Speakers: Luke Hickey, Julianne Schultz, Chris Wallace
Luke Hickey:
Yuma. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the National Library of Australia and to this very special conversation between Julianne Schultz, author of the Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation, and Dr. Chris Wallace, Associate Professor at the University of Canberra. My name is Luke Hickey. I'm the Assistant Director General of the Engagement Branch here at the National Library, and in month three of a new role for me, which is very exciting, particularly to get to introduce events such as these.
Luke Hickey:
As we begin, I'd like to acknowledge Australia's First Nations peoples, the first Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and give my respects to elders past and present. Through them, to all Australian and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders that are with us, either here today in the theater, and it's wonderful to see faces back in the building, or for those who are joining us on the livestream on Facebook as well. Welcome to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.
Luke Hickey:
Emeritus Professor Julianne Schultz is the Chair of the conversation. She was the publisher and founding editor of the Griffith Review and is Professor Emeritus of media and culture at Griffith Center for Social and Cultural Research. She's an acclaimed author of Reviving the Fourth Estate and Steel City Blues, and librettos to the award-winning operas Black River and Going Into the Shadows.
Luke Hickey:
Julianne became a member of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and the community, and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities the following year. She has served on the board of directors of the ABC, Gratton Institute, and Copyright Agency, and chaired the Australian Film, TV, and Radio School, Queensland Design Council, and National Cultural Policy Reference Group. I'm not sure what you do in your spare time, Julianne.
Luke Hickey:
In The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation, she challenges our notions of what it means to be Australian and asks timely and urgent questions about our national identity. Here at the National Library of Australia, our vision is to connect all Australians with national collections, with the aim of enriching our understanding about who we are and our place in the world.
Luke Hickey:
What a perfect venue to host this conversation tonight, so please join me in welcoming Julianne Schultz to present The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation. Julianne.
Julianne Schultz:
Thank you very much. It's lovely to be back here after such a long absence. We've done obviously lots of Griffith Review events here over the years, and I was very pleased when the Library said that they were just on the cusp of being able to start doing live events again and were offered to host this discussion this evening. The format, it'll be slightly different than a Q&A because I thought it might be useful to just sketch out some of the ideas that are in the book that relate specifically to this part of Canberra. And excuse me, my throat is a bit strange. So I'm going to talk for about 25 minutes or so, which sort of draws from one of the chapters in the books, and then Chris and I will have a conversation and take it from there.
Julianne Schultz:
So the chapter that I'm sort of talking to tonight is one called The Architecture of Silence. The year an overwhelming majority of Australians voted effectively to recognize First Nations people was the year before I started high school. And that year, W.E.H Stanner presented the ABC Boyer lectures. In them, he coined a phrase which has had a life of its own ever since, "The Great Australian Silence." It was in many ways, a phrase that provided the previously unmentioned scaffolding for the other famous 1960s phrase, "The Lucky Country."
Julianne Schultz:
We know Donald Horn meant that term ironically, but his book does not fully address this silence and its role in creating the luck that he described. His phrase became a slogan and in the land of silence, forgetting in denial the foundation of its good fortune was obscured. Stanner was talking about the original sin of the Australian settlement, the willful decision at the time of Federation to believe that the first nation's people were a dying race who could be dismissed and made invisible, and denied the right to vote or fully participate in the life of the new nation.
Julianne Schultz:
The legislation that enforced this decision came nearly a 100 years after British officials failed to heed the advice of Jeremy Bentham, whose designs for the penal colony prisons they were quite happy to adopt, that the failure to reach a new settlement and treaty threatened to be an incurable flaw. Over the intervening century, various iterations of ignoring, silencing, forgetting, prevailed to make this floor seem to be truly incurable even as the colonies gained some independence.
Julianne Schultz:
As Stanner said in 1968, "What may well have begun as a simple forgetting, turned into habit, and over time, into something like a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale. We've been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we're now hard put to keep them in mind, even we knew most want to do so." This was in 1968, which is a year after the referendum, which meant that the federal government had responsibility for First Nations peoples. They could be counted in the census, yet it was more than a decade before they, like all other Australians were required to vote.
Julianne Schultz:
At the time, Stanner thought the tide might be turning, but worried that it might be just another year in the old plateau of complacency. There was some movement. The Tent Embassy was established. Some land rights became real. The news media started to report seriously the Aboriginal issues, but children were still being taken and a lot of most First Nations people was deplorable. Stanner was right to be cautious. The complacency in silence, trauma and shame remained and got worse.
Julianne Schultz:
12 years later, another Boyer lecturer, the great art historian, Bernard Smith revisited similar territory. His lectures were called The Specter of Truganini. They're arguably the most politically and morally challenging series that the national broadcaster has ever transmitted, and they're informed by Bernard Smith's deep knowledge of the nation's cultural history. He declared that a culture's vitality and capacity for survival will depend largely on the quality of the moral values it brings to the solution of human problems. Values born of its own historical experience, values which are unnecessarily continuously tested.
Julianne Schultz:
Over five weeks in his lectures. He described the way the white blanket of forgetfulness had been repeatedly thrown over the carcass of genocide that haunted the nation, and wondered whether the deep fear of change would render the country unviable in the next century.
Julianne Schultz:
Yet he dreamed that a Makarrata, a treaty coming together after struggle would be in place before the bicentenary, which was then eight years hence. 37 years later, the plea for a Makarrata formed the centerpiece of the Uluru Statement from The Heart, a plea that at the time was rejected rather than just ignored. A decade after his death, one can only imagine the despair Bernard Smith, like the other great scholars, advocates, politicians, and public servants of his generation would feel about this approach. The gap between the culturally informed and concerned conscience that he advocated, and a brutal nitpicking politics intolerant of dissent has grown to become a chasm. It's taking much longer than Bernard Smith had optimistically predicted for the truth that was swept out the door to blow back through an open window.
Julianne Schultz:
Silence is not just an absence. Sophisticated scaffolding is needed to keep the black hole open and empty. It takes determination for a nation created out of reports and official inquiries to hide. Bureaucracies thrive on records and the early administrators sent to establish an open air penal settlement documented everything in fine copperplate. Reports, documents, and accounts were written on parchment, tied in blue ribbon and sent back to white hole. There, they were considered reviewed, filed and tucked away in archives.
