The Idea of Australia

 

I reserved Julianne Schultz's The Idea of Australia from the library long before the federal election was called, but it turned out I was reading it during the last couple of weeks of the campaign. Talk about perfect timing. While policy debates (such as they were) swirled around us, there were demands for Murugappan family to be returned to Biloela, our relationship to Pacific nations became an election issue, a band of impressive independent women took on the overwhelmingly male 'safe' Liberal party seat (and ended up winning!)... as all this was going on, I was reading about the political history of Australia, its shames and triumphs, as interpreted by another very impressive woman.

Julianne Schultz spent years on this book, subtitled A search for the soul of the nation. She examines the troubled history of Indigenous resistance and reconciliation, immigration, suffrage, the pandemic, Australia's place on the world stage, war and many other issues, all informed with her expertise as an academic, journalist and publisher. She intersperses her analysis with snippets of personal experience that are sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, but she maintains throughout a bracing sense of optimism that things can and will change for the better. This was a message I very much needed to hear, and now that the government has changed, I'm allowing myself to hope, too. I know there will be disappointments ahead -- there always are -- but I can't help feeling that a great weight has been lifted off the shoulders of our nation and we can raise our heads to the horizon after a long period of despair.