At 2:52am last Sunday, a former employee and friend sent me ‘just a salute’. My writing was very good, he said. My headlines were ‘extremely’ me. I had found a ‘folksy Australiana’ that mocked the Liberals while making Labor look ‘pussy-footed’.
It was, by modern standards, almost touching. It lasted less than three hours.
By 5:48am, the salute had acquired a bayonet. My opinions were trash – although, after an edit, only half trash – and my writing was apparently the inevitable discharge of a ‘carefully refined debate engine’ produced by a Jesuit education. This was said, naturally, ‘with the utmost respect’.
This is how the modern intellectual class says good morning: a compliment, an insult, a quotation from Gramsci, and a plan to reorganise the nation before breakfast.
His complaint was that I want to return Australia to ‘a mythical past’; a ‘diorama of a world that never existed’. Instead, we must imagine a radically different country, accept the technological revolution, integrate more closely with the Asia-Pacific, become a little more Swiss, pay people to have children, and ‘go big Australia’.
At some point, artificial intelligence appears to have joined the conversation, although even a computer might have suggested coffee first.
The message was funny. The assumption beneath it sadly wasn’t. It represents one of the great errors of our age: the belief that anyone who wants to preserve a civilisation’s character must secretly want to reverse history.
I don’t want Australia returned to the 1950s or converted into an Anglo-Celtic museum with a White Australia gift shop. I have argued explicitly that nostalgia cannot save a nation. Australian values were never the private property of a bloodline. They were shaped across centuries, carried through British institutions and eventually made unmistakably Australian. Migrants – including my own family – entered that culture, contributed to it and made it their own.
The past is not a destination. It is an inheritance.
He calls that Australia mythology because he never lived it. Born in 1989, by the time he was old enough to understand the country around him, the cultural change was already well underway. By 2007, people his age were entering the electorate as part of one of the first voting cohorts whose view of the world had been formed substantially online. The Australia I remember – where a fair go came with the expectation that you would have a go, and where Bob Hawke could say ‘there must be no privilege of origin, no hierarchy of descent’ and be understood – was not perfect. But it was not imaginary. To him it is myth. To me it was life.
My former employee is a younger millennial, university-educated, institutionally fluent, and approaching 40 with all the confidence of a revolutionary and most of the benefits of middle management. This isn’t every millennial. It’s a particular formation.
They were taught to criticise before they were taught to inherit; to deconstruct before they understood what had been constructed; and to treat every durable tradition as a power arrangement waiting to be exposed. They can speak endlessly about systems, identities, and structures, but become strangely incurious about the values without which no system can survive.
They now occupy corporations, bureaucracies, universities, and policy units. They increasingly decide how Australians work, speak, hire, teach, and live. They may not look as though they run the country. In practice, they operate much of its machinery.
This is central to my book, which he clearly hasn’t read. He’s not alone. There is now a flourishing genre in which people rebut books by reading their titles and arguments by objecting to something never said. It is scholarship adapted to the attention economy.
My argument is about culture because culture is the bedrock of civilisation. It is not the decoration added after the serious work of economics and policy is complete. It determines what the serious work is for.
Every lasting institution begins with the same questions: who are we, what do we stand for, and what do we owe one another? That is true of a family, a business, and a country. A family without shared values is merely a collection of relatives. A business without them is a logo with a payroll. A country without them is an economic zone with a flag.
Values and ideas form a culture. Culture shapes conduct. Conduct forms institutions. Institutions make policy. My friend begins at the final step and imagines he has designed a nation.
That is why his policy shopping list misses the point. Trade, diplomacy, regional integration, neutrality, and population growth may all deserve discussion. But none can tell us what Australia is. ‘Big Australia’ answers a question of quantity while avoiding the question of purpose. Bigger for what? More citizens, or merely more customers?
My generation understands technological change. We went from vinyl records to streaming, landlines to smartphones, and encyclopaedias to carrying most human knowledge in our pockets, where we mainly use it to watch strangers argue. We adapted, but adaptation did not require amnesia. Technology changed around us after much of our character had formed. For those who followed, the internet helped form the character itself, supplying identities, moral fashions, and prefabricated opinions. That helps explain why continuity can look like nostalgia to people who never experienced what came before.
A healthy country must change. It must also know what it is trying not to lose. Otherwise, change is not progress. It is simply motion, cheered on by people who assume the future has a direction merely because it is arriving quickly.
Australia does not have to choose between becoming a museum and becoming an airport lounge. We can welcome new people, master new technology, and confront new challenges while preserving the principles that make those achievements Australian, rather than merely things occurring on Australian soil.
My friend thinks I am staring longingly at a diorama. Perhaps. But before our new cultural architects knock it over to make room for the future, they might want to check whether it is merely on display – or holding up the roof.
A radically different Australia may look magnificent in the artist’s impression. Most things do before anyone asks about the foundations.
