The first monocultural project on this continent was not multiculturalism’s defeat. It was colonisation’s ambition.

For tens of thousands of years, this continent has been a multicultural one. A myriad of nations and clans, as diverse as the landscape itself. Made up of around 250 languages with 800 dialects. Each nation had its own lore and justice. Trade routes, in the form of songlines, scrawled across the breadth of the country, where diversity was not only acknowledged but was embraced through smoke and ceremony, corroborees the peak of cultural exchange gifts were shared, disputes settled and peace maintained.

While every nation had its own origin story, invariably at the heart of each was the revelling of land, water and skies. An understanding born through millennia of brutal experience that the people of this continent were beholden to the ecosystem in which they lived, not the other way around.

These ancient understandings, settled in the dust of the continent were kicked away into the wind in the times that followed the arrival and then invasion by Europeans. In the breaking, most of those languages, to be found nowhere else and unique to the land they reverberated off , were lost, appropriated or destroyed. Words and phrases that explained this place through time and seasons never to return.

With blinkers on, the colonial project set about to cementing itself as a monocultural set of outposts. Hanson can look to some of the early work of the Victorian colony when it tried to erase First Nations culture from the earth, as a how-to guide to achieve her required state. The grand ambition, the attempted eradication of multicultural society(s) in order to supplant all that was before with a monoculture.

Truth Be Told, the Official Public Record from the Yoorrook Justice Commission, detailed the transition from theft and slaughter for land, to something that was far more palatable for the colony, but just as devastating for First Peoples:

“The colony’s preoccupation shifted from Aboriginal land to Aboriginal blood. Once the land had been fenced, surveyed and renamed, attention turned inwards, to the bodies and lineages of those who remained. Clerks, with their ledgers and laws, decided who belonged.

The Aborigines Protection Act 1886 (Vic) was a mechanism for disappearance disguised as a means of governance. The colony had decided that First Peoples would need to be made to vanish. This was premeditated cultural elimination.

The 1886 Act—or so-called ‘Half-Caste Act’— redefined who could legally be considered Aboriginal. Those of ‘mixed parentage’ were ordered off missions and reserves; no longer entitled to rations after a transition period, nor government support unless they were granted a licence to live at a prescribed residence. The government would decide who belonged and who did not. Aboriginal people had no means with which to resist the labels imposed upon them. It was the torture of not being allowed to be yourself.

The government called this a path to independence. It was, in fact, a sentence of abandonment. Those expelled from reserves were expected to support themselves in a society that did not want them. As Aunty Alma Thorpe (Gunditjmara) told Yoorrook, it was ‘a different type of death’.

The effects of these policies reverberated far beyond the immediate loss of land. Families were scattered, often with little hope of reunion. Communities fractured under the strain. Intricate ties to Country frayed under this relentless pressure.

The 1886 Act was crafted to dismantle the cohesion of Aboriginal life. And its consequences are not confined to history. The dispossession and disruption it caused have left deep imprints on the lives of First Peoples, shaping both the intergenerational grief and resilience that endure today.”

Who knows what methods Hanson and her rich backers plan to unleash to bring their dystopian utopia to life, but this is how it was done first time around, and it nearly worked.

It wasn’t too long ago that Hanson super-backer Gina Rinehart’s father Lang Hancock cracked open the colonial playbook when he suggested, “The ones that are no good to themselves, can’t accept things, the half-castes and this is where most of the trouble comes, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in future and that would solve the problem.”

It’s basically what the half-caste act attempted to do.

That was his approach to the Aboriginal question.

These aren’t the tides, but they are the currents the national conversation is drifting and swirling around when an increasingly larger number of people see immigrants, refugees and people from the world as less than human. A problem to be solved rather than a humanity to be engaged.

*

While Hanson, despite her record popularity, is still seen by large sections of the media as a curiosity, a bell and whistle sideshow. The overall meekness and mainstreaming by a significant cut of the corporate media in coverage of her appearance at the National Press Club, doesn’t match the threat her desolate aspiration for this country presents. It has bewildered those whom recognise this moment as a potential forever point from which there is no return if her vision comes to fruition in order to dulcify the best parts of us. The reportage doesn’t acknowledge the moment or true history of what this place has always been in all its scope.

Instead, there’s a propensity to talk about her presentation, her look and her ability to get through it all. “She did well”, “she didn’t flounder”, “she knows how to work a camera”, were all observations that flowed freely through the press core in the early hours post her address.

These things may or not be true, but they are not the point. Just because her extremism is popular, her grievances hitting their mark in an unjust world; doesn’t mean the language to explain the popular right’s ascent should be business as usual. It would appear no lessons have been learnt from the normalisation of Trump, even a decade into his political career. Reporting on Hanson’s toxic rhetoric shouldn’t be reported like a stoush over Capital Gains Tax or whether to temporarily cut the fuel excise. This moment and what is stake is beyond the performative outrages of the 24 hour news cycle. But it’s there it will stay.

*

Hanson’s yearning for a bland, culturally flat nation, isn’t some yearning for the past, because that past that never existed. It’s actually a clear vision of a future the far right wants to bring to life; a cultural hellscape; the ultimate boiling down of our democracy for the vested interests that have aided her rise.

It’s not a return to tradition, it’s a continuation of something that Aboriginal people know better than anyone that colonial ambition has never really left us.

It’s merely been interrupted by multiculturalist policies and the gradual maturing of a nation that was on the verge of being comfortable with its place in the world. But for us, the First Peoples of this land, it has come at us in many guises; protection boards, policies of erasure, assimilation, sterilisation practices and ruminations, the spirits of which are now slickly encompassed in the language of Australian values and patriotism.

