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LEAD STORY

Volume 11 Number 1

Australia '- a Nation in Search of Its Soul

01 February 1998

Australia will celebrate the Millennium with a cocktail of hope spiked with a potent brew of insecurity and anxiety.by Mike Brown

Our Millennium party will continue right through the Sydney Olympics up to 1 January, 2001-the centenary of the Federation through which six British colonies became one self-governed nation.

How independent is still a question. A royal British Head of State, the pervasive 'Big Mac' global culture and Japanese-owned golf-clubs symbolize only part of the overseas dependency we would like to pretend we can do without.

The paradoxes don't stop there.

This youthful nation, with a free-and-easy lifestyle and enviable sporting record, is blighted by one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world.

This resource-rich land, whose people pride themselves on egalitarianism, is carving out a chasm between its wealthiest and poorest citizens.

This extraordinary multi-ethnic society (one of the most diverse on earth) is facing a nation-defining choice in its racial and ethnic relationships.

This oldest of continents -- geologically, and in terms of a living 60,000-year-old indigenous culture -- is struggling with its adolescent nationhood.

Underlying all these issues, however, is one defining question. It is whether we as a nation can find our soul.

'In the past 50 years, we have built a nation which has no need to hang its head, for it has achieved a great transformation,' claims Don Aitken, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra. 'We have moved from being a constipated Anglo-Celtic colony to being an effervescent multicultural society.'

Multiculturalism is 'a fact, not a policy', says Ross Tzannes, deputy-chair of the Ethnic Affairs Commission in New South Wales. Greek-born Tzannes is among the quarter of the population born overseas. Unlike the American Dream, which maintains that anyone can succeed regardless of background, Tzannes says Australia's multiculturalism gives equal rights and access to people based on who they are, not on what they might become.

That's just the problem, say a lot of other Australians, who have probably never heard of Tzannes or Aitken. They feel that in this polyglot country we are losing touch with the 'real' Australia of Waltzing Matilda, the Gallipoli 'diggers', meat pies and mateship.

Australians are questioning their very identity-provoking an ugly 'race debate' which has unearthed attitudes towards Asians and Aborigines which we thought had been buried with the death of the 'White Australia' policy. Fuelling fears at one end of that debate is a perception that the country is being taken over by a university-educated elite who want to replace traditional Australian culture with some sort of internationalized order.

Global media, marketing and economic forces have indeed become dominant. Though globalization can be positive, 'by and large it is the same people who win and the same people who lose', says Tim Costello, a minister, lawyer and social campaigner in Melbourne. 'People have felt run over by it.' He sees a basic shift from 'the notion of the common good' to a 'user-pays' society.

High unemployment is the most evident effect of globalization, particularly among the under-35s. One of them, La Trobe University student Erik Parsons, believes post-modernism has compounded the problems. 'As I see it,' he says, 'we have shifted all of a sudden from travelling down a road to a river. It's fluid. There are reasons to be very scared, because you can drown-and people do. We are all building boats, or trying to find ways to get a ticket on them. We can't go back to the road because it's been flooded.' He defines the river as 'identity flux'.

That is why Stepan Kerkyasharian, Chair of the NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission, feels it is so important to have 'a clearly defined identity to which we can turn as an anchor' . Most of us would agree with that. But how to define it?

Recently 32 Australians—Parsons and Kerkyasharian among them—met over a dinner in Melbourne to consider just that. Indigenous and non-indigenous were there from rural Australia and from the cities. The discussion was chaired by Jim Carlton, secretary-general of the Australian Red Cross. 'What is the essential struggle in the soul and character of Australia?' the group was asked. Is there some realistic, inclusive process which would help Australians enter the new Millennium with a deeper sense of our values, character and relationships?

'Our major problem is our loss of a sense of shared story which connects leaders with people,' said Gordon Preece, director of the Centre of Applied Christian Ethics at Melbourne University's Ridley College. Many are in pain and want to go back to a particular story from the past. Though he sees problems with some traditional stories-such as those about 'mateship'-Preece said they still hold the potential to be expanded to include indigenous people, immigrants and the marginalized.

Peter Newman from Perth took it further. More than identity, Australia needs to enter the new Millennium with 'a sense of calling', he said. As Professor of City Policy in Murdoch University, he works extensively with grassroots organizations in urban and rural communities. His recent book documenting conservation initiatives is called Case Studies in Environmental Hope. 'When I lecture using such studies, students flock around because they get no other hope in this cynical age.'

He believes that we need to seek out the stories of people making a difference. 'As local communities find hope, we will discover our calling as a nation,' he said. 'Finding a calling implies everyone has to work out what it means, collectively.'

That rang a bell with John Smith, an unconventional church minister who runs the God's Squad Motorcycle Club and has given 'Values for Life' seminars to over a million students. 'We must move out beyond the elite,' he said. 'The process has to work from the margins in, not from the centre out. We must let the pain of the disenfranchized be heard.'

Smith plays a role not unlike the Old Testament prophet Amos; his searing insights make people uncomfortable. When Aboriginal social justice commissioner Mick Dodson wept in frustration on television, Smith wept too. Then he thundered in his column in the Melbourne Age: 'When the Government of an ill-informed electorate, demoralized by a materialistic self-centred value system, ruthlessly disregards the weeping heart of an unjustly disenfranchized minority, it remains moral degradation, whether majority choice or not.'

Amos called for justice to 'roll down like a mighty river'. The cry for justice, for a 'fair go', is deep in the Australian psyche. Yet groups such as Aboriginals have been left out. Does that give a clue to our calling? Rather than scrambling for boats in a river of 'identity flux', could we find our national identity as we work for a surging river of justice for all-economic justice, social justice, across every gender and ethnic divide?

