Aussies enjoy a highly positive reputation overseas. We're known for being friendly, easygoing and rugged — all qualities required to confront the daily incursion of wild animals, poisonous spiders, and stealthy drop-bears.
We're known for a uniquely beautiful and diverse natural environment, a rich Indigenous past, and the successful achievement of multiculturalism. We're harmonious, prosperous, and peaceful, in possession of a land and a society that is the envy of the world.
Like all authorised generalisations (postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls them 'sanctioned ignorances'), this luminous vision of Australia contains plenty of truth, plenty of exaggerations, and plenty of outright lies.
And, like all authorised generalisations, it is an example of a successful story. As well as being a globally known story, it's also the story Australia most likes to tell itself; it sings through ideas like the lucky country, the land of the fair go, the land of the long weekend; and is used to defend imperatives like 'Fuck off we're full' and 'We grew here you flew here'.
Despite rattling the country's white supremacists, this story is at work in 2017's Australia Day lamb ad, which presumes an Australian togetherness that ignores its brutally racist conditions of possibility.
Social research on Australia tells a more complex and less easily unified story. Australia, as Professor Andrew Jacubowicz has identified, is an ethnocracy — a state that is formed in the image and for the benefit of a dominant ethnic group.
The nation was established in 1901 'to ensure nationals of British descent would be able to create a society populated by individuals as much like themselves as possible' and today has 'Federal cabinet and the ruling parties' leadership' made up 'almost totally of long-standing Australian or Western European background'.
This Australian version of ethnocracy works as 'one cloaked in the rhetoric of multiculturalism'. That is, Australia's rulers use a commitment to racial and cultural pluralism to justify this ethnocracy (i.e. all the power is held by white people, but we tolerate other races too).
"As those repressed on either side of the white settlement story, the words of Indigenous people and asylum seekers from many countries of the world must be heard and accounted for."
Jacubowicz's assertion helps to understand two narratives that regularly appear in storytelling about Australia: the narrative of Australia as belligerently isolationist and bullishly proud of a singular 'way of life', and that of Australia as a welcoming place of successful integration of races and cultures.
Take for example two pieces of research released in the same week in November last year. An Essential poll found that many Australians 'think racial equality has gone "too far"' and are worried about overseas influences such as investment from businesses in China and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs; while a Scanlon Foundation showed that 'Australians are less worried about immigration now than they have been at any point in almost a decade'.
These narratives of wounded and defensive nationhood on the one hand and a peacefully composite society on the other are a recurring feature of Australian public conversation about itself (think about some of the previous ads for lamb).
Perhaps this is why the support for migration and multiculturalism evident in respondents to the Scanlon Foundation survey did not extend to people who arrive by boat. Migration is okay, but it has to be entirely on our terms, and we will defend the latter position with the former. In an ethnocracy, membership of the nation can only occur on the terms of those in charge. With the rhetoric of 'queue jumpers' and 'illegals', people who arrive by boat have been deemed 'uninvited'.
So where can we find stories about Australia that break this ethnocratic cycle and help us know the nation in more truthful terms? As those repressed on either side of the white settlement story, the words of Indigenous people and asylum seekers from many countries of the world must be heard and accounted for. Of this years lamb ad, Luke Pearson writes that 'I would give it a bonus point for accuracy if the meat the English gave to the Aboriginal people was poisoned with smallpox or strychnine', and observes the colossal effort it currently takes 'to make Australian history, or contemporary Australian society, appear much more inclusive than it actually is'.
Carol Roe asks that Australians hear the story of her granddaughter Ms Dhu, the young Aboriginal woman who was jailed for unpaid fines and died in custody after cruel and negligent treatment by police. From the globally condemned Australian-run prison on Manus Island, Rohingya man Imran Mohammad tells us that 'While the torture in my country is transparent, in Australia it is not obvious.'
I've been away from Australia nearly a year now, living mostly in Mexico City. Nearly everybody who asks me where I am from knows the settled story of Australia: rich, friendly, and peaceful (and bursting with kangaroos). They're shocked when I pass on Pearson, Roe and Mohammad's words. How could this be, people ask me, when Australia is so wealthy, so beautiful? Maybe this is a question that can deliver us more truthful stories.
Ann Deslandes is a freelance writer and researcher from Sydney. Read her other writing at xterrafirma.net and tweet her @Ann_dLandes.