Julianne Schultz:
Later records from the colonies and states were typed in triplicate and also sorted and filed, but many decisions and documents crumbled like the paper on which they were written. Institutions sometimes prefer to hide their secrets in plain sight. Nations with shameful stories like families develop a habit of secrecy and will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain the silence. This is not confined to the distant past. Those in power and with something to hide and a flexible attachment to the liberal conventions will stretch the tools at their disposal to protect themselves. Closing courts, redacting documents, pillaring individuals, bringing politically inflected charges and destroying lives in the process.
Julianne Schultz:
For a nation with a bureaucratic creation story, its record keeping has left a lot to be desired. There are stories of lost and inadequate records in every state and territory. Queensland is home to several of the most instructive, which I describe in the idea of Australia. But this did not mean that people who were paying attention were ignorant. Carl Feilberg, who was inducted into the Australian Media of Hall of Fame in 2018, 130 years after his death, paid a high price for his campaign against the brutality of the all disciplined Queensland Native Police.
Julianne Schultz:
He lost his job as the editor of The Queenslander after documenting what he's described as the promiscuous massacres. "Every resident of Brisbane," he wrote in 1880, "who becoming aware of what is going on, neglects to do what he can in his capacity as a citizen and a voter to wipe out the stain which rests on the whole colony, shares in the disgrace of it." We know now that the extent of their violent attacks, reprisals, and massacres was vast and undeniable. Further research, an increasingly sophisticated analysis suggests that the Queensland Native Police force was responsible for 66,680 killings, and probably more, resulting in many tens of thousands of deaths that were described by Feilberg at the time as profligate, furtive and unprosecuted.
Julianne Schultz:
When Paul Hasluck traveled east from Perth in 1941 to take up a position in the federal Department of External Affairs, the journalist and academic who later became a Liberal government Minister and Governor General was astonished to discover the inadequacy of the record-keeping. Hasluck was one of a new breed of public servants drawn to Canberra by the existential threat of war, even before Darwin was bombed and the Japanese subs entered Sydney Harbor.
Julianne Schultz:
His skills as a researcher and oral historian and journalist were invaluable in the reconstruction effort that began even before the war was over. Shortly after he arrived in the department, he asked for highly confidential cables on Syria to help prepare a brief on a possible allied intervention. He was instead brought a file on Tasmania. "The clerk who brought it to him," he later accounted, "Said she could not find Syria in the index files, but one of the boys told her it was a town in Tasmania, so she hoped that would do."
Julianne Schultz:
The department files were a mess, record-keeping was chaotic, access to information and past decisions depended on memory and networks. Hasluck was appalled, but it took another 20 years before the archives were given some autonomy, although they were still in the Prime Minister's department. And 1983, before legislation was passed for it to become an independent authority, fourscore years and two since the nation itself had come to being, where it's records then to be captured. The greatest secrecy always attached this to records that threatened to reveal what was known about politically inspired or sanctioned abuses of power, but that's not what I want to talk about tonight.
Julianne Schultz:
What I want to talk about is this part of Canberra, because I think it really tells a big story. Buildings often reveal priorities more robustly than words. As I was writing the book, I came to wonder what some future archeologists uncovering the remnants of the Commonwealth of Australia would make of this precinct? Because in my search for the soul of the nation, this area... because if my search was for the soul of the nation, this area is surely its heart. Certainly, there are granted natural wonders, which we've appropriated into the national psyche, the rock monolith at the center of the nation, the extraordinary corals or the Barrier Reef, the remarkable coastline, the vast interior, and the built environment that's been created by people seeking to create monuments of note. Most particularly, obviously the extraordinary opera house, which has its own international statue.
Julianne Schultz:
But in any nation, the buildings in the national capital really provide the best clues to what is valued, what is important, what is the ethos of the place and its people. This is particularly so in capitals that have been created rather than those that have evolved over centuries. You see it in the grand buildings in Washington where the axis of power is clear to see. You see it in contemporary Berlin where the preferred building material for the many new government buildings is glass, a physical manifestation of the new value placed on transparency and openness.
Julianne Schultz:
Many of you know so well, this has long been a matter of longstanding discussion and dispute in this city. My purpose is not to say what could or should have been done, but to reflect on what is here and what it says about the nation now. Whereas the other Australian capital cities can trace their origins to colonial days, Canberra is very much a product of our Australian creation for good [inaudible 00:14:12].
Julianne Schultz:
As Billy Hughes said at the inauguration ceremony in 1913, before he became Prime Minister, "The nation is unfolding without the slightest trace of that race we have banished from the face of the earth. We must not be too proud, lest we should too in time disappear. We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have. Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony's design for Canberra included a national archive in the parliamentary triangle of the national capital. The American designers drew on the institutions of their own capital where a grand ne-classical archive takes pride of place between Congress and the White House, and people queue for hours to see the founding documents and to search for their own records. But as other cultural institutions grew on the banks at the lake known for Walter Burley Griffin, plans for the archives literally fell off the drawing board.
Julianne Schultz:
First, it was to be a wing of this library. Then on a site overlooking the precinct that since become the ASIO headquarters, then again, a separate building near the library. Two competitions were held to find the best design. Two winners were selected, but none were built. Today, the National Archives' lease is one of the modest art deco buildings on the outer edge of the precinct. It's records stored offsite in a stylish building in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. It's place in the hierarchy, if we take buildings as a metaphor, is plain to see.
Julianne Schultz:
The construction of this library just a little over 50 years ago was also an example of an approach that put a negative dollar value on symbolic resonance and design integrity. As the Library's website notes, "The style of the building is called contemporary classical and it was influenced by the work of the American architect, Edward Stone. And more importantly, by the Parthenon in Greece." The building was planned to have 17 columns on one axis and eight on the other, like the Parthenon. Instead, at the insistence of the penny pinchers at the National Capital Authority, and one man in particular, one row of columns was cut to save a mere $250,000, which unbalanced the design and stands as a testament to both a lack of imagination and more. It's sort of a bureaucratic silly decision, but it sort of says an enormous amount.
Julianne Schultz:
Instead of being the home of the National Archives, the important chunk of lakeside land was used to build Questacon, the science museum. It's a much loved destination and a great place to take small children, but it's an unlikely building to have pride of place on the core access of the precinct. Again, to follow the money is revealing. Questacon was funded in large measure by bicentennial gift from the Japanese government. At the time, Japan was Australia's most important trading partner, was only 40 years after the second World War when the fear of a Japanese invasion had galvanized the nation.
