Exemplary Australians

In the vast work of postcolonial reconstruction that drives one of the primary, politically committed modes of contemporary global academic discourse, the Australian situation may appear of moderate, but not inordinate, interest. Australia is, geopolitically speaking, of only minor regional strategic importance; it is a notoriously peaceful place, devoid of violent public political struggles (unlike Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, or Palestine); its population is nugatory by world standards (approximately twenty million inhabitants); it is a developed first-world nation, preponderantly suburban and middle-class; it is widely touted as a successful multicultural state. As a ubiquitous local idiom declares, Australia is, indeed, “the lucky country.”

Given such factors, the various claims made for Australia's uniqueness may convey a sense of special pleading, if they are not simply received as implausible. After all – although a European settler-colonial state, with all the violence and bloodshed that such a denomination now implies – many Australians acknowledge the inequities of invasion (e.g., there are now excellent and detailed historical programmes well-established across the secondary school system) and, that being recognised, feel that everyone can now get on with the business of getting on. Australia is unlike North America, with its vast numbers of dead and extremities of violence, not to mention the ideological celebrations of Manifest Destiny and the Wild West; it is unlike the countries of South America, with their extraordinary gulfs between rich and poor; it is unlike South Africa, where the inheritors of the white colonists were massively outnumbered by the indigenous inhabitants, yet installed their domination in Apartheid;