Team Australia

In any case the terms of the agreement were complex, transparency was dim, and the issue was one that a reasonable and interested citizen might think was simply too hard. Ultimately both sides of politics were in favour, and that reduced the likelihood of partisan dispute. Yet the indifference of the bulk of the electorate before and after the election was marked.

Citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as rights. Perhaps this is not a time when externally derived responsibilities are attractive to most people. Perhaps, as our society grows more technologically and socially complex, the important issues in public policy simply become too difficult for people to comprehend unless they are prepared to devote a very great deal of time to them.

But it is as though for many people, perhaps the majority, living and working in Australia has become disconnected from the notion of the country itself and its future, disconnected from the notion of nation-building.

There is certainly an urge to understand about Australia and its history. The rediscovery of Anzac day, especially by the young, says something about a felt need to find valid symbols of nationhood and belonging. Something like 10,000 people (some of them New Zealanders) gather each year at the Gallipoli battlefield itself to remember the landing and its aftermath. The celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade at the end of 2004, the controversy over what ought to be the themes of the displays in the new National Museum of Australia, the widespread interest in local history throughout regional Australia - these are all indications that a new sense of being Australian is developing.

Australians may still not know who they are, but they now know a great deal about who they were and how they have changed. As has been argued already, from the 1960s publishers have discovered a book-buying public anxious to know about Australia in every way. Tens of thousands of books have been published, and the flow continues.

Indeed, the most powerful outcome of the research conducted by academics in Australia, more powerful by far than anything done in medicine, technology or the sciences, has been the transformation of the knowledge of Australians, their society and their environment. What was initially academic work has been transmuted into school syllabus material, into newspaper stories, into radio and television series, into films, into more books still. Australians are today vastly better educated about themselves than was the case in 1951.

Defining ourselves positively is a problem, because comparisons are automatically involved. It is still much easier to say who we are not, and then to emphasise what we were for. If Australia is to be more than just the place we live in, it needs a future as well as a present and a past. The Australian project has always been straightforwardly comparative: to build a better society than the one the immigrant left.