Julianne Schultz:
As we continued the journey along the lake to... there is now of course, the National Portrait Gallery, which Tom Roberts, the artist had argued in the early days of Federation should have been built then. It took nearly five score years before it finally opened its doors. Even this tardy beginning would not have been possible without the determined advocacy and support of Gordon and Marilyn Darling, who personally encouraged Prime Minister Howard to visit the comparable museum in Washington, which tipped the scales. Moving along the lake front, there's the high court, which it's worth remembering has only been the final court of appeal for the nation since 1988, and the National Gallery, which has been made and remade several times in its relatively short life.
Julianne Schultz:
Of course, my future archeologist would pay due attention to the Old Parliament House and the new building partly submerged in the hill further up. Much has been said about them and I won't add to that discussion tonight, but I wonder what she would make of the Magna Carta place tucked into an otherwise desolate corner near the Rose Gardens, just to the side of the Old Parliament House. The recent rise of the Magna Carta in the founding mythology of this country is intriguing. It's one of those causes that's been carefully nurtured despite the demonstrable absence of any particular relevance to the founding of the penal colony, and its rather arbitrary forms of justice, or even to the creation of Federation.
Julianne Schultz:
But ever since Sir Robert Menzies outbid the British museum and found the money to acquire one of the last copies of the document, he just had a growing place in the hearts of many of our more conservative politicians. Just as the Japanese government donated the money to build Questacon, the British donated the money to build Magna Carta place with its buried time capsule, which is due to be open, maybe by my somewhat mystified archeologist in 2101, suggesting that our sacred sites may be available. This combination suggests that our sacred sites may be available to the highest bidder.
Julianne Schultz:
It’s also less likely that should find much evidence of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which has occupied the plot outside the old parliament since 1972. Who knows? By then there might be the remnants of an Aboriginal resting place in the precinct. The construction of a museum for Aboriginal Australia was first seriously proposed in an official report by John Mulvaney in 1974. It was endorsed the following year, but in the intervening half century, there've been another 14 reports recommending this in one form or another, but still nothing has materialized. A few months ago, the current Prime Minister put on his best dream time tie and promised that the first steps towards the creation of an official resting place would be made after the election. I hope it's right, but we will see.
Julianne Schultz:
Absences speak volumes. There's still plenty of space of course, along this area. So what is missing from this precinct is also important. Part of the architecture of silence. There's no immigration museum, despite this being a country built on immigration, although that's obviously part of the remit of the national museum. The film and sound archive with this extraordinary records is not here and immediately accessible. There's no landscape or photographic museum. There's no formal museum of Federation.
Julianne Schultz:
I know many of these areas are covered elsewhere, but they're really important parts of the cultural and political riches that define the nation, and so their absence is itself noteworthy. As you all know, the cultural institutions have been struggling for years, weakened by a lack of respect, recognition and resources. The waiting time for the archives for requests had grown so embarrassingly long that the clearance rate has been dropped from its annual report. And despite the legislative requirement of a maximum 90-day wait. This is often honored in the breach. 10,000 requests have been left unanswered for a year. Another 10,000 for five to 10 years, and 2,566 have been waiting for a release for more than 10 years.
Julianne Schultz:
Allocating scarce... blah blah. Have a glass of water. Allocating scarce public funding requires judgements about priorities. Some of those involved in the campaign to get resources for the archives wondered whether a cash strapped a validly pro-disclosure organization should have spent millions of dollars and the time of its most senior officials for almost a decade, trying to prevent access to its documents. As authoritarians everywhere know, and I'm not suggesting that they have, but it's worth drawing the connection. Even old official records are not neutral artifacts.
Julianne Schultz:
In 2011 when Jenny Hawking began her [inaudible 00:21:57] battle for access to the correspondence between the Governor General and Buckingham Palace, this was a battle that went on to cost the archives probably about $2 million, until a High Court required that the documents be released. Not long after her quest to open and read the 1,200 pages of correspondence had begun, the archives was re-classified as an agency of national security, rather than in the cultural organization's machinery of government.
Julianne Schultz:
This reflects the way national security was displacing economics as the dominant lingua franca of policy here, and national security necessarily requires secrecy. Again, building spoke volumes. The new headquarters for the spy agencies were built in a prime position overlooking the lake that had once been earmarked for the archives. Half a billion dollars was recently allocated to expand the Australian War Memorial complex and turn its Memorial into what many have described as a war museum.
Julianne Schultz:
The Griffins had imagined its elevated sight on the parliament house axis as the place for a pleasure palace, a casino in the parlance of the day. The devastation of the First World War, where their live or die game of two up had distracted men facing death, shifted priorities back here. Pleasure Palace is slipped off the agenda and instead, the site came to house a memorial, which was built and opened as another war took its toll in lives. The sweeping views from the eternal flame over the Pool of Reflection and across the lake to parliament put the human cost of war at the sober heart of national life.
Julianne Schultz:
As you know, there are house of opposition to the plans to undermine the ethos embedded in the memorial that many felt was implicit in the new designs. The allocation of so much money to what had become the top tourist attraction in Canberra while the other cultural institutions resorted to crowd funding also was a very telling moment. The idea of Australia like the idea of a life is as much shaped by the silence as the stories we tell ourselves and as the institutions we've created.
Julianne Schultz:
Secrets need to be heard with compassion and without judgment, not to re-traumatize but to release. And so that reparations can be made, the old power structures modified. There are lessons in how this might be done from home and abroad. In 1985, Richard Weizsacker, the German President at the time gave a speech that set the framework for modern Germany. It was described by the Israeli Ambassador as a moment of glory. The horrors of genocidal war still hung very heavily in Germany, but he said... he being Weizsacker, said, "It was not a matter of coming to terms with a past that could not be made undone. However, anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection."
Julianne Schultz:
In the book, I explore some of the other ways in which the architecture of silence has produced a society where the attachment to official secrecy has deep roots and impinges, I think on the soul of the nation, culture, censorship, draconian legislation, closed courts, and more, but those of you who live here, who know and love this precinct have a special responsibility. One of the arguments I make in the book is that a lot of the responsibility comes back to the local and in Canberra, this is the core of the local.
Julianne Schultz:
I would hope that in the coming decades it becomes... this precinct especially, becomes a better representation of an open inquiring society, one that's not ashamed of the past, but willing to face it openly and honestly, and that that's reflected in the built environment which provides a new architecture. Thank you. I can sit down?
Luke Hickey:
You can sit down. Thank you, Julianne.
