The Nation - Be In It

Australian Left Review, Dec 1987

Thus the Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA) Fact sheet on 15 December last. Pitched somewhere between the schoolmasterly and the "Life, be in it" modes, the language of the ABA 's publications, especially Bicentenary 88 (the newsletter of the ABA) and the Bush Telegraph (a tabloid publicising the development and progress of the planning of the Bicentennial travelling Exhibition) is carefully tailored in its emphases on participation, consensus, enjoyment and learning.

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The Nation - Be In It

I N I T ? Colin Mercer The left can't carry on any longer hoping the Bicentenary will go away. It's time to face the question of how to upset the tidy consensus view of history that's planned for us. - Envisaged as an Exhibition about Australia for Austral­ ians, it will focus our history and our heritage, our culture and our community, achievements and our bus the Australian Bicentenn­ T ial Authority (ABA) Factsheet on 15 December last. Pitched somewhere between the school­ masterly and the "Life, be in it" modes, the language of the ABA's publications, especially Bicentenary 88 (the newsletter of the ABA) and the Bush Telegraph (a tabloid publicising the development and progress of the planning of the Bicentennial travelling Exhibition) is carefully tailored in its emphases on participation, consensus, enjoyment and learning. All sections of the cornmumty are addressed in the ABA 's plans: Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. women. the aged. the disabled. unions. young people and even people whose stories have never f<"EATURE been told. Central emphases are placed on experience of life, journeys, of histories, of time and place; and on discovery of self, of identity, of landscapes, of communities. The Bicentenary has ambitions to become what Gramsci called, without denigration, a "national-popular" form. It delimits a particular space and time - the Australian nation since 1788 - but also, and more importantly for its aims, the Bicentenary seeks to establish or, perhaps, to redefine the nature of the persons- the people­ who inhabit that space and time. Hence, all the emphasis on experience, learning, discovery, effective participation: "that heightening of the senses that we hope you can achieve on your journey through the Australian Bicentennial Exhibition."3 or, more economically, and according to a key refrain of the ABA's advertising theme song: "It's a fee-eeling ... just like you and me" It would have been easier and more comfortably academic to have written this article in 1989 or, better still, in 2038 when, with more or less hindsight, it would be possible to look back on the events of 1988 and to 1 J:ui lO them as evidence of an historically specific and politically charged celebration of national unity of a particular type. Or, perhaps, as a resounding failure. Or, as a missed opportunity. By then, at least, there would be access to some assessment of success or otherwise in the form of attendance statistics at the travelling exhibition and other events, sales figures on the "landmark" volumes to be published. participation rates in the various community-based programs and so on. But even without the benefit of hindsight. it would. I think. be a pity if some future researcher were to look back and identify the 1988 Bicentenary as a triumph of inane pomp and circumstance, of restrained official culture. as a moment of consolidation of what would. by then, be called the "Hawkean Consensus": or as the year of Barrie Unsworth's Birthday Cake. It would be a pity, mother words, if 1988 was seen as a restricted exercise in what Debra Silverman has called, in relation to another national celebration, "selective historical remembrance".4 What this means, of course, is that it would be seen as a moment of a very precise forgetting of, most importantly, the effects of settler colonisation on indigenous peoples. This last point is certainly the most crucial issue in the left's current attitude to the Bicentenary. The Bicentenary, in this view, amounts to two hundred years of colonisation, repression ands genocide. Therefore it should be boycotted. It is impossible to deny this fact, of course, but it is possible, I would suggest, to recognise it and yet find ways other than abstention of publicising and, in appropriate terms, of "exhibiting" it as "About Australia and for Australians". This is one central theme of my argument. Another theme is that, despite this indelible mark on the Australian nation's origins, there are things which can be celebrated. Among these we would probably want to list, for example, the history of socialism in Australia. the democratic traditions and progressive achievements which have been fought for and won, certain values of community, identity and allegiance in local, regional, national and multtcultural contexts. I may be beginning to sound a bit like an ABA brochure, but there is possibly a good reason for this which is that the issues which they address are not inextricably and for all time part of the repertoire of an official or dominant culture. A political strategy based on the presumption that the past two hundred years of Australian history is indelibly marked by a single and repressive ongtn is as guilty of a one­ dtmensional view of history as some of the most inane re-enactments which the Bicentenary Itself promtses. In effect. this stance can produce no political strategy but only an ethical position: the ethics of guilt This 1s a col)trovers1al (...truncated)


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Collin Mercer. The Nation - Be In It, Australian Left Review, 1987, pp. 8-14, Volume 1, Issue 101,