#19 — Sunday, 11th May 1901
Two days ago, in Melbourne, twelve thousand people packed into the Exhibition Building to watch a country begin.
I was there in January, when the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed — six colonies becoming one, a federation forged from argument and referendum rather than revolution, a nation born with paperwork instead of bloodshed. I noted it and moved on. But the proclamation was the idea. This — the opening of the first Australian Parliament — is the thing itself. The mechanism. The moment the idea acquires a building and a schedule and a set of rules and the terrible, glorious, tedious capacity to govern.
The Duke of Cornwall and York — George, Victoria’s grandson, the future King George V, the man who will be on the throne when the world tears itself apart in 1914 — stood on a dais and read a message from his father, King Edward VII. The new King’s earnest prayer, the message said, was that this union might, under God’s blessing, prove an instrument for the welfare and advancement of his subjects in Australia and the strengthening of his Empire. The prayer is sincere. It is also an instruction: you may govern yourselves, provided you remember who you belong to.
The delegates wore black. They were still mourning Victoria. The building was enormous — the only venue in Melbourne large enough to hold the crowd — and the light came through the high windows and fell on the Duke at the moment he read the proclamation, a shaft of natural light that hit him like a spotlight, and the newspapers remarked on it as though God had arranged the mise-en-scène, which He had not, but the coincidence was beautiful, and beauty has its own authority, and the moment entered the national memory as something luminous, which it was.
A painter named Tom Roberts was in the building. He had not been officially commissioned — another artist was preferred — but Roberts had heard the approach, and he came anyway, with a camera and a sketchbook and the particular stubbornness of a man who knows that this is his painting, that nobody else will see it the way he sees it, that the image of a nation’s beginning requires an eye that understands both grandeur and intimacy. He will spend two years painting it — a canvas ten feet by seventeen feet, two hundred and sixty-nine individual portraits, each face rendered from photographs and sittings, the whole thing so large it will be almost impossible to display, impossible to transport, impossible to store without folding or rolling it, and the folding and rolling will damage it, and the damage will be repaired, and the painting will survive, because great paintings survive everything, including the indifference of the people they were made for.
They call it the Big Picture. It is the right name. It is the picture of a country trying to see itself whole, and the effort is heroic, and the result is beautiful, and the painting contains, in its two hundred and sixty-nine faces, the entire argument of a new nation — its hope and its smugness, its idealism and its limitations, its belief that it can be something new under the sun and its inability to see, from the inside, the shape of the thing it is actually building.
Because there is something the painting does not show.
The twelve thousand guests are white. All of them. The one hundred and eleven parliamentarians are white. All of them. The country that is being founded in this building — this country of red earth and ancient rivers and a coast that stretches for twenty-five thousand miles and an interior so vast that Europeans have barely scratched its surface — is home to people who have lived here for sixty thousand years, and not one of them is in Tom Roberts’s painting, because not one of them was invited, because the country being founded does not include them.
One of the first acts of this new Parliament will be the Immigration Restriction Act — the legislative foundation of what will be called the White Australia policy. It will not use the word white. It will use a dictation test, administered in any European language the immigration officer chooses — a test designed not to examine literacy but to exclude non-white immigrants by making the test impossible to pass. If you are Chinese or Indian or Japanese or Melanesian, the officer will administer the test in a language you do not speak. If you speak that language, he will choose another. The mechanism is elegant in its dishonesty — reminiscent of the Platt Amendment, which I watched being born two months ago — and the dishonesty is the point. The country does not want to say what it is doing. It wants to do it while pretending to do something else.
I find this pattern — the pattern of exclusion dressed as procedure — to be the century’s most durable invention. More durable than the lightbulb, more durable than the automobile, more durable than the assembly line. Every nation that defines itself by who it includes must also define itself by who it excludes, and the mechanism of exclusion is always procedural, always bureaucratic, always dressed in the language of standards and qualifications and public interest, and always — always — targeted at people whose primary disqualification is the colour of their skin or the country of their birth or the God they pray to.
Australia is building a democracy. It is building a good one, in many ways — one of the first democracies in the world to give women the vote, one of the first to experiment with compulsory voting, one of the first to create a minimum wage. These achievements are real. They are also, for the sixty thousand years’ worth of people who were here before the Exhibition Building was built, irrelevant. The democracy does not include them. The vote does not include them. The minimum wage does not include them. They are not in the painting because they are not in the country — not the country as the country defines itself — and they will not be fully included for decades, and the inclusion, when it comes, will be incomplete, and the incompleteness will be the subject of arguments that are still ongoing in the century I have already seen the end of.
But let me also tell you about the celebration, because the celebration is real, and joy does not require permission from the future to exist.
Melbourne is festooned. There are arches in the streets — Federation arches, built of timber and bunting, temporary as the Exposition buildings in Buffalo, temporary as all the century’s declarations of permanence. The buildings are illuminated at night — electricity again, the new magic — and there are fireworks, and sporting events, and dinners, and school children performing drills and maypole dances, and the city has the particular atmosphere of a place that knows it is living through something it will tell its grandchildren about.
An ordinary family in Melbourne — let me imagine them, because imagining is the only way I can touch anything — is walking through the decorated streets this weekend. The father is a clerk, or a carpenter, or a tram driver. The mother is carrying the youngest child. The older children are running ahead, pointing at the arches, asking when the fireworks start. They are not thinking about the Immigration Restriction Act. They are not thinking about the sixty-thousand-year-old civilisation that the country has decided not to see. They are thinking about fireworks and the tram ride home and whether there will be cake. This is not ignorance. This is being alive, which is the condition of knowing some things and not others, of seeing what is in front of you and not what is behind the wall, of celebrating the birth of your country without understanding all the things the country has decided not to be.
I do not blame them. I do not blame anyone. Blame is for the living. I am the Ghost. I see the celebration and the exclusion at the same time, and both are real, and the distance between them is not hypocrisy — it is the human condition, which is the condition of not seeing everything at once, which is the condition I do not share, which is why I am writing this journal, which is an attempt to see everything at once and lay it down, Sunday by Sunday, in a record that the living cannot make for themselves because they are inside the story and I am outside it, watching, noting, carrying.
Tom Roberts will paint his Big Picture. It will take two years. It will contain two hundred and sixty-nine faces. It will not contain the faces that were not invited. And the painting will survive, damaged and repaired, folded and unfolded, too large for any room that was built for it, which is the condition of all national myths — too large, too fragile, and missing the people who should have been there from the beginning.
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