Luke Hickey:
I'd now like to welcome Dr. Chris Wallace to join Julianne in the conversation to further explore these ideas and the idea of Australia. Dr. Chris Wallace is an Associate Professor at the 50|50 by 2030 Foundation at the University of Canberra. She works in modern and contemporary political, international, and global history with special reference to leadership, transnational lives and transformational change, and the information strategies that underpin these.
Luke Hickey:
She was the National Archives of Australia Cabinet historian from 2020 to 2021. And Dr. Wallace is also an associate of the ANU Center for Digital Humanities Research. The conversation has twice named her one of Australia's top thinkers in 2017 and 2019. So it gives me a great pleasure to welcome Dr. Chris Wallace.
Chris Wallace:
You are on fire, woman. Many in the room and listening online will know Julianne as one of the great ultra-marathoners of Australian public intellectual life for decades. She's been one of the great multipliers, one of the great amplifiers of powerful ideas for good in Australian society and beyond. And I think I'm feeling like this is a kind of a compressed bomb from you into the Australian polity to try and shake us up and out of, as you so compellingly describe it in the book, a terra nullius of the mind in which we are all stuck.
Chris Wallace:
You're a great rememberer, Julianne. It must be exhausting. Tell us about why you have embraced this role as the great rememberer and stimulator of action in a society you clearly think is deeply stuck?
Julianne Schultz:
Well, I care a great deal and if I didn't care, I wouldn't bother. I think it's interesting for people of my generation. So I was born in the mid, late 1950s, and I think over my lifetime, this society has been transformed and I think that in a funny sort of way, growing up as many of the changes that have produced the very good society that we have now, to see them happening and to see them then stall has been a matter of profound disappointment, that as we've got richer, we've got meaner, we've lost some of that urgent excitement and possibility of being an independent, outward looking nation that really values some of the old mythic ideas.
Julianne Schultz:
And I think that what I try was trying to do in the book was to try and trace how that had happened, why it had happened, and what the underlying causes were, and how we might in a way rebuild some of the momentum to the good ideas of Australia that have been around for much of my growing up.
Chris Wallace:
The scope of the book is extraordinary. You are, as an archival researcher yourself, pretty phenomenal. I think as I look around the room here, there are many people who, as we sit here in the National Library of Australia, are familiar from the special collections room and probably have looked at some of the documents you have. Most people haven't. I'm fascinated that you've situated tonight's talks squarely in the national cultural institutions in the parliamentary triangle. What is your relationship to Canberra yourself?
Julianne Schultz:
Yeah, it's interesting. Look, I am not a great archival researcher. You are, many people are.
Chris Wallace:
It's pretty good.
Julianne Schultz:
I think what I'm quite good at is I'm quite a good synthesizer. I'm quite good at picking and pulling, and digging down to the next level. I don't make great claims myself to that degree. My relationship with Canberra, well, look, I think like everyone, like so many people, I've never lived here full time. My children both went to ANU, so I spent an awful lot of time here during their university years, and my professional life, well, since I became a journalist. Really, I've pivoted in and out of Canberra. So I've always had a sort of working relationship with the place.
Julianne Schultz:
I was attached for a few years to the Reshaping Australian Institutions Project at ANU, and so I spent a lot of time here at ANU at the time. So I've sort of been in and out. I feel like it's very much part of who I am and I'm very fond of it and very familiar with it. I think one of the things that I was trying to do in the book is to try and explore that if you start talking about the nation, which is itself, I understand quite a problematic thing in some regards.
Julianne Schultz:
I think when we talk about Australia, we tend to do the acknowledgement of centuries of First Nations settlement, occupation, and deep communion with the land, and then we get to the point of British arrival. And that's the point that we tend to start the conversation about the place from, and I guess what I was trying to do in the book is to acknowledge all of that and go into it in some detail, but to say, well, actually, the real part of the nation starting is with Federation and we don't actually pay much attention to that.
Julianne Schultz:
Even in the debates around Australia Day, for instance, it pivots on Cook and Philip, who in many ways were blokes doing jobs. They were here on a mission work. They had their papers, they were signed by the king or whoever, and they came to do what they did, but that colonial project is different to the process of creating a nation which is independent. And it's taken this nation a long time to tease out and detach from that colonial foundation. And that's why Canberra is important, because Canberra is the epicenter of that idea, that very presence of the nation is embodied in this place.
Chris Wallace:
As you sketched out then, the original agents of colonization as kind of mid-level executors of bureaucratic policy, it connects so absolutely with the travesty of the buildings, the fate of the buildings symbolizing so much more in this very spot. Is this actually part of the secret of our failure to launch as a nation? Are we trapped by some not good enough ones that keep stuffing up the parliamentary triangle destroying the opera house?
Julianne Schultz:
Yeah. Look, it's funny.
Chris Wallace:
Are we really a nation of bureaucrats?
Julianne Schultz:
Well, I think that maybe part of it, that may be that we're a nation of bureaucrats, but we're increasingly a nation of bureaucrats who have been told that the public good value of a public bureaucracy has been devalued. And so it can all be competitive and you can do it all on your own website and it could all be sold out. So I think that transition is interesting.
Julianne Schultz:
Look, there haven't been... and you've done your work in this area, there haven't been a surplus of great leaders in this country. There've been important leaders, there are people who made great contributions, but in the sort of political domain, if you line them up, it's not an inspiring bunch, we have to agree.
Chris Wallace:
But you have been inspired in your life and you explain in the books, inspiring moments in the development of the nation that we've kind of lost the spirit of. For you personally, what's been the turning point from excitement, hope, patience, to a kind of a curdled disappointment, if I can put it that way?
Julianne Schultz:
I would tinge with hope. Yeah. Look, I think-
Chris Wallace:
We'll get to hope. Don't worry folks. Don't give up hope.
Julianne Schultz:
Okay, good.
Chris Wallace:
Don't reach for the razor blade yet. There will be hope.
Julianne Schultz:
Look, I think that for me, I spent my early adolescent or my early adulthood in Queensland and that was under the Jo Bjelke-Petersen period, which was, I think sort of slapdash nasty autocracy. It was a corrupt government. They behaved badly. They were bullies, they were thugs. They were anti-intellectual. They were not good people, if you like.
Julianne Schultz:
And so growing up as a young adult in that environment shaped a sense of both the negative politics and how negative politics could really have a stifling effect on a community, but it also made you aware of the power of protest and opposition. And while at the time, when I was sort of a student and so on, it seemed that, that would never result in much change.
