'The Declaration of She’ll Be Right'

We see also that the pages of The Bulletin circa 1886-1900, resound with arguments about perceived threats from foreign labourers, the plight of “the Aborigine”, and the relative merits of forming a republic. Most of these arguments are repeated today, unchanged, in forums such as On Line Opinion. Our national discourse appears to have crystalised circa 1885.

Nick Mansfield demonstrates how this kind of thinking, and the literature that it produces, effect to resolve ambiguous, distressing or complex historical questions into unquestioned grand narratives. Thus the plight of Australian Aborigines can be resolved into a “noble failure” of European peoples to “elevate” them. And wholesale environmental devastation can be portrayed as an heroic conquering of a harsh, unforgiving land.

Mansfield describes this process, rather kindly, as “self-authentication” - though I call it begging the question.

A stark example of self-authentication is seen in the narrative insistence that “the British colonised Australia in 1788”, a temporal impossibility since the name for the continent was first suggested by the first man known to have circumnavigated it in 1791 - Matthew Flinders. Thus the notion that “the British arrived in Australia in 1788” retrospectively writes into history and literature a name that had not then been considered and a nation that did not then exist, nor did exist until 1901. Self-authentication indeed.

Of course, none of this academic hand-wringing prevents us from dreaming the idea of Australia as a kind of secular religion. The modern mindset, informed by liberal humanist values yet still rooted in our innate tribalism, has sought to substitute the nation for God, as the “something bigger” to which all humans seek to belong. The nation has become, in Joseph Conrad’s words, that which “redeems” the wars and conquests carried out its name. In Heart of Darkness, Marlowe explained that the sins of imperialism were redeemed by:

[a]n idea at the back of it … something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to …

... Whether it be Britannia, Uncle Sam or Dorothea MacKellar’s “sunburnt country”.

Those who doubt the central importance of literature in national identity would do well to remember that much of the formal academic study of English, and most English departments and professorships, were instituted as recently as the late 19th century, driven by the perceived urgency to define a unified cultural inheritance to which all “Englishman” could lay claim: and which in fact bound other non-English populations - Welsh, Scots, and indeed Australians - into an imagined cultural and political unity with “mother England”.

These ties are, literally, fictions - the fictions of Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and Pope - yet many earnestly put the view that these works metaphysically bind their readers together. How otherwise serious scholars can entertain such mysticism is unclear, but the idea is quite contagious.

The seemingly eternal canon we study has only been thought of as such for a scant several generations: since the likes of Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot decided what literary artefacts qualified as good English. This co-opting of literature into the service of English nationalism was inspired by rival political pressures emanating from France and Germany, whose scholars, such as Goethe, had “awakened” (sic) national consciousness by focussing heavily on the literary output of their countrymen.

In fact they had not “awakened” anything - they had created it from the whole-cloth of novels and poems. Even describing “national consciousness” in terms of “awakening” presupposes there was some eternal, slumbering thing there, waiting to be roused, when in fact it was called into being by the very act of enquiry.

But how seductive the nationalist ideal remains. Let us examine briefly the arguments of those who seek to ground a nation’s essence in its geography or language, oblivious to the siren call of literature.