Good readers and good citizens: Literature, media and the nation

• Main Author: Carter, David
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 1999
• Subjects: Literature; African; Australian; Canadian; First Nations
• Online Access: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:35982

IN recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary record, nationalism often appears to have been little other than racism and sexism. Race was the very basis of the national settlement in early twentieth-century Australia; how profoundly, I think, is something we still have to learn. How far are we from thinking in terms of First Nations as a way of acknowledging Indigenous Australia? Our easy familiarity with and moral superiority to' pre- I967 Australia and the White Australia Policy means that there are many degrees of Australian racism that remain hidden from commonplace historical knowledge·:' Australians still tend to think of South Africa as belonging to-another time and place altogether, another moral universe and historical trajectory. This was not a mistake that colonial Australians made. The parallels will become less and less resistible.