Aboriginie

Island tribe australia
Torres strait island groups
Where is australia located

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The National Confessional

Lallah Rookh, or Truganini, photography by C.A. Wolley, 1886, National Library of Australia

What comes to mind when you look at Trukanini’s face? Do you feel challenged? A sense of sadness and regret? Or are you so empathy-fatigued you make an inward groan? Not again! We know that sad story. We have said sorry. The History Wars have been waged.

Trukanini’s face launches an internal conversation. This conversation has a history, one that unpacks like a matryoshka doll. Trukanini has long been the symbol of a terrible but straightforward story of extinction, what is often popularly concluded to be one of the most clear-cut cases of genocide. This is how Tasmania appears from the outside: the Holocaust of the British Empire, international shorthand for all colonial guilt. But beneath this layer is a nation looking to itself, or rather looking down to its island state, in an effort to understand its history. To white Australians, Tasmania has been the yardstick of ‘our’ brutal past, the worst of what ‘we’ did. It may now seem a kind of convenient

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Introduction

1Around the world, Australia is perceived as a young and modern country, a rich enclave of the North —with a high standard of living— in the Southern Hemisphere, a nation endowed with a vibrant democracy and a relaxed way of life.

2All of this is accurate, to a large extent, but there is much more than simply meets the eye. A country cannot be reduced to the quality of its political institutions or to its economic power and, in the last resort, the best way to understand the soul of a nation and its people is through their geography, their history, and also their literature.

3Now, in the case of the island-continent, geography, history and literature suggest otherwise and disclose a country that does not feel so comfortable. Australia has an anxious, disquieted soul, and the best leading thread to understand her delicate collective psyche is through the notion of fear, a fear that has always been omnipresent, sometimes more, sometimes less, since the beginnings of British colonisation in 1788, that is over two centuries ago.

4This is so true that Alan Renouf,