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00:00For the best part of 20 years my career took me overseas.
00:22My nostalgic view of Australia was challenged by the place I returned to.
00:29I wonder, is it time that we all began to re-imagine what is the idea of Australia?
00:37When I close my eyes and think of Australia, I see my dad in his shorts mowing the grass.
00:42The surf lifesaver, the footballer, meat pies, Vegemite, big sky, big red dirt roads through
00:48the desert.
00:49This is like a country, there's no question about it, I mean if you're born in Australia
00:53you've won the lottery.
00:55What an extraordinary polyglot place it is.
00:58It is astonishing.
00:59But the idea of who we are as a nation is still a work in progress.
01:05It sparks debate and conflicting views.
01:08Fair go, egalitarianism, greatest multicultural country on earth, like that's a great package.
01:13It's just that it's not real.
01:15It's been served up to our people and it's a shit sandwich.
01:18Out of this multitude of stories, crystallises a story of Australia that is only ever going
01:25to be partially true.
01:27This is the story of the contest to create a nation.
01:32Fighting for the republic has been gruelling and heartbreaking.
01:35To make the changes that we need in the constitution is going to take people power.
01:42How rebellion and defiance courses through our history.
01:45It's not what we think is the foundation of our culture is these radical progressive women.
01:51Activism was coming from women just standing up and saying it's not fair.
01:54And I am the product of the extraordinary women who came before me.
01:58And the legacy of war.
02:00The idea that any wartime feat forges a nation leaves me distinctly uncomfortable.
02:06What does the making of our nation tell us about the idea of Australia?
02:11And if we were to recognise the dynamism of the past, could we build something even better
02:17for a rapidly changing world?
02:28When I lived in the States, I was always amazed that Americans from all walks of life could
02:46quote from both their constitution and its amendments.
02:50From we the people to the right to bear arms and of course free speech.
02:55Americans have so internalised that document that it's almost become part of the DNA of who they are.
03:04I was always embarrassed that I couldn't quote from our own.
03:07And I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
03:09There's no grand sweeping statements or even a Bill of Rights to quote every time we're told we can't do something.
03:16But our constitutions in fact have something in common.
03:20Just like the American version, ours was written with the capacity to be changed to suit the times.
03:27Now we know that's not easy and that's by design.
03:30But it can be done when the idea of who we are needs to grow.
03:35On January the 1st, 1901, Sydney, the site of the first permanent settlement on our continent, celebrated the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia.
03:49The swearing in of the first Federal Cabinet in this pavilion marked the birth of our nation.
03:54What do you know about this Sydney landmark?
04:03Very little to be honest. All I know is that it's a monument for something.
04:07It's for Federation.
04:09Right.
04:10Do you know when that happened?
04:12Again, no.
04:13Is it, um, 1771? Is that right? No.
04:18What do you know about Federation?
04:20Captain Cook invaded Australia with a bunch of convicts at Port Bockingham.
04:26I don't know much about that sort of stuff.
04:29We were just having a little butchers there and, yeah, it's nice but no idea, no.
04:34Do you know that we got a constitution then?
04:38I didn't know that but, again, that does make sense.
04:41Um, you need a constitution that governs all of the states.
04:45Can you quote anything from our constitution?
04:49Um, what, is it not freedom of speech? Is that not part of our constitution?
04:54Don't quote the American.
04:56I don't know.
05:02We probably know more about American history and their, their war of independence than we know about Federation
05:08and what it was we were trying to do when these separate state colonies chose to come together.
05:14It's not seen as a sort of revered moment of our history.
05:18Maybe Australians just don't give a shit enough to actually understand their constitution.
05:25They really don't care.
05:31We need to care about our constitution.
05:33We need to care about where Federation brought us.
05:36If we could choose not to care about it and have generations not understand why it is that our democratic institutions
05:42and principles are so strong and set us apart, that would be a catastrophe.
05:48Bridget?
05:49Cookie, where are you?
05:51Uh, don't know. What's up?
05:53Can you make an Australia Day barbie at my place? Bit of cricket?
05:56For a lot of white Australians, they think in terms of British settlement
06:00rather than the actual creation of the legal structure as the beginning of Australia.
06:04When Cook takes possession of the, of the eastern side of the territory, it's generally known as New Holland.
06:11It's linked to ancient ideas of Terrastralis, a great southern land.
06:15Well, Australia didn't exist. There was no such thing as Australia.
