The times should favour openness, but secrecy – the first cousin of incuriousness – is deeply embedded. This is fertile territory for the oldest tropes to bubble up like groundwater, bitter with excess salt and polluted by the detritus of mining and industrial agriculture. I wonder how these institutional cruelties endure when they are nurtured by neglect, and how they might be displaced by ideas that enable us to create an Australia that knows its past well enough to foster an enduring open, innovative, generous society.

This is an edited extract from The Idea of Australia – A Search for the Soul of the Nation, published by Allen & Unwin, out now

Sun 27 Feb 2022 06.00 AED

‘The necessary fictions of Australia’s official foundation story, the one that starts with European sailors and offers a cursory nod to those who were already here, have become an increasingly threadbare, lazy shorthand for a much more complex identity.’ Photograph: Sean Gladwell/Getty Images

In this extract from her book, Julianne Schultz says the topography of an evolving national identity reveals peaks of great change and long valleys of fearful, censorious complacency

byJulianne Schultz

Stories make us fully and uniquely human. They are the way we make sense of the world, our lives and relationships. They may not always be true, completely, or even substantially. They may be tinged with hyperbole and hope, fiercely contested or modified…