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