06:18We became a series of colonies administered by England that were almost like their own separate countries
06:24and in fact could have become their own separate countries.
06:27The idea of Federation started when Henry Parks, who was the Premier of New South Wales, accepted a dare from the English governor
06:34to see if he could unite the colonies into one nation.
06:38Parks thought it could be done within a year.
06:41In fact, it took 11.
06:43And by that stage, he was dead.
06:45You know, there was a lot of discussion that was happening during that 11 year period
06:50about what sort of society it was that they wanted to create.
06:55There were people arguing that women should be formally recognised in the Constitution.
07:00The New Zealanders, who at one point were going to be part of the Australasian Empire,
07:05were arguing that the First Peoples should be recognised.
07:08Now, to Section 6 of the Constitution.
07:11The States will be all these ones, this little one here, and New Zealand.
07:16They just need to accept our offer.
07:18Which, of course, they will.
07:20There were Irish groups and others who were arguing that it should be a republic.
07:24So to get Federation was quite a coup.
07:27The day the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated, 1st of January 1901,
07:33unlike today, it was hot and windy.
07:36Imperial troops and horse-drawn floats paraded through the city
07:39and up here on Oxford Street.
07:41Thousands of flags waved in the breeze
07:44and 10 especially-commissioned triumphal archers adorned this route.
07:49Now, I have stood right here for Mardi Gras,
07:52and I know Sydney loves to party,
07:54so that first New Year's Day of the new nation must have been quite the spectacle.
08:03Now, on the evening of New Year's Day 1901,
08:17celebrations for the great and the good ended up at the Sydney Town Hall.
08:22There's our first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton,
08:25and our second, that lover of the Ouija board, Alfred Deakin,
08:30who claimed Federation was a miracle.
08:34Also in the House, Samuel Griffiths,
08:36no relative of mine but instrumental in writing our Constitution.
08:43Now, it had been a long day and the VIPs were getting tired of speeches.
08:47They were just looking for a drink.
08:48In fact, poor Samuel Griffiths toast to the Commonwealth was drowned out twice.
08:54Eventually, the speeches stopped, but the party did not.
08:58The toast for the Australian Commonwealth was not properly delivered,
09:13because all these men were three sheets to the wind.
09:17And the interesting thing here is, where were the women?
09:22Where were their wives?
09:27Meanwhile, the women, many of whom had been passionate campaigners for Federation,
09:32were relegated up here in the upstairs gallery.
09:35They had hoped to civilise Australian politics,
09:38but on this night, they were merely spectators of the revelry below.
09:44It's no surprise so many women thought temperance a good idea.
09:48Perhaps they thought this young nation needed to sober up
09:52before it had listened to them on fair wages, full suffrage,
09:55and protections against domestic violence.
09:58Despite this separation of the sexes,
10:01it was quite the opening night bash for a nation.
10:05Celebration of the nation!
10:07Give us a hand!
10:09Celebration of the nation!
10:11Let's make a drag!
10:13We were no longer just South Australians or Queenslanders,
10:17Victorians or Westralians, New South Welshmen or Tasmanians.
10:21We were Australians.
10:22Come on, give us a hand!
10:24A nation had been made,
10:29but the document establishing the new form of government had some gaps.
10:36Still does.
10:38What we don't see reflected in our constitution
10:41are rights for every Australian.
10:46If you look at our constitution,
10:47we borrowed cut and paste from the United States.
10:50So we borrowed the federal system from the United States,
10:52we adopted the Senate,
10:53took parliamentary responsibility and responsible government
10:55from the Westminster system, from the UK.
10:58But where we stopped was the cut and paste of the US Bill of Rights.
11:02We don't even have a statement that we're all equal.
11:05We are the only liberal democracy in the world
11:08that doesn't have a Bill of Rights.
11:13The concept at the time was parliaments as representative bodies
11:20would be the most appropriate body to balance rights.
11:24And on one level, that has strength to it,
11:27that you want your parliamentary body to be doing that.
11:30We have politicians telling us,
11:34don't worry, responsible government protects you
11:36and protects your rights.
11:38Why any Australian would believe politicians
11:40when they're selling to you a concept
11:42which means they're less accountable to us
11:44and to our rights,
11:45is astonishing to me.
11:47The fact that there is no reference to citizenship rights
11:50has meant that the government of the day
11:53has a lot of power in relation to the restriction of people's rights.
11:59We begin with the latest on the coronavirus outbreak.