Julianne Schultz:
Within a decade of my graduation, the government had changed, the Fitzgerald Inquiry had delivered its reforms, and the society began a profound change. So I think that one of the elements of that was that it taught me... it gave me a taste for what a bad government could do to its people, but it also made me realize that change was possible. So that provides a sort of frame in a sense for my sort of view of the world. I think that what struck me with some astonishment and disappointment was I was reporting for the Korea Mail at the time that Pauline Hanson was elected, and it was a bit of a joke. You could understand the sort of economic suffering that people in the area that she'd been living in were feeling, and I've written a lot about that over the years, but her election was sort of absolutely a bolt from the blue.
Julianne Schultz:
Now, in the first year of Pauline Hanson's sort of slightly crazed role as the member for... what was her seat? I can't remember her seat. Whatever it was, Ipswich East. Yeah. Oxley, that's right. Thank you.
Chris Wallace:
Very good.
Julianne Schultz:
That's good. But when she was first elected, when she first came down here to do her first reach, she was basically condemned that the overwhelming response was that this was an unacceptable form of discourse. You couldn't be blaming Aboriginal people. You couldn't be blaming Asians. You couldn't be saying this stuff honestly, in a straight face. It wasn't a matter of political correctness. It was just wrong and it was not acceptable behavior.
Julianne Schultz:
What astonished me, and astonished many is that within 25 years, 26 years, the ideas that are embodied in that sort of one nation sentiment have become so much a part of the mainstream political discourse that they've twisted everything. There is a small percentage of the people of the population, but it's actually taken a really strong foothold. So that gave me real pause for thought, that the changes that I thought were sort of incrementally working towards, could be pulled back so sharply.
Julianne Schultz:
I think that when the whole refugee stuff really escalated in 2001 and then continued to do so, and the language that started to being used about not just the, "We'll decide who comes to the country," and so on, but the violent brutality of the language that was really... again, corroded the sort of whole political discourse. And so it made me think, my goodness, is this way of thinking so deeply ingrained in the DNA of the country that we can never escape it?
Julianne Schultz:
And so it made me want to go back and try and understand where that came from, and in the process, sort of discovered that it had never really been cauterized, that for instance, the three founding bits of legislation in the first Federation parliament, the first piece of legislation was about the deportation of Pacific Islanders who'd been brought here effectively as slaves. And the reason that Sir Samuel Griffiths and others really wanted that to get up, and it was one of the first political deals of the Federation, was not out of any sort of humanitarian concern for that these people have been... well, at some level, there was some humanitarian concern that these people have been brought here under false pretenses, but it was the fear that should they remain, we would get to a state in Australia which was like the racial division in the United States.
Julianne Schultz:
And so at the same time, the Americans were actively considering ways of deporting the Black population. Here, there was a smaller number. It was more manageable and it could pass the parliament. As it transpired, many of the people who'd been brought here didn't actually want to go back and there was legal action and there were petitions, and so on, and not quite the same numbers were deported as it was originally proposed.
Julianne Schultz:
So that's number one. Number two is the White Australia policy. So for decades before Federation, the politicians and others had been actively amping up the fear of what the Chinese represented. Now, the first boat of Chinese brought here were like the Islanders. They were effectively kidnapped and brought on a boat when some traders were worried that with the cessation of convicts coming, they wouldn't have enough labor. It was sort of like, it's an inversion of the whole process. So the wide Australia policy, by the end of that year, now Lord Hopton, the Governor General at the time didn't want to sign the legislation. The British government had been really pushing back on lots of that legislation, eventually it passes and goes ahead.
Julianne Schultz:
Then the next was the political deal to give women the vote. Now, the fact that female suffrage wasn't included in the constitution, it's in my view a travesty. It could well have been, but the feeling was amongst the whiskery men who were dominating the talks that this was just a bridge too far and it would be sorted out with a political deal. And so the political deal was to grant women the vote in 1902, but in the process, the vote was taken away from a whole bunch of other people, including First Nations people who didn't already have it in the states that had given them the vote.
Julianne Schultz:
So it seems to me that that foundational story, those three bits of legislation, it's like they keep coming back. It's like some sort of reflux and when you then look at the dismantling over time of the White Australia policy, there's never been a formal apology. There's never been a formal sort of restitution that's been made in terms of that. It was eaten away by legislative change over a 15 year period, but it's never really... it's importance in terms of the formation of the nation, it's never really been properly unpacked.
Julianne Schultz:
Equal rights for women takes until 84. These things take a long time to get [inaudible 00:41:55].
Chris Wallace:
Would you say there was a respite in that between the Whitlam government disavowing the White Australia policy and the election of the Howard government, and the arrival of people like Pauline Hanson in Canberra?
Julianne Schultz:
What was at the beginning of your sentence?
Chris Wallace:
Would you say there was a respite from...?
Julianne Schultz:
There was a respite, and what happened in that period was that really liberating beginning to engage with an idea of multiculturalism that was inclusive and it wasn't just tolerant, it wasn't telling people that they had to assimilate and forget. It was actually a much more active sort of process and would seem to me that that's a first step. It's not an end point, it's a first step.
Julianne Schultz:
And so when the Hanson stuff comes in and starts winding that back, you think, "Ah, so that was just a step in this process."
Chris Wallace:
Back to a slapdash nasty autocracy.
Julianne Schultz:
Yeah. Slapdash. And that was my-
Chris Wallace:
I've written that down. That's going to see future years. So coming back to that Hanson moment-
Julianne Schultz:
Yes. Sorry [inaudible 00:42:52].
Chris Wallace:
There's one big element, I think in the last quarter of a century which doesn't get enough attention either, and that is many people will recall the early Pauline Hanson interview on a current affair where Mike Willesee puts some actual ABS migration data to her about the makeup of Australian immigration. And she says, "They're just paper figures." And to me, it seems the crystallizing moment at which we seem to detach from reality in terms of being able to discuss these things, we can't not talk about that without talking about someone who features regularly in your book, Rupert Murdoch, his media, the 100 years of Australian Murdochracy that we've had given his father Keith, and now his son Lachlan.
Chris Wallace:
Yet it's another of the things that is subjected to the great Australian silence, isn't it?
Julianne Schultz:
That's true.
Chris Wallace:
Can you speak to that a bit?
Julianne Schultz:
Yeah. Can I just talk to the Pauline Hanson, "Those are just numbers?" The thing that I think was really crucial about Pauline Hanson's appeal to her constituents was that not all of them, but many of them were people who actually had not benefited from the riches that flowed to many as a result of the sort of economic changes in Australia.
