[Intro Music]
[Applause]
[Laughter]
Well, hello. What a wonderful occasion, what a wonderful space,
and what a wonderful welcome to country that was.
I don't think there is a ceremony in Australia
that is more beautiful, or more generous, than Welcome to Country.
Welcome to country reminds us of our shared history.
Australian history is, is thousands of years old.
And for a white historian like me, the wonderful thing
is that that is no longer a novel thing to say,
that we know, that the history of Australians, is thousands of years old.
I feel proud to be part of the generation that is able to say that with confidence,
and with joy, and to be received into a space, where I've been given permission, to make
that statement.
So this is a talk really, for those of us who are part
of the new generation of Australians,
the Australians that are on this great journey, a journey to belong, it's the story that
I have called the Water Dreamers, it's why I wrote the book, The Water Dreamers,
so that I could explore the story of how that new generation of Australians could explore
their aquatic boundaries, and the aquatic boundaries
they shared with the original Australians,
because the first fleeter were wet country people.
They came here to the Aboriginal continent
from green and pleasant lands, and somewhere out there,
they met a formidable barrier
that they called the bush. They had one word for all of it, it was just Bush.
And they experienced that Bush, so often, as a dry and a silent place.
A place which said you don't belong. You dream of water and you think that this
place
is dry. So they experienced alienation, the first slide there.
They experienced alienation. They experienced a sense that they were alien here.
It's so different from the Americans. The Americans journey west and they had this
experience, the experience that they are a people
with a manifest destiny, the great plains
lie before them, and it's as if the land is crying
Welcome, and you can see that extraordinary, uh, painting
there from 1872, which Americans often wheel out
as an illustration of manifest destiny.
With the, um, the, the indigenous culture moving
away to the west, and the great, uh, telegraph
being laid across the continent, as civilisation sweeps across the land.
By the way, the information revolution did not start
in the 1980's or the 1970's, it began in the 1870's
with the telegraph, that's the first time
that electronic information becomes a reality and that the new paradigm, uh, comes into
force.
Now, the explorers, the explorers of Australia, by contrast, experience over and over again,
a sense of disappointment. They experience a sense that
the centre of the land is silent,
that it will not speak to them. You know, they started off with hope in their hearts.
Charles Sturt set out, we know, looking for an inland sea,
but when he got out there, what he experienced,
he said again and again, was a sense of death-like silence.
He had the feeling that he'd come to a land
that was silent, and which did not want him. Now, I think there are several responses
in the nineteenth century, among white historians, to this death-like silence,
in this attempt to belong to this land which doesn't present you with a manifest destiny.
And I've called the first and great response necronationalism.
Necronationalism; a nationalism based on death, a nationalism that glories in madness,
death and defeat. It's the credo that's put into words
by Henry Lawson. You know those great words
that he ended that famous story of his, The Bush Undertaker, and the sun, sank again,
on the grand Australian bush, the nurse and tutor
of eccentric minds, the home of the weird,
and of much that is different in other lands. The sun sank again in the grand Australian
bush,
the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird,
and of much that is different in other lands.
Now this is our poet, our great story writer, who in the end, is saying my sense of belonging
is something I want to express as alienation, that this is the home of the weird.
You know, we're often asked, or people often talk
to me about why we venerate dead explorers,
and they say, Oh, it's because we like failure, Australians love failure.
Well we don't love failure, we want our team to win,
I want my team today to win.
The reason we venerate Leichardt and Burke and Wills,
Burke and Wills are here, no, that's Henry Lawson,
here's Burke and Wills, the reason we venerate Burke and Wills is because we believe that
in death
they were received into a mystery. That out there
in the silence, they learned things that
you and I do not know, but somehow in death they've been received into another dimension
of knowledge,
which is knowledge of the land. That's why we venerate
Leichardt. Leichardt is even more potent
because we didn't find his body. You think about Patrick White's novel Voss,
a novel,
I think, is very unhealthy, actually. Voss is about how a man achieves apotheosis
by dying
in the landscape and somehow being received into its mystery.
This is all about alienation and belonging,
it's about people who say yes we can die here, but I'm not sure whether we can live here.
Now I should say that I don't share the view that we cling
to the coast, you know, people often say oh well white
Australians, there's something wrong with them,
they cling to the coast as if they're afraid
of going inland. We cling to the coast because we do understand our aquatic boundaries.
We live where it rains, there is the rainfall map,
and the population map, and we all know that they
map onto one another. And if you were to look at a map
of Aboriginal population, and there are such maps,
you'll see that Aborigines, in the times before the Whites arrived, lived in greater concentrations,
here, on the coast than they did in the centre. Why? Because that's our shared biology,
that's what the land will support. Now, at the end
of the nineteenth century, next stage of belonging,
a new group arrived, I call the Water Dreamers, and they represent a new and optimistic spirit,
a spirit that you can belong, and that we will
do it by hydro-engineering.