In the process of returning us to the most basic instincts of colonialism the result is to reduce complexity, ignore nuance, steamroll diversity and decide who is heard, who gets to speak and gets a share in the Australian dream.

In this climate, it’s difficult to have legitimate political debates with any decent measure of maturity, and that well suits the Hansons of the world .

All of this even though the land on which we all call home, is home to the oldest multicultural experiment in human history.

The tragedy isn’t Pauline Hanson’s ignorance to the lessons of this place. It’s that so many of the people that now follow her seem to have forgotten them.

The land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples is a beautiful place. A century of reordering the landscape, to make it symmetrical to the human condition, to plant order where European eyes could see none, has failed to tame the natural beauty of the panoramic country cradling Canberra.

It was in this s…

Read more

It was the decade that began that belief that the neoliberal frame was right and good and inevitably. If you weren’t making money, it was a waste of time. There was that initi…

Read more

I was fortunate enough to be asked to present some opening remarks about the event I’m curating for the Melbourne Writers Festival on its opening night at the resplendently dilapidated Athenaeum Theatre on Thursday. I was given a chance not to only speak about the event, but to speak about the moment Treaty finds itself in.

DJ x

The Athenaeum Theatre 07 M…

Read more

In the team meeting, when the human was being built, were they serving whiskey? Or sucking on some opium. Or, worse, was it the scene of bureaucratic mediocrity where it was left to a committee? However it was done, the scenes must have been wild because the whole thing is made up of all these little functions that make little sense, except within their…

Read more

It’s the tears I remember. The gentle percolation of happiness, sorrow and the memory of those who deserved to see what’s been achieved here but aren’t here to share in the moment. The opportunity it promises for a people that have defied our predicted demise for generations. The celebrations and hugs, so perfect in the moment, gently broken by the real…

Read more

Michael J Fox has a lot to answer for. Those Back to the Future films fed an optimism that ultimately brain-washed us into believing that if we could just go back—adjust a few things—we would return to a better version of what was ahead. I was the gullible kid that believed that greed and power would eventually die-off because injustice couldn’t sustain…

Read more

Another front in the culture wars opened up this week with the arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith on five counts of war crime murder. I suppose you could say the pencil that drew the line on the map had been in the sharpener since the former SAS soldier calamitous defamation action. This piece is not a rumination about his guilt, innocence or otherwise. It’s c…

Read more

I grew up in the 70s and 80s with scary imagery of drug taking. In Degrassi Junior High – the original Canadian series aired on channel 2, back in the 80s – Shane jumped from a bridge when he was on acid and never walked again. This put a strain on his relationship with Spike, who he fathered their child Emma with, while they were in high school. And th…

Read more

This year marks 30 years of Hansonism at the heart of the Australian political landscape. Unlike Howardism, the former doesn’t only exist in legacy. It lives and breathes in the world we inhabit and it’s going from strength-to-strength.

The analysis, since last Saturday’s election result in South Australia, point to a section of the electorate disenfran…

Read more

‘Coooeeeeee.’

It erupted out of nowhere breaking the peace of the early hours of a weekend morning in Melbourne. And then moments later from a little further down the road, a faint but clear, ‘coooeeeee’, in retu…

Read more

When both parents are gone, time becomes something you ponder more deeply. The turning of the seasons, the pressures of the modern world, the question of where to give your energy and where to withhold it all sharpen in the mind.

Time becomes the frontline. It moves from abstraction to something deeply personal.

Findi…

Read more

I’ve had a cracker of an International Women’s Day week/festival/depressing acknowledgment of how horrific the lives of many women remain.

I enjoyed this week mostly because I could speak openly about the impacts of Peri menopause AND ADHD when I:

Read more

We may never know what really happened, who was responsible. We may never see anyone held to account, accountability itself feels like a relic. What we do know is this: one hundred and sixty-five, mainly young schoolgirls, were obliterated in the southern Iranian port city of Minab, near the narrow throat of the St…

Read more

I have been thinking a great deal about John Howard recently, about his largely unwelcome return to the public gaze after the Bondi terror attack, about the fact that next week marks thirty year…

Read more

As Pauline Hanson goes on Australian national television to let us know there are no “good” Muslims, I wonder how I came to not react as I once would have. In the aftermath of her comments, it was Nationals senator Matt Canavan that questioned her ability to lead a major party and branded her ‘un-Australian’. …

Read more

This is likely the most under researched article that I have ever written, but so disturbed am I by the romance landscape, that I’m here to weigh-in on what seems, from my preliminary research, to be a cooked world for the hopeful lover.

Out there good people, we have added oxygen to a wildfire that has burnt every inch of our heart’s rich vegetation. We…

Read more

Over the past decade, the Australian political landscape has shifted in tone and temperament. Debates that once felt settled have reopened. The language of politics has hardened, more insistent about identity and allegiance, more comfortable drawing lines than building bridges real or metaphorical. Themes that once flickered at…

Read more

Over the summer break, I pitched a few stories to various news outlets. On reflection, perhaps they were right to ignore one of the ideas I sent through and pretend they had not read it. You know you’ve got a stinker when there is no effort made to sculpt a story or add elements that might make it richer. They were kind, and receptive to a couple of my …

Read more

The searing heat, seemingly fan forced from the north, crashed into the building cooled by air conditioners, sealed windows and the low mechanical hum of summer indoors.

Outside, the day roared. Inside, it stalled. The contrast landed with the blunt force of impact, registering before it could be named, a reminder that this season, summer, no longer arr…

Read more