Julianne Schultz:
Now, some of them were economically perfectly fine, but many of them weren't, or they had a sense of grievance because they'd seen the old structures had crumbled around them. I don't think there was enough attention paid to... and this is an ongoing thing, to ensuring that, that sort of inequality is addressed and taken seriously. If people haven't had the same opportunities to get a proper education, if they haven't had the opportunities to stretch themselves and learn more, they become prey for demagogues, and that's essentially what that-
Chris Wallace:
But don't we have the paradox that they're in fact, the ones who are delivering power to the demagogues?
Julianne Schultz:
Absolutely, and I think that it's so interesting that the fear of that, what is about 3% of the electorate has now sort of taken over the whole mainstream, and the Greens on the other end, for instance, not that there's a real polarity, but the Greens, for instance, with 10 or so percentage of vote have not exercised similar sway. So this little 3% has managed to sort of really infuse the whole body politic to an extraordinary degree.
Julianne Schultz:
Now, the time suit them, but it's a mystery to me in many ways how that has occurred. Now, I try to document in the book how it's occurred, but it's still [inaudible 00:45:45].
Chris Wallace:
Well, you do a good job and you link it to the dominance of the Murdoch media.
Julianne Schultz:
I do. I do. I do.
Chris Wallace:
So what's the mechanism by which that's working and what could one do about it?
Julianne Schultz:
No, many questions there. Thank you, Chris. Look, one of the things about Australia in its early formation was that at the time of Federation, it was the most literate and numerate society in the world that compulsory education had been introduced in all the colonies at various points in the back half of the 19th century. It was known as a Republic of newspapers. Every town had its own newspapers and often, they were associated with the Mayor and property developers because property is one of the guiding elements of the nation, but it was a very vibrant environment in which lots of ideas float around.
Julianne Schultz:
Now, what you started to see in the 20th century is of course, that consolidation of the media and Rupert's father, Sir Keith was one of the very early players in that field of leading to much greater media concentration. He was at the Herald and Weekly Times where they bought and sold newspapers. They consolidated titles, they made ones with one name into two names. They were very closely associated with the Collins House Group of mining companies, where they sponsored newspapers that were advocates against the unions and against collective action. So there was a long history of those newspapers playing a very overtly political role.
Julianne Schultz:
What we've seen in the last couple of decades has just been an amping up of that process, and it's sort of the last man standing, and that's the Murdochs. The Murdochs own 70 odd percent of the newspapers in the country, which are of course, a shadow of their former selves in many cases. But that occupies a big space in terms of the architecture of silence. It absorbs a lot of air time, the pushes out the stuff out. And-
Chris Wallace:
Yet the phenomenon is largely undiscussed.
Julianne Schultz:
Undiscussed, yeah. It's been interesting to watch the campaign that Kevin Rudd and others have been running about a Royal Commission. Now, politically, it's an impossibility. Politically, you're not going to see a newly elected Labor government in a land where 75% of the newspapers are owned by one company having a major Royal Commission into the powers of that enterprise, but what that enterprise has done, and it's a lesson that's been learned over many, many, many decades in this country is that owning a newspaper is a key to power.
Julianne Schultz:
And it was the case from the earliest colonial days. It was there with Wentworth and The Australian. They owned a newspaper, they got an influence. It's always been the patent here. I used in the book, a couple of strong examples of Sir Robert Menzies saying sometime after he was no longer Prime Minister, "I never had the courage to really take them on." David McNichol, who was for a long time, the sort of the silver head genius of the Packer enterprise saying after he's retired, "Oh, my mission was to get people to vote against their own self-interest."
Julianne Schultz:
There was always a political sort of agenda, which the media owners were never backwards in coming forward in turn to use. That was the sort of central argument of my book on the Fourth Estate, that the commercial power had distorted that capacity for independent journalism because they became sort of stage armies.
Chris Wallace:
And delivered a massive now century long megaphone for a slapdash nasty autocracy to flourishing and-
Julianne Schultz:
That was a Queensland thing about autocracy. I don't think we nationally at the autocracy line.
Chris Wallace:
No, I'm generalizing it because I used to wonder what it would be like to be a journalist in the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s, reporting day in, day out millimetric changes that then gathered pace and to the hijacking of democracy and a disastrous, disastrous World War. And what I'm seeing, and your book contextualizes this so well, the persistent forces in Australia that keep coming back to override other strong scenes of goodness that drive for inclusion and fairness, it so prominently breaks out every now and then to our immense credits to society and to the benefit of many people, it keeps getting eroded by nefarious forces.
Chris Wallace:
And I think isn't it true that we've exported this to the world now? Could you have had Donald Trump without Australian Rupert Murdoch's Fox News? I would argue not. And you look at the commentary in the US now as we're nearly halfway through to the next presidential election and the January 6th Capitol Hill rioters is that there's barely been anything approaching justice in terms of getting the high level perpetrators, as opposed to the low level grants. This is catastrophic.
Julianne Schultz:
Yeah. That's true. Look, I agree with much of what you're saying. One of the things that I try to do in the book is to try and put Rupert Murdoch, the growing up of Rupert Murdoch, as it were into some sort of context that explains his evolution now. And it is sort of interesting. There are people of a certain generation who probably now quite in their dotage, but who remember a young Rupert Murdoch as part of the sort of swashbuckling sort of nationalistic sort of enterprise. The creation of The Australian here in Canberra, it was an exciting adventure.
Julianne Schultz:
The willingness to actually challenge the old, what was a very closed, inward looking society in the sort of '50s and '60s, to really challenge that was something that he took very seriously. He was as much a product of anyone else who's born in the early 1930s of the sort of decolonization and independence movements that swept the world after the war. So he hated England. He really despised that old stuffiness. He felt he was disrespected by the Melbourne establishment and felt he-
Chris Wallace:
And then he was disrespected by the Oxford establishment.
Julianne Schultz:
As he was disrespected by the Oxford... and he felt that was a score that he needed to settle. Now, that chimed quite nicely with the group of people and it was a widespread movement who were really trying to assert a different sort of Australian independence in those sort of post-war years. What he realized was that actually, if he wasn't the smartest person in the room, he was probably the smartest person at marshaling an argument to get what he was after.
