Three recent essays (one, delivered as a speech to The National Press Club) – each, very different – are provocative, but nuanced.
Richard Flanagan’s, Stan Grant’s and Don Watson’s words are worth reading, in full.
A key sentence from Richard Flanagan, who is white and Tasmanian:
As much as there was a process of colonisation, there was also a history of indigenisation – a frequently repressed, often violent process in which a white underclass took on many black ways of living and sometimes, more fundamentally, thinking and feeling, in which may be traced continuities that extend back into deep time.
The full text of Flanagan’s April 2018 address to the National Press Club – not coincidentally, delivered a week before Anzac Day – was published by The Guardian, which headlined it, Our politics is a dreadful black comedy.
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A key sentence from Stan Grant, an Aboriginal Australian:
At its worst, the politics of identity appears to me like that line from Franz Kafka: ‘A cage went in search of a bird.’
Last month The Australian republished Grant’s essay, gave it a new headline, and placed it on the Murdoch-moneymaking side of a paywall.
The essay first appeared in issue 60 of Griffith Review, headlined My grandfather’s equality, subtitled Confronting the cosmopolitan frontier.
The original publisher has made the full essay available, gratis.
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A key sentence from Don Watson, small “r” republican:
Yet the very first thing republicans should do is shun the idea that they are more patriotic, more egalitarian or more Australian than the monarchists.
Headlined Rethinking the Republic, and published in April 2018 issue of The Monthly, Watson’s essay is subtitled The Great National Project Diluted.
Read all of it here.
(copyright Doug Spencer, the photo atop this post was taken September 2016 in southwest WA’s Ferguson Valley. Crooked Brook Forest offers several easy and rewarding walks)