12:02Australians overseas are this morning scrambling to come home
12:05as authorities prepare to shut the country's borders.
12:08Not to include a Bill of Rights,
12:10not to include equality provisions,
12:12has had a huge impact on our nation and what we are today.
12:16It enabled ongoing discrimination
12:19against First Nations people
12:20who were not even treated as humans.
12:29And that's continued throughout our history.
12:31We cannot help but wonder
12:34why have we taken the white Australians
12:38just on 200 years
12:40to recognise us as a race of people.
12:44Our history guides us
12:46in understanding how we got into these problems
12:49and if we're blind to the history
12:51it'll be harder to fix things.
12:55History has proved that taking a pen to the Constitution
12:59is no easy task.
13:02Just eight out of 45 referendums
13:04have been successfully passed.
13:08I actually think
13:09we need more referenda not less.
13:11But part of the problem we face
13:13is that there's a great unknown
13:16in the holding of a referendum
13:17a feeling that we're changing the Constitution
13:20this is massive
13:21and yet the Constitution is made to change
13:23it's made to be changed.
13:24It has the provision in it
13:26through the section on changing the Constitution.
13:29We must stop thinking of our Constitution
13:32and Federation as a frozen moment.
13:35It's a living document
13:36that requires a degree of creativity
13:38and an imagination
13:40about what kind of a nation we need to be
13:42in a modern context.
13:44But the systems of power
13:46that have evolved in practice
13:48have made that very difficult.
13:50When the voice referendum was proposed
13:52it was 25 years since the last one
13:54so we don't do them very often.
13:55The idea for a voice came from the people
13:59and it will be decided by the people.
14:02The voice yes campaign launched a hopeful fanfare
14:06but only one referendum has ever passed in Australia
14:09without bipartisan political support.
14:12The Coalition like all Australians
14:14wants to see Indigenous disadvantage addressed.
14:17We just disagree on the voice being the solution.
14:21We've got one of the great democracies
14:23no question about it
14:24in terms of one man won't vote
14:26one woman won't vote
14:27but the truth is you can't change the Constitution
14:29with a referendum
14:30if you get one side of politics that opposes it.
14:32It doesn't matter what it is.
14:33This voice is risky, divisive and permanent
14:37so if you don't know, vote no.
14:39Do we want to become an advisory body
14:42to the colonial system?
14:44If you don't know, vote no!
14:47The no campaign galvanised support
14:50amongst undecided voters
14:52and uncertain communities.
14:54Never even heard of it.
14:56So it's voice to parliament.
14:58I'm not sure at the moment
15:00but most probably no for now
15:03because I'm not sure what happened if I say yes.
15:07There were a lot of people from
15:09Meineke the Woods
15:10that actually voted no.
15:13As refugees
15:15or as people who've come here
15:17to call Australia home
15:19you just want to keep a low profile
15:21and it was seen that if you voted yes
15:24you'd be a troublemaker.
15:27They were saying that if we vote yes
15:29they're going to come and take our land
15:32take my house
15:34because of where I live
15:35and the zoning and everything else.
15:37One of the goals is to tear down the war memorials
15:39and replace them with the fake genocides of the Aborigines.
15:43I object to a minority group
15:46controlling what happens in Australia.
15:49The fear, fear sells man.
15:52But we are so easily manipulated I think.
15:55That's the problem.
15:56Or they believe what they hear on social media
15:59or from their misinformed friend.
16:01Have you Googled it?
16:03The voice.
16:04The proposal.
16:05The referendum.
16:06Have you Googled it?
16:07You know what?
16:08I have not had heaps of time.
16:10Yeah.
16:11It's busy.
16:12Yeah.
16:13Yeah.
16:14Pretty much.
16:15Life.
16:19Yeah.
16:20It's not good enough to say
16:21I don't know therefore I'm going to vote no.
16:23Go and find out.
16:24That's part of what democracy is about.
16:25That's why we give you the vote folks.
16:27There are always many and varied reasons why the winds of change are held back and constitutional reform fails.
16:37The tragedy is that the referendum came at a time when Australians were starting to feel the impacts of a severe economic downturn and a rise in cost of living, a rise in interest rates, forcing up rents.
16:53The result clear within minutes of the count getting underway.
16:56Tonight's result is not one that I had hoped for.
17:00This is the referendum that Australia did not need to have.
17:03Leaving voices of anger on both sides.
17:08My greatest regret, if I were to think about it carefully, is not saying firmly enough to the Prime Minister that we should delay the referendum.