We say, OK, the continent doesn't want us, the continents a place of, of death and silence,
we will engineer a new kind of Australia. We'll build it when we irrigate,
we'll build damns, we'll transform the land, and even Henry Lawson, dear old Henry Lawson,
he gets the bug. This is his retort to the unbelievers.
He says, God sends answer for the rain,
the rain, and the way on the lease, sorry I'll do it againÉ
God for answer sends the rain, the rain, and away on the Western lease,
the limitless plain grows green again, and the fattening stock increase.
We'll lock your rivers my land, my lands, we'll dig lakes on your farthest run,
while down in the corners where the houses stand,
they drivel Australia's done.
So this new idea, this Water Dream, is expressed in a sense that we can engineer a new kind
of Australia,
'cause there is no nature out there, nature is a big bowl of nothing,
the deserts nothing, there is nothing there at all.
We have to bring water and life here through
hydro-engineering. And the great exponent of this is a book called Australia Unlimited,
which was written by a man called Edwin Brady. And you'll see Edwin Brady here, in the next
slide,
talking to Henry Lawson in fact, the great pessimist
and the great optimist, who were chums,
embracing each other. And this is the book. It weighs four kilos, and it's a kind of bible,
it's a kind of bible that says we can believe here,
it's a bible that says this is a land of unlimited
potentialities. Irrigation, hydro-engineering, they will change Australia.
Brady said the population of Australia could be 100 million,
it could be 500 million, all we need to do is irrigate.
This is the story of Australia Unlimited. Now, you and I know that the dream of Australia
Unlimited
has done enormous damage to this country, that irrigation has sucked the Murray-Darling
Basin dry. There are questions about the Snowy Mountains Scheme, what it's doing to the rivers
that,
uh, that it draws upon. But understand that this
was a great and generous dream. It was about believing
in the country, but failing to understand that there
was nature out there. And in the 70's, a new attempt
to belong appears in Australia. It's the ethos of wilderness.
Now, we all know the story because it's in, in the memory
of many of us. In, in 1972 the government in Tasmania,
um, announces plans to flood, flood the beautiful
Lake Pedder, and the Wilderness Society is born out
of an attempt to resist that.
Uh, and, uh, the battle is lost, but of course the wilderness movement is born, and they're
activated again,
uh, when the Franklin River is, uh, threatened back in 1983.
Wilderness is a very positive step on the journey
to belonging, it makes us feel good. It says look,
yeah there... there's some nature, there's some nature
over there, we understand it and it... it's easy
to do because it's Tasmania and it's rainy
and it's full of forest and so on. But wilderness cannot
be the final move in our journey to belonging,
because wilderness reinforces our sense that we live
alienated from nature, that here, in Sydney,
this isn't nature, nature's something beautiful and pristine over there.
And nature also is unacceptable, uh sorry, wilderness,
because it erases Aboriginal presence,
it says that's a pristine realm, where human foot
has never trod. Well of course, human foot has been
treading there for fifty thousand years. Uh, it's in fact rather cruel that the notion
of wilderness,
never trod by human being, has taken root, so, resolutely in Tasmania.
This is the challenge; the challenge of belonging, the challenge of the Water Dreamers,
to understand that what we do is part of nature. You know in Australia, we're one of the few
countries
that talk about a farm as if it's not part of nature,
as if nature ends at the farm gate and what we do on the farm
is artificial. In all the discussions about the Murray-Darling
Basin, where the water should go, the environment
is over here, and the farms are over there, and they're fighting with each other.
Until we accept that the farm is a part of nature,
that everybody in the debate understands
that the farm is natural, to build canals is natural,
to build dams is a way we interact with nature,
that Sydney itself is as natural as an ants nest,
that the transport system, the sewerage system,
the power grid, the internet, they're all part of nature,
you know we need to believe that we can build cities
in the Pilbara and not destroy the environment, or compromise Aboriginal integrity.
We need to treat our rivers and our lakes, not as vessels filled with, uh, water,
that's we.... we view... as uh, as a tradable commodity,
but as the arteries of a living country
which sustains us and gives us life and prosperity. And there is a great sign of hope, you know.
If you'd asked an Australian in 1900, a white Australian
in 1900, what lies in the middle of Australia,
they would have said Lake Eyre, Lake Eyre was the dead heart, a symbol of
alienation,
of disappointment, it was the withered sump of Charles Sturt's inland sea.
But you ask an Australian, anybody what's in the centre
of Australia today, and they say, Uluru.
That movement, of the centre, from Lake Eyre, to Ayers Rock, Uluru, is the most fundamental
change of heart that white Australians have undergone,
because it says that the centre of our country
is a place of beauty, a place that welcomes us,
and the place of Aboriginality.
It’s a site of reconciliation between white Australians
and original Australians, and it's a site
of reconciliation between white Australians and the land.
It's a sign that we are hearing nature,
and life, where once we heard silence and death.
It's a sign, that at last, we are starting to belong.
Thank you.
[Applause]