It's a different agenda. But one which could make our present crisis creative. As author Richard Flanagan wrote in The Age, 'We live in a period grown momentarily molten, one of those rare occasions... when great change suddenly seems feasible.... We are being presented not only with our past, but with our future, which we must seize before it flees... the opportunity for making ourselves anew.'

Perhaps the key to it is 'making ourselves anew'. Amos pointed out that 'rivers of justice' have to be fed by 'never-ending streams of right living'. Where does that leave us when a Royal Commission turns up huge networks of paedophilia protected by corrupt policemen? When our yacht-racing hero Alan Bond languishes in jail with a hangover of multi- million-dollar fraud? When we go on destroying our badly-damaged ecology for the sake of short-term gain? In a land of dry creeks, our moral landscape seems to be suffering from an El Niño drought also.

Surely we need a quality of love which is non-abusive, and a plain-as-daylight honesty which rejects ripping off the system as simply wrong? If we could put aside commercial greed and ethnic divisiveness, perhaps we would discover as never before the story of community-building.

By strange irony, help in the regenerative process may come from those very people who most disturb us—Aboriginals and Asians.

That Australia needs 'a new perspective on our Asian neighbourhood' is obvious to Allan Griffith, a foreign affairs adviser to five Prime Ministers. Countering the prevailing view, which could be summed up as 'the neighbourhood is there for our benefit', he says, 'We always need to ask what Australia will do for the world'.

Stephen Fitzgerald, who at 34 was Australia's first Ambassador to Beijing, offers that new perspective. In his recent book, Is Australia an Asian Nation?, Fitzgerald calls for 'a political association of East Asian nations... joined as sovereign and equal partners', based on a pluralist, non-discriminatory regional polity. This must give 'centrality to the human being, drawing on both Asian collectivist and Western individualist traditions'.

Fitzgerald believes this vision is entirely achievable, though it means facing up to hard issues. 'We cannot clutch at protectors or a white man's world now gone or a past which cannot be retrieved.... We have to be Australian and not European. We have to be quiet and not strident, to learn humility, to listen to silence. We have to find our pilgrim soul.'

Can we?

On these next pages Australians of many backgrounds-from a judge to a Vietnamese immigrant to an Aboriginal who was 'stolen' from her family-join the search.

VALLEY OF DESPAIR

John O'Brien, dairy farmer in Victoria and Chair of the Gippsland State Emergency Services and Water Board:

Our area of the Latrobe Valley is one of huge despair. At least one third of the 18- to 30-year-olds are out of work. I counted 19 suicides in a three-month period last winter on farms in the West Gippsland area.

The greed in Australia-in the upper echelons of business, in government, in bureaucracy-has gone crazy in the last 10 years. Whereas the average family is struggling. It's very hard for people to have open minds to the economic and cultural changes that are necessary when they are carrying such loads.

We can't go forward without coming to grips with why people are not accepting change. It is because they're bitter. I can see why our Aboriginal brothers and farmers are bitter at what has been done. Nobody is prepared to sit down and talk with one another.

In the Latrobe region we've worked to establish a traineeship programme on best farming practices at the local TAFE (college). I can see it opening up young people's minds-those who come through the programme are better able to cope and make something of life. That local action gives me some hope.

But the corruption and greed of the global marketing system frightens me. Governments and bureacrats haven't a clue how it is impacting families. They are acting on impulse, not with a clear vision of where we should be going.

WE BELONG TO THIS LAND

Stepan Kerkyasharian, Chair of the Ethnic Affairs Commission, NSW:

So much of the conflict on the horizon emanates from a confusion about our identity. Because this confusion comes at a time of economic uncertainty, it plays on fear. And it makes racist discussion acceptable under the guise of freedom of speech. It is a mark of a civilized society when such animalistic thoughts are not allowed to gain currency.

This confusion leads to the misrepresentation of indigenous rights. We are being diverted from reconciliation. Similarly the old view of Asian migration undermining Australian identity and values is being brought up. In this situation we have to return to what it means to be an Australian. A national identity can be defined but it cannot be prescribed.

Within identity I include the values, character and experience of all Australians. We are a continuum of people, starting right back with the original inhabitants and going into the future, incorporating all who have come to this continent over those tens of thousands of years.

This is the crucial question-coming to terms with the fact that we migrated to Australia on a permanent basis, that we belong to this continent and are part of this land, its spirit, its soul, and have to share its destiny, and the social and economic hardships which are confronting us. It is only through recognizing that we are one people, complex and diverse in character, that we can confront globalization in a positive way.

OPEN DOOR

Goretti Nguyen has worked in the retail industry and is one of the organizers of Australian-Vietnamese Youth Today:

Australia -- the 'lucky' country -- was my parents' dream. I was born in Vietnam. I am Australian.
As a child, I pictured the shores of Australia not only as white sands and blue surf, but even more as an 'open door'. This island-continent opened its arms to those who wanted to call it 'home' and provided for them as it would for its own people. We all shared the land, worked to enrich it and enjoyed its beauty. I remember generous neighbours, caring teachers, the kindness of strangers, harmonious co-existence and trust.

But 'tolerance', the buzz word of the Nineties, must have replaced 'acceptance'. Now there are waves of a different kind. People who differ in appearance, speech and traditions find themselves being victimized. How did our ethnic diversity become an issue which hi-jacked our emotions, creating this sense of crisis?

Growing up, I was aware that some had more than others. My parents affirmed that there were plenty of jobs, that real opportunities were within reach if we aimed high. Build your dream and be happy.

True, many living on this land mass do not have plenty. Youth unemployment is breeding a sense of worthlessness and despair, creating troublesome lifestyles. It is soul-destructive.

The essence of what we all look for is to feel wanted. Let's make it that way. This is my dream for this lucky country.

Mike Brown