“All the evidence is that if one set of stories no longer makes sense, people do not simply become realists. “People do need a sense of collective purpose, a sense that there is something that they belong to and that belongs to them,” he wrote. Speakers once shamed and jailed are now honoured for rescuing words and stories to buttress the uniqueness of a continent that is now a nation.įintan O’Toole has described the profound challenge to national, personal and community identity that followed the collapse of respect for the Catholic Church as Ireland’s pre-eminent institution. The lands and languages of First Nations peoples were now named. Australia Post announced in 2021 that mail would be delivered to addresses that included First Nations place names 25 years after the revealing patchwork map was published. The ancient stories of the peoples our official narratives tried so hard for so long to extinguish are being coaxed back from memory and official records languages once banned are now taught in schools and appear routinely on signs, television titles, and even envelopes. While the stories on the main stage all too often resemble the carcass of a dead animal on a drought plain, those percolating elsewhere are rich with nuance, inclusion and possibility. Yet the prime minister was prepared to allocate $6.7m to build a replica of the Endeavour to “re-enact” the mythical voyage as a learning experience for the nation.Ĭan we just dismiss the ignorance of a nation’s leader who could suggest that slavery never existed, when the legislation to deport indentured labourers from the Pacific (slaves by any other name) was one of the first bills to pass the national parliament a little over a century earlier? Matthew Flinders and the Kuring-gai man Bungaree first made that voyage. Could any other prime minister so misunderstand the celebrated journey of his nation’s foundation as Scott Morrison did when he suggested a re-enactment of James Cook’s “circumnavigation” of Australia? Cook, for whom Morrison’s electorate is named, did not circumnavigate Australia. False statements enter public discourse from the mouths of people who should know better with only belated clarification. So much has been forgotten, or never known. In the early months of the pandemic former prime minister Tony Abbott, pictured left with Scott Morrison and John Howard, declared it was time to again ask: who are we? Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian To share an inner life with others of a complex place where belonging, not exclusion, prevails.
It is possible to be attached to different places, beliefs and ways of being at the same time. The challenge is to allow multiple stories. Stories “underlie the necessary fiction that is ‘us’”, the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote as he pondered what is the Irish story. This applies to nations as well as individuals, families and communities. Others, over time, make the journey to myth, where they console and distract from more confronting truths. Some provide the key to atonement, others a safe or challenging place to consider the lessons of the past. The questions they raise are, as the philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “part of the process of deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become”. But the best stories retain a flicker of emotional truth, a resonance that outlives the events, people and places they describe. Key characters and memories are conveniently or painfully lost in the miasma of pride, shame and trauma. They may be tinged with hyperbole and hope, fiercely contested or modified by hand-me-down retelling. They may not always be true, completely, or even substantially. They are the way we make sense of the world, our lives and relationships. S tories make us fully and uniquely human.
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