilst The Idea of Australia received rapturous reviews from eminent historians, journalists and writers, one review from conservative journal Quadrant, published in December 2022, caught my eye – ‘A Boastful Boomer’s Boring Idea of Australia’ by Michael Connor. As we will see during 2023 as the referendum debate unfolds, the culture wars are alive and well. What is an ebb and what is a flow in our nation building depends on your point of view.

Julianne has been described as an ‘ultramarathon runner of public intellectual life’ and she is no stranger to the Byron Writers Festival, so do take the chance to catch her in conversation when she next attends.

Allen & Unwin / 472pp / RRP $34.99