Julianne Schultz:
And as he realized that in that challenge, he could make a fortune and have an influence beyond his wildest imaginings as a young man. I think that just became the end in itself. And sure, his politics move as that would necessarily take it, but it's very much a product of this sort of environment. And as you say, the global influence of that is extraordinary. And I'm not a psychotherapist, but it just seems that you find the germs of that in the origin story of the man and his father.
Julianne Schultz:
And if you know that, it sort of makes sense of some of the sorts of writing and the sorts of behavior which is very much encouraged in those newspapers. The columnists who write for those papers have a platform, an unrivaled platform, because there's so little else. They have a capacity to make an argument and a point of view that they want to express, but many of them, they write with an almost palpable sense of there being a chip on their shoulder.
Chris Wallace:
Grievance.
Julianne Schultz:
Grievance. Scratchy, there's a scratchiness about them, and a muscular scratchy. I know I'm mixing my metaphors, but it's not just that they're a bit uncomfortable. They're quite prepared to have a biff about it. And so it always struck me that, that was such a characteristic of so many of those people that I knew. And I was sort of intrigued when I went back and reread a lot of those Murdoch biographies to realize that, that was an essential part of his demeanor as well. And so, people like that recognize others and take them with them.
Chris Wallace:
So are we to be endlessly hostage in history to young bullied men with chips on their shoulder who become power... Thinking young Rupert, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, it's a particular psychology. Do we have to go through this again and again, and again?
Julianne Schultz:
It's so interesting, isn't it? One of the things that I'm really intrigued by, and it's sort of became sharper as I was doing the research and reading and thinking for the book, this has always been represented as a very male society, and partly that's a reflection of numbers, but it became very clear that there's an inquiry and terribly persuasive story about female agency and a sort of different point of view.
Julianne Schultz:
Now, it's not been the winner in the historical framing of the place, but the women who've been advocate-
Chris Wallace:
Yet.
Julianne Schultz:
Yet.
Chris Wallace:
But the women who've been advocates and the men who have been advocates of that sort of point of view as well, but the women who have been advocates, were there making serious cases, right from the beginning of the penal settlement and then certainly into the colonial life, and then the beginning of the Federation process, the pre-Federation process. And I think it's so interesting that in this political moment that we're in now, that the overwhelming majority of the independence who are standing are all women. They're women who are not aligned with the traditional parties, and they're advocating a different sort of politics, which is very much more locally based, accountable, responsible, in close communication with their electors, which was there in the arguments that Rose Scott and others were making in the pre-Federation debates.
Chris Wallace:
They got sidelined by the whiskery blokes, but they were there making the case, and it wasn't just about women having the vote. It was about a different sort of politics and Rose Scott was a Sydney based feminist. She used say that she had no faith in these genius men who would sort of aggregate all power to themselves in a far away place, and just become detached.
Chris Wallace:
So it's so interesting that a 100 odd years on, we're seeing many of those same arguments being made again by women in a very active political engagement.
Chris Wallace:
Very, very interesting point. I've myself made a close study over the last 18 months, two years of many of the independent campaigns going on around the country to try and work out why what they're doing is working on the ground? And it struck me as I've been observing this, that it's this old-fashioned thing that used to be so familiar to so many of us called community organizing, very basic logical political craft that the major parties used to practice back in the day themselves. But as they've become more and more oligopolistic in their operations and very top-down in their manner.
Julianne Schultz:
And very professionalized [inaudible 00:57:40] that it's all about the numbers. It's all very professionalized, yeah.
Chris Wallace:
But you make a killer point about these independent campaigns and their female candidates. Uluru, tell us about it?
Julianne Schultz:
Yeah. Look, can I just add something to your comment there and then I'll bring in the Uluru thing? One of the things, I think you're right about that old-fashioned campaigning. And it seems to me that there are a couple of factors which are really sort of worth playing into that. One is that the COVID times have forced people to go back into the local, because physically you couldn't go more than five kilometers in many places for much of the last two years, places you used to drive past, you walk past, people who never talked to you had time to chat to you.
Julianne Schultz:
Now, I know there's an enormous amount of hardship and difficulty associated with that period, but it did force people to focus on the local in a way that they hadn't previously done.
Chris Wallace:
Can I give you a tiny, tiny little fantastic example of this? The female independent running in Flinders called Despi O'Connor, she's a local school teacher and during the first protracted Melbourne lockdown, with no political experience at all, from a standing start created an entirely online political campaign to get elected to the local Mornington Peninsula Council because she was so disgusted at the decisions being made. She got elected and became Mayor. Yeah. So get busy people.
Julianne Schultz:
And she's now standing [inaudible 00:59:03]. Yeah. Yeah. And she's so interesting. I was on a panel with her the other night. She's a very interesting woman. So that local staff I think is really powerful and it's something that the major parties have given up on because the sort of that old process of centralizing into Canberra and it's all about the big deals and the numbers that are incomprehensible and so on, that bleeds out the local.
Julianne Schultz:
The other part of it is that the environmental moment that we're in, in terms of fires and floods and climate change, and all the rest of it, that affects where you live. And so people are forced to engage with that in a way that they didn't necessarily used to have to, unless they were farmers or something. So that's two elements. The third is, and this touches on the Uluru thing, one of the things that... the most important thing of Uluru is constitutional recognition and the voice. That's the bedrock. Sitting above or below with whatever you go with bedrock, that is this notion of truth-telling. Now, truth-telling is necessarily a local activity. You can't tell a generic, big story... Well, you can tell a generic, big story, but the truths are the local truths and the truths are the stories of local people in place.
Julianne Schultz:
So that plays into that local stuff as well. So when people are forced to engage at that very local level, and then they say... and I've seen this in my area. People say, "What's the story here? What happened here? There must be something about this," blah, blah, blah. And in some cases, the stories can be answered. In some cases they can't, but the sort of native title process for all its flaws has made a lot of that material much more accessible. People are looking for it. So you see in Victoria and in Queensland already, very active steps towards the truth-telling part of leading towards the treaty.
Julianne Schultz:
My sense is that as that happens, as has happened in a whole lot of other areas where revealing the stories of First Nations Australia occurs in the public domain, it will lead to more of that storytelling of subsequent arrivals as well. So there's lots of stories that get layered on top of it. So one of the things that's interesting to me about the independence, and I raised it in this meeting the other day, this Zoom thing the other day with a bunch of the independence, including the woman standing in Kooyong and the woman standing in Bradfield, as well as the woman standing in Flinders, was that when you look at the agendas, it's climate change, anti-corruption, accountability-
Chris Wallace:
Gender equity.
