The study of history is in many ways an attempt to learn from the past; in some cases, so we do not repeat its mistakes. Yet we forget all the time, due to neglect, and limited human capacity to process information. Wilful forgetting is, however, a way that we construct identity, framing the reality we live in. History is ultimately a creative pursuit – the events of the past have no importance until society and culture injects meaning into them[i].Our history is constructed by how we view the present; it says something about who we are now, and who we wish we could be. What Australians consider ‘foundational’ moments, such as Gallipoli or the Eureka stockade, have no inherent privilege over the ‘forgotten’ moments of our history. Yet, in perpetuating a particular narrative of Australia’s history, our ‘cult of forgetfulness’ runs the risk of becoming ever more exclusionary.
Australia’s greatest exercise in forgetfulness is that every day we forget where we are in the world. Caught between geographical regions and our historical ties to the Anglosphere, Australia has a troubled relationship with regionalism. Australia calls itself Asian-Pacific, but is considered ‘Oceanian’ by most of Asia. We seem to occupy political space as a South Pacific power, yet we are also apparently ‘European’ enough to compete in Eurovision. Reconciling perception with conception has often caused Australia to fall back onto its ethnic-historical rather than geographic identity, Former Prime Minister Robert Menzies once said that Australians were “British down to their bootstraps”. The most recent former Prime Minister followed the ‘Menzian’ tradition. Tony Abbott’s decision to knight Prince Philip in the order of Australia would have been amusing if it did not go to the core of what the conservative establishment thought of our country. In Abbott and Menzies’s reality, Australia does not exist as an independently constructed community, but one that is fundamentally connected with its imperial past.
There is a popular sense that the Australian identity comes from our roots in British imperialism, where Australianness is maintained through the continuation of a heightened status of European cultural identity despite its geographical location. However, the perpetuation of this idea has continually stifled alternative stories of identity that do not fit into the predominantly colonial narrative of our place in the world. In privileging particular images of the past over others, Australia’s national identity becomes an uncritically exclusive discourse by cementing its traditionally favoured views and neglecting the respect that other voices deserve.
The function of this kind of selective memory and forgetfulness is to construct a mythology. The past gains the quality of another world because it is removed from competing perspectives, perpetuating its own logic and cultural discourse. Sustained forgetfulness then brings with it the legitimacy of history, which transmutes subjective reality into ‘facts’. The stories of Ned Kelly, Gallipoli, and the Eureka stockade take on this mystical quality in the Australian context. These stories, and much of Australian folklore, speaks of hard-working white men taming a wild land and it is here that context begins to depart from reality in favour of a romanticised vision of history. This is not a necessarily negative project. Nations are essentially constructed communities, and the formation of ‘national’ identities was a key part of the rise of the nation-state. The worry is when the identity of a state is bound up implicitly in the exclusion of an ‘other’.
This mythology is not just a process of creation, but also of omission. In order to sustain the mysticism of the past, cognitive dissonance needs to be avoided. The key example of this is Australia’s experience of the Second World War, on the one hard fighting against Japanese and German fascism, while at the same time undertaking its own genocidal project in the form of the White Australia Policy at home. These contradictions are removed from Australia’s history, and the origin story of the Australian spirit is purified from contradiction.
How, then, do we forget for a positive purpose? In Laura Tingle’s quarterly essay “Political Amnesia: How Australia forgot how to govern”, she talks about the need for institutional memory. Yet, forgetting can open the way to innovation. In removing oneself from the burden of what has come before, it is possible to have a fresh perspective on modern issues. Australia’s political culture, however, may be forgetting what is important – that is, airbrushing imperfections when they represent events that still affect people today. To say that the European colonisation is over is to remove responsibility for the effects of imperial exploitation that continue today. For Australia, the notion that the ‘invasion’ happened hundreds of years ago misses the point that it is far from over for many people in our own country.
The Australian identity has not adapted to the multicultural society in which we live. Our history is still the history of Europe. This is a potentially dangerous notion that threatens to silence the voices of those already at the fringes of society. A narrow view of ‘Australian-ness’, especially one based around British ethnicity and historically European culture, is inaccessible for a large part of the population. The more Australia reinforces this view of itself, the harder it is to deviate from the narrative and tell different stories.
As a nation of hundreds of nations and people from all corners of the globe, the heterogeneity of our stories have the potential to encourage meaningful debate and political pluralism. Memory is central to the construction of a communal history and the manifestation of national identity. In participating in and questioning this process, we are jointly facing up to our historical responsibilities and imagining the sort of nation we would like to be. What is important to us is demonstrated by what we choose to forget.
Matt Rogers is an international relations student who reads a lot of literary fiction in attempt to appear more sophisticated than he really is.
Bibliography
[i] Carr, E. H. (1990). What is history?, 2nd edition. London, England: Penguin Books.