It is easy to forget how young Australia is. Many look to 1788 as the source of national identity, but Federation is actually a closer approximation of birth. Given that the creation of the Commonwealth was driven in part by a movement that sought to formally distinguish what is Australian from what is British, 1 January more accurately captures the beginnings of nationhood than 26 January.
If we thus take 1901 as our birthyear, then our country turned 111 on New Year's Day. A mere drop in the ocean, in a world where China, Egypt, India, Iran and Mexico have histories that stretch back uninterrupted into antiquity. Our own Indigenous history is at least 500 times older.
Even the US, the closest comparable country in terms of genesis, is far ahead in maturity. By the time the First Fleet pulled into Sydney Cove, 12 years had passed since the American Declaration of Independence. When our first Federal Parliament was inaugurated, the US Constitution had been in place for over 100 years. We have been singing our current national anthem only since 1984.
This youthfulness contributes to the ongoing tensions around what being Australian means, or indeed who we ought to be. Like many adolescents, Australia is going through a protracted identity crisis.
It is caught between its immature past and burgeoning potential, longing for prominence yet lacking confidence, struggling to make sense of the varied aspects of its identity. It obsesses over its flaws while denying them in public, swinging between pride and resentment.
These are normal hallmarks of adolescence, but Australia must also contend with a troubled background and few guiding lights. Not only is its early history marked by violence, the institutions from which it draws its sense of self are shallow and murky.
Its national day is inextricably linked to the dark consequences of those first boat arrivals, and will continue to be for as long as injustice characterises Indigenous lives.
Its founding document (the birth certificate, as it were) codified discrimination, and still does. The constitution which had empowered our founding fathers to restrict immigration against 'Asiatics' or 'coloureds' and exclude Aborigines from the census, still contains a provision that grants federal power to make 'special laws' based on race.
Its other foundation story, the Eureka Rebellion, glosses over the fact that Chinese miners were subject to discriminatory taxes, segregation, forced evictions and migration limits. None of these policies met the same resistance as the mining licence policy that led to the stockade.
In other words, Australia does not have the narrative touchstones that would help it navigate its way through its adolescent identity crisis.
There is no soaring statement on the equality of all men and unalienable rights, no principled liberation of indentured labourers, no prescriptive constitutional preamble that links a 'more perfect union' to the ideals of justice, peace and liberty, no stirring speeches about shared brotherhood. No wars for its very soul.
Or perhaps the narrative touchstones that Australia does have are inexplicably obscured.
For instance, the Fraser Government's decision in the late 1970s to accept nearly 60,000 Vietnamese refugees (including 2059 undocumented 'boat people') ought to be part of our national storytelling, not merely a political footnote.
So should the 1992 Mabo decision be elevated from a legal landmark to a shared liberation. Given its correction of a doctrine that led to the annihilation and displacement of Indigenous peoples, Australians ought to be as familiar with it as Americans are with Abraham Lincoln's legacy.
Paul Keating's speech at Redfern that same year is also a narrative touchstone, as frank and prescriptive as Martin Luther King Jr's at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Both drew on human capacities for dreaming and imagining as bases for the work of justice: King in expressing his hope for freedom, Keating in inviting people to put themselves in the shoes of the oppressed.
As a very young nation, Australia has so few such touchstones, that it flails in the dark when it buries them. Such stories, especially the ones that provide a glimpse of its better self, should not lay hidden. They should be laid as the foundation for more.
It is how nations mature, as Australia eventually must.
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Fatima Measham is a Melbourne-based writer, and tweeter.