Should Australia's pride in its economic resilience, extraordinary stage of development, cosmopolitan culture and all-round good luck be clouded with an enduring guilt? How much of this very real pain should we feel, as the descendants of the architects of this colonial adventure here in England, along with those who reaped its benefits in Australia? In other words, can we reconcile the bounty of this prize with the plight of the people who had it first?
More than mere political correctness, the issue ? complex, emotive and hugely sensitive ? is one of moral culpability. White Australians continue to say "sorry" and, as we have seen this week, make compromises. As long as these compromises
and apologies don't cost them too much, they appear to be heartfelt and legitimate. But for Aboriginal Australians, it really is the case that "sorry" isn't good enough.
It would be impossible, given their history, for Australians not to have an uneasy relationship with race, with national identity and with immigration. Australia's murky past is not that distant: until the 1970s a "White Australia" policy was enforced to restrict the inflow of non-white immigrants. Australia's non-indigenous population represents more than 95 per cent of the total, and a quarter of its residents are foreign-born, but still this is not an easy country to emigrate to. Even British people for whose trade or skill Australia has little demand are excluded.
Australia has an island mentality, and to the boat people from such war-torn countries as Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, hoping to start new lives in Australia, it shouts, with less and less ambiguity, "Warra, Warra!" The vast majority of these afflicted peoples do not even make it to the mainland, being detained on Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, for "processing", a word with uncomfortably Orwellian connotations.
Politicians exploit this insularity for their own ends: in the last election, and indeed the last several elections, immigration ? especially the issue of boat people ? has dominated political discourse. Rather like health care in America, it has split small-L liberal and conservative Australia beyond its traditional party affiliations. Zealous anti-immigration political figures have emerged, such as Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Nation Party who, in her first speech before parliament in 1996, said: "I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asianse_SLps a truly multi-cultural country can never be strong
or united."
Hanson was a precursor to such populist Right-wing figures as France's Marine Le Pen, but it is a great compliment to Australia that her initial support and profile waned, and she is now a largely forgotten figure. Or at least, it shows that if some Australians are a little bit racist, then they certainly don't like to be seen as racist.
So, is Australia racist? My own experience, having attended school there until the age of 11, and then lived there during my early twenties, is that underneath the blokey "mateship" of a certain type of Australian male there is a seam of racism. This racism is not only applied to indigenous Australians, but also to, for instance, the Lebanese and Greek immigrants who
live there.
The term "wog" is in common use in Australia in a way that would be unacceptable anywhere else ? indeed, it has been appropriated, in an act of (some would say misguided) self-empowerment, by the "Mediterranean" communities themselves. There remains a subtle division between white Australians and even their "ethnic" (another unsavoury Australian epithet) friends. They are assimilated, but divided also. It's a very subtle, local dynamic, a hangover from being a country that felt almost entirely "white" from 1788 until the 1950s.
I did a story once for an Australian newspaper on "Bachelor and Spinster" (B&S) balls. These are parties held inland for young people often living hundreds of miles from one another. They come together to drink and get off, and to forget the hardship of an Australian agricultural industry brought virtually to its knees by near-constant drought.
The white kids at the party I attended got drunk and groped each other; meanwhile I saw, 300 metres away, a group of Aboriginal teenagers drinking nervously by the river. We wanted to meet them, and began walking their way, only to be told, "Don't go down there ? there's darkies by the river." This is a very specific sort of racism, born not perhaps of malice but of ignorance and, I think, as natural to a specific sort of Australian as sunburn and blowflies. Dame Edna summed it up when she said: "I'm not racist; I like all races, especially white people."
Hanson's belief that a truly multi-cultural and cosmopolitan country is not a strong one is misguided. Australia, despite the residual tensions and occasional conflicts, is multi-cultural, and it is stronger for this reason. For if "White Australia" still exists in the hearts of a small but not minuscule minority, there is a new Australian identity made up of varied ethnic groups. They are Greek, Lebanese, Irish, English, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Australian. And Australia is them.
Oscar Humphries is the editor of the art magazine 'Apollo'. He was the launch editor of 'The Spectator Australia'
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