Julianne Schultz:
Gender equity, they're the three big issues. And while a number of them have Uluru somewhere tucked down on their list of priorities, it seems to me that when you talk about the foundational floor at the heart of the nation, the thing which has not been resolved in our 121 years, or whatever it is, of nationhood has not been resolved since Jeremy Bentham said in 1803 that it was a failure to have a treaty with the people who were here when the British arrived promised to be an incurable flaw.
Julianne Schultz:
Seems to me that not having the Uluru issue central in that campaign of the independence is a bit of falling into the old ways, because my sense is that until we, as a nation resolve that, it's going to be very difficult to get beyond the nuts and bolts or the, "Oh, we need a corruption thing here. We need that there." Important initiatives, no doubt, but there is a sort of... it's like this wound that needs to be addressed.
Julianne Schultz:
And it was interesting to me that while in that conversation I had with the independence, they all agreed, but they were worried that there was no political mileage in it.
Chris Wallace:
They were already thinking like politicians.
Julianne Schultz:
They were already thinking like politicians.
Chris Wallace:
Oh dear. Briefly but importantly, you've mentioned in conversation that people are deeply reluctant. You can almost sense a kind of tension and can we just move on quickly from the necessary indigenous part of this conversation that is so crucial to your argument in this book. You're sensing this again and again, as you're touring the book. How do we get people past that? How do we persuade people broadly that this is something we've got to sit with and work on, not tensely acknowledge and try and quickly move past? Have you worked out a technique since you've been subjected to this so often?
Julianne Schultz:
Yeah. Look, all I do is I just keep saying it, which it's probably not very... that's dumb, but anyway. Look, I think people feel uncomfortable about it because there is a deeply embedded sense of shame. We have observed the trauma and we've witnessed the retelling of trauma that First Nations people have been subjected to and have endured, and we see it still in media coverage all the time. And we sort of want that trauma story to keep on being told.
Julianne Schultz:
Well, it's not sufficient to keep telling it. You've actually got to tell it and move on. Some sort of a much more important process of [inaudible 01:04:36].
Chris Wallace:
You've got to acknowledge it and accept the reality of it.
Julianne Schultz:
That's right, but it's a deep listening. It's a deep, respectful listening that needs to address that. And it's sort of like trauma and shame at the flip side of each other. And until we can do that respectfully, it's very difficult to actually address this sort of feeling that, "Actually, we didn't do the right thing or the right thing wasn't done and we haven't repaired it."
Julianne Schultz:
I do think it's really intriguing and important that my growing up in rural Australia, and I'm sure many of you had similar sorts of experiences, the contact that people had, the contact that in a town you had with people who were living in shanty camps in the most deplorable circumstances, I can remember as a child in country New South Wales feeling profoundly discomforted by that.
Julianne Schultz:
Now, moving beyond a sense of discomfort to something else takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of respect. It takes a lot of listening. It takes a lot of talking, and it takes a willingness to acknowledge your own small bit. Now, that's an ongoing thing and it means that people... it's why I do it because I have a lot of First Nations friends and colleagues, and the burden of constantly having to re-prosecute this stuff is just brutal. It is so brutal to see the relentless demands.
Julianne Schultz:
I think on this side of the ledger, in a sense, we have to stand up and say, "We've got to own this as well. They've got to take the lead, we've got to own it," and that's hard.
Chris Wallace:
As you say in the book, to end on hope quoting you, "The aspirational ethos to belong could be revived, stripped of its foundational flaws, a fully formed nation grounded in a civic, not ethnic way of belonging, without fear is still possible." You give us hope in this. It's not a, "My God. We've just got to bulldoze Australia into the Arctic Ocean," but the knowledge embodied in here is so crucial to be shared widely, discussed, embraced, and most importantly, acted upon.
Chris Wallace:
How do we finally get people to act, to seek out, embrace and act on the necessary knowledge to make us unstuck, to get us out of the toxic pit we seem to have been-
Julianne Schultz:
Well, I just-
Chris Wallace:
Got accidentally parked in?
Julianne Schultz:
I guess, look, I'm just hoping that one of the things is that a lot of people don't know a lot of stuff, and so what I've tried to do is to tell stories that make things accessible and interesting, and doesn't make the history boring. I've tried to personalize it in a way that tells some of my stories so that it feels like it's a bit intimate, and I've tried to tie it into this moment in time.
Julianne Schultz:
And so it's not a history book, it's not a memoir and it's not a contemporary manifesto, but it's a bit of all of them. And by braiding them together and I hope providing some accessible points where people can have conversations, that it starts the conversation and starts the dynamic. Well, it's already there. It just gives it a bit more form.
Julianne Schultz:
One of the things in my observation of the sort of ups and downs and long waves of change in Australian society, which is much the same in many other places, is that the people are ahead of the politicians. The resistance to change comes from the top much more than it comes from on the ground. People have accommodated in their personal lives, the most profound changes in my lifetime. And you saw that in the same sex marriage referendum, it was overwhelmingly supported.
Julianne Schultz:
People were wanting... older people wanted their children to be able to marry whoever they wanted. That was not an issue, but this process of trying to hold the status quo to prevent change, I could never really understand it. And I realized that was the end in itself. Preventing the change held the status quo. So the challenge is always there to get more air into it, so things can move along.
Chris Wallace:
Well, it's a mighty achievement. I congratulate you, Julianne.
Julianne Schultz:
Thank you, Chris.
Chris Wallace:
You are a warrior for a much better Australia. I thoroughly commend the book, and let's all thank Julianne for writing the book and speaking so well tonight. Thank you.
Julianne Schultz:
Thank you.
Luke Hickey:
Thank you so much, Julianne and Chris for tonight, moving us from curdles, disappointment, to aspirational ethos, I think was terrific to be able to hear that. Thank you everyone for coming tonight. That brings our official proceedings to an end. Julianne, you still have time upstairs to sign book?
Julianne Schultz:
I'd love to, yeah.
Luke Hickey:
So Julianne will be able to sign books up in the foyer for us, and the bookshop is open, not only for copies of The Idea of Australia, if you haven't already gotten them, but also Dr. Wallace's book, How To Win An Election, which might come in handy in this election year as well, both available tonight at a special 20% discount as well.
Luke Hickey:
Thank you everyone for coming. We hope to see you again at the Library soon.
In discussion facilitated by Dr Christine Wallace, Julianne Schultz talks about her most recent book The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation, which challenges our notions of what it means to be Australian and asks timely and urgent questions about our national identity.
