LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium 2004 Lecture

David Malouf

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We sometimes assume that only in new societies, settler nations like Canada and Australia, is identity a matter of question and doubt. In fact these questions also arise in older places. I’m thinking of the united Germany and how, on a daily basis, whenever rights are under consideration or laws made, or an historic monument is to be restored or a bit of waste ground built on, there is always the need to take account of recent history; not in order to rewrite it — quite the contrary — but to see that the new thing continues some aspects of the past and makes a break with others.

Nations that have suffered defeat and occupation or have condoned or been the victim of tyranny, or of civil war or violent social division — England after 1649, the US after its civil war, more recently Chile, South Africa, Lebanon, Cambodia, ex-Yugoslavia and many more — have in the re-establishment of civil order within a unified and bonded nation to face bitter questions about crimes committed and rights violated before they can be reconstituted as ventures with a foreseeable future.

Australia too, I might just say, has a problem, still unresolved, with history and the need for reconciliation. Unlike Canada, we did not recognise prior occupation of the continent by indigenous people. Until very recently, we considered it, before we arrived, to have been terra nullius, no man’s land. We signed no treaties with native peoples, and till 1967, when a referendum settled the question, did not count them in the federated nation. They were, in 1901 when we drew up our Constitution, no more than an unhappy remnant. Their only chance at a life within the nation was to assimilate or get lost.

But with this admittedly shameful exception, our nation, like yours, does not have a past of violent disruption, of civil war or revolution or tyranny to deal with. Questions of identity in new countries such as ours are about who we are and what we are for, have to do with beginnings and ends. With the kind of worlds we have made through the give and take of daily intercourse, but even more through inventiveness and imagination, that might offer us a security and range of opportunities that are not common elsewhere.

Of course the particular condition out of which the two places grew were unique, as they always are. What we now call Canada and Australia had different beginnings.

You began as a series of isolated settlements and trading posts in a vast wilderness that became, over centuries and by agreement, a tripartite nation, British, French, native.

We began nearly three hundred years later, as a purely British venture and a planned one: a product of the English and Scottish Enlightenment.

Despite these large differences, we are at this point remarkably alike. Federations that share the same goals and values, the same responsibilities one to another as members of a society devoted to the public good. We have two of the oldest and most stable government systems in the world and legal systems so close that decisions in your courts are frequently referred to as precedents in ours. We also have similar views about where we stand in the world: our responsibility as middle-sized but rich nations towards those out there in a complex world (and in our case they are close neighbours) who might need our aid or protection.

So then, what sort of nations and countries — since nation and country are not quite the same? What values and how did we establish them? To what extent have they been achieved? And how, in the world as it now is, are we to extend and preserve them?

We are places, I would want to say first, whose great work is to comprehend, which really means imagine, the land we occupy. To take it in. First as a landmass — much of which, desert in our case, ice in yours, is very nearly blank, though not in the minds of native people — then to hold it in our mind as a place fully occupied and inhabited: so fully that all the events and accidents of our experience in it, all the acts of conscience, somehow persist as accumulated lived life to enrich and layer the present and give it depth.

I am speaking now of our kind of history. Which is not one of great men or heroes — we are very little concerned with those — but of experience and the density of living: of work done, houses and cities built, many small lives lived that made their own small mark. A country imagined but also held in the memory, remembered: and in this way carried forward as a present reality to be dealt with and drawn on, but also loved.