On Frailty and White Australia

*Collins Street, 5pm - John Brack. Image, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Purchased, 1956. © National Gallery of Victoria

It's been a big fortnight in Australia for white men who are unnerved at living in an insane, chaotic and rather stupid time, who yearn to feel safe so badly that they must project it onto not capitalism, or corporations, or rich people, or job loss, or climate change, but onto migrants. We've had Blair Cottrell on Sky News go entirely unquestioned on his desire to purge the black and brown evil from amongst us. We've had Andrew Bolt writing about 'the foreign invasion', about "a tidal wave of immigrants sweeping away what’s left of our national identity." And then a few days ago we had Fraser Anning give his maiden speech in federal parliament where he talked in part about the need to stop Muslims from migrating here and calling for a return to the White Australia Policy, to the tradition of European Christian peoples occupying this land, a tradition that's gone on for oh, at least 65,000 minutes.

What do you think they mean - Cottrell, Bolt and Anning etc - when they talk about our national identity being taken away? They never quite explain what they mean but they talk about it constantly.

It's not that I don't have sympathy for how they are feeling. And I'm sorry if that is repulsive to you. But I do have sympathy for how easily we crumble into hate (all of us). For how easily swayed we are to the childish violent view. To what fucking babies we are, and how quickly we learn how to become immune to others' suffering. To how little we have to hang on to. To how much beauty has been lost. Of what whisps we are in the wind.

Living now, you can't grab hold of anything stable. There's so much rage, so much desire to know who or what to blame. Living now, you really do understand the filmmaker Werner Herzog's comment that "Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness." That ice is cracking, just like the sheets in Antarctica. We are on fire, just like our earth. We don't often consider that we are a part of the earth. We still do, strangely and creepily, consider that we are separate from the earth. We call it "the environment" as if it's a product, a thing out there, a disconnect.

This paradigm is the water we've been swimming in strongly for 500 years. What chance did we ever have to not fracture into 23 million shards?

So what do people mean when they say we as Australians have lost our national identity? Is it the identity of the ANZACS? Is it barbecues with fellow laconic Aussies? Beachgoing? I feel constrained by that identity. It just doesn't feel like much of one, to me. It feels like they are crying out for an identity that never was a very fitting one in the first place. Like something cobbled together by politicians, a story. There's so little story to be gleaned from such a young, young country. A handful of generations attached to a penal colony of a colonising empire, one which then settled the lands and which decimated the bodies of those who were already here.

But we won't face it. Us white Australians with a scattering of generations behind us, we won't face it. We say no, and slap away the hand of history and turn to the wall and pull our never-was-enough-to-keep-us-warm identities around us and say no, the problem is with immigrants who aren't us.

Is this desire to regain back our tattered national identity simply a desire of an inflamed central nervous system that is so lonely upon the earth that it wants to - needs to - go out in the street and see itself reflected back to itself in a white face, so it knows that it exists? That's not so surprising - people do wish to be around their own kind. It's not even racist to say so. The racism comes in when your kind, which happens to feel very weak and frail for totally acceptable reasons (but which are culturally powerful and hence the mindfuck) pushes the blame onto that group over there who smell different.

Is it so hard to accept that white men, if they are not very good at self-examination, or if they haven't grown up feeling very loved, or if they're not particularly knowledgeable about the massive complexity of the tattered world being the way it is, will dig their heels in deeper to racist beliefs when smartass leftists whose identity politics aren't wedded to humanism think abusing white men is not only okay but it's fucking justice, man? I mean, what the fucking fuck is that?

We all see each other as two-dimensional avatars now though, so it's okay. Apparently. Some of us are measuring people solely as power-blips, not as people comprising an already fractured society who are fractured themselves. Well, that idea only ever works as a theory; humans are embodied beings within that society. Individual men did not cause the shitfest. No one started the fucking fire.

I mean, being a bewildered white man who has inherited racist tendencies by dint of being born where you were, and then being blamed for fucking everything and told to change without being given the tools to do so (because we do still expect men to magically fix themselves) would be enough to Frankenstein scared racist men out into their current time in the sun, wouldn't it? And if the only place where your fears are being addressed is on the far right - well, what's a little extra racism, right?

Fraser Anning's speech is full of a great yearning for things to return to the way they were. By this he means the Australia of his youth, where he was safe and secure in his life, in his place, in his country under queen and God. It's a bit of a requirement for a good life, really, knowing where your place is.

There is though, for the time being, nowhere, no places, for any of us.

However, he also wishes to return to a history where the blood crying from the ground of Aboriginal people slain not even 200 years before was as silenced then as it is now. As unacknowledged then as he wishes it to be now. And if you can't acknowledge your country's beginnings, then you shouldn't expect that tattered identity to do much for you at all. If you yearn for the past but you also won't face it, how on earth do you stand?