Foreword to Reimagining Australia, Part 1

Futures, 2007

During the recent years, Australia has once again opted for a conception of the world that centres on its European and especially American connections. The harsh treatment of asylum seekers, 'border protection', threatened pre-emptive action against terrorists in the region and intervention in Iraq have been proposed by the government-and to a considerable extent accepted by the electorate-as an investment in safety. For the best part of a decade, Australia's profound ambivalence towards Asia has resurfaced with a vengeance. This essay examines the psychological and political underpinnings of this 'leap into the past', and makes the case for a more promising policy direction for the future. It brings to both policy analysis and prescription an approach that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and the imaginary dividing line between the domestic and the international.

A series of short vignettes drawn from personal experience will illuminate and explore the culturally and socially defined 'baggage' that often encumbers non-Indigenous relationships to this country and with its First Peoples. This 'baggage' involves questions of identity and belonging, assumptions and stereotypes, intolerance, complacency and representation. Applying critical reflection to her own life and to two strands of her work -as a social justice advocate and educator in the field of Indigenous public health -this article offers the author's initial understandings as to how structured reflective processes involving story telling might contribute to progressing Australia's nascent national dialogue and related reform of the Australian Constitution.

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2021

Australia was settled as a colony of Britain from the 17th century, and its early history of violent occupation has gradually given way to a relatively peaceful, wealthy, multicultural society. As a post-colonial country, its people share characteristics with those of Britain, but, as a multicultural society, national identity is increasingly influenced by the cultures of many countries, from both the global North and South. In this paper, the question of Australia's placement as a country of the global North or South is explored. Considerations of geography, the economy, political regimes and national identity are the backdrop to an investigation of Australian scholarship and the attitudes of scholars to the inclusion of Australia as a country of the global South.

The old adage, ‘silence speaks louder than words’ does not mean that silence is simply a passive absence. As renowned playwright Harold Pinter demonstrated, silence has a power to communicate and dominate. This article explores the endurance of the Great Australian Silence over the history of our colonial past, and the continuing colonization of Indigenous people. Despite the introduction of Indigenous Studies and Indigenous History into school and university programs, and despite the heart-felt statements that Australians need to understand their own history, that understanding remains partial. The desire to engage with this history appears problematic. This article argues that the failure of a more embracing history to penetrate, more than partially, into the education system and popular understanding is a product of a particular national imagination embodied in projections of the Australian landscape and the Australian individual. The case is put that a particular way of framing the embodiment of national identity and the land has created an imagining of ‘Australianness’ that impacts on our capacity to hear and accept the history of Indigenous colonization. It argues this embodiment, when accepted uncritically, perpetuates not simply a silence but an un-history, a not-telling, a non-acceptance of colonial history post-1788.

What does it mean, to be Australian? Tracing his complex family history, the author interrogates the conventional narratives of identity in 'multicultural' Australia and asks who he has displaced, as a white male, to claim belonging. He ought to feel he belongs but his loyalty to a distant 'Royal Family' is weak and his 'deviant' sexual identity places him beyond the bounds of family, religion and even the law. He feels like a stranger in a strange land. And he has no aboriginal ancestry to reconcile him with country. What does a society lose by sacrificing diversity through the coercive normative processes of homogenisation? The hostility towards people who don't fit the Anglo-Celtic profile was enshrined for years in the scandalous White Australia Policy and exploited long after the official demise of that xenophobic policy by Pauline Hanson's 'One Nation' push (which has recently re-emerged).

Coolabah, 2018

Copyright©2018 Greg Watson. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our Creative Commons Licence. Abstract: Living with difference is an unavoidable part of living in Australia. How we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine Australia. This paper considers the matter of reimagining Australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. It is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of Australia at the microlevel of society. It considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within Anthony Kwame Appiah's vision of cosmopolitanism and Jean-Luc Nancy's vision of coexistence.

Medical Journal of Australia, 2008

Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 2023

Within Australian society, the term ‘Country’ is used to acknowledge prior and ongoing Indigenous Australian connections to specific lands, waters, and skies, challenging any supposed neutrality of public, cultural, or institutional spaces. However, non-Indigenous use of the term ‘Country’ might also slide into unreflective abstraction when disconnected from the nourishing interactions of particular people and places that the term in its fullness can embody. In this paper, we seek to dispel conjectural mists that can surround the notion of ‘Country’ in popular societal use by attending to various relational dynamics which configure and substantiate its meaning. Engaging with Warlpiri (Aboriginal Australian) epistemology and the pedagogic strategies of Warlpiri scholar and co-author, Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu, we propose the seemingly odd question, who is country? as a hermeneutic strategy—an approach which embraces a grounded ontology that ‘lowercases’ meaning as essentially relational and figured within shared identities. We indicate similar tonalities in the contextual hermeneutics of prominent Indigenous Australian theologians, who challenge latent abstractions of theism lurking within pronouncements of meaning as disembodied from real contexts of people and place.