17:19Australia was not ready for that referendum.
17:23For Australians to consider constitutional change, timing it seems, is all important.
17:30We look back to the referendum on the Republic, that was 1999, a quarter of a century ago.
17:35Australians had given the thumbs down to a Republic.
17:3954.7% said no to a Republic, with 45.3% in the yes count.
17:47And we still aren't revisiting that question in our constitution.
17:51What was squandered with the Republic referendum wasn't just the opportunity to become a Republic and stand on our own two feet and to be seen to stand on our own two feet.
18:00The loss in that referendum made it harder for the next one.
18:04The loss of this one, the voice, the most recent one, is going to make it that much harder again for any future attempts to have a referendum, no matter how important the issue might be that we need to resolve.
18:15And just because we have one of the longest continuing democracies in the world doesn't mean we should be too scared to update our constitution to reflect modern times.
18:25So we're dreamers and yet every now and then we're put to the test and fear comes in and we pull back from doing the brave thing.
18:32There has never been a more intense period of change. The Industrial Revolution was huge.
18:37But we are facing change on change on change on change.
18:42And yet we can't use the constitution as one of the tools in our kit to be able to adapt.
18:52Now that isn't just sad, that's dangerous.
18:56And our constitution could be an aspirational document.
18:59And I don't believe that our constitution reflects the society that we are or the society that I certainly want us to be.
19:06But as successful referendums have shown, constitutional change is possible with a hard-fought contest over ideas.
19:15Australia can no longer tolerate legal racial discrimination against its indigenous people.
19:22The result of the referendum on the Aboriginal question was a resounding triumph for the Aboriginal cause.
19:27It's from such debate that seminal questions are asked about what our idea of Australia is and what we want to become.
19:36There's an inscription around this building that asks the question, should Australia be a place of greed and worship of materialism or a paradise to last a thousand years?
19:48It comes from a poem that was written around the time of Federation, but it's still a pretty good question, don't you think?
19:54For a largely law-abiding bunch, this nation of ours has been forged from a long line of rule-breakers.
20:14We love the idea of sticking it to authority.
20:22It's a trait we adore in our folk heroes and film characters.
20:26One of the new guys, first day on the job and he rips me off ten grand.
20:31And you've done some bad things, sweetie.
20:35Our politicians.
20:36I tell you what, any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up the day is a bum.
20:40And most of all, in our sports stars.
20:44Adam Goods was booed.
20:46Well, some of our sports stars.
20:50So, where does this maverick streak come from?
20:55What Australians don't understand is that we were the Guantanamo Bay for the British Empire.
21:02At least 3,600 political prisoners were transported to our colonies in the 19th century.
21:14And these people were sentenced for protest, reform, for outright rebellion.
21:21Britain was built on a series of hierarchies.
21:24It was built on landed privilege.
21:26It was an aristocratic country.
21:28It was based on property.
21:30And so, the radical colonial democrats were wanting to instate a radical ideal of equality.
21:39The fear of the British was that there would be a revolution in Britain, as occurred in France.
21:45These people were transported en masse to Australia.
21:55Some of the leading orators, political activists of the age.
22:00And they made a difference.
22:04Like, Eureka Stockade.
22:06The uprising of gold miners in 1854 gave claim to Eureka as the birthplace of Australian democracy.
22:19No taxation without representation and having the vote and removing the property franchise.
22:26Eureka was critically important as a moment.
22:29And, around the same time, the union movement erupted.
22:35Unions were organising unskilled workers for the first time in Britain and the United States.
22:41And there's an explosion of working class radicalism.
22:44It's the job of the trade unions to look after wages, hours of work and fair treatment.
22:53Australia has had a very vibrant union history.
22:57And it was a very militant movement.
23:00People power continues to rise and shapes the party political system we know today.
23:06The Labour Party formed which should be a political arm for the union movement because they realised that they actually needed to be organised and in government if they are going to improve the conditions of workers.
23:19The Labour Party emerges as the first effective organised working class political organisation in the world.
23:29Like all political parties, the ALP has evolved from its roots.
23:33But what is also striking about the reforming 19th and early 20th century is what has been airbrushed from the storytelling.
23:44This period of radicalism celebrated as his story.
23:50I think the thing that has surprised me most about studying Australian history is that I couldn't see myself in that history necessarily.
23:59This history that I was studying didn't have women in it.
24:05It's extraordinary how they are absent from the history.
24:09And yes, they were there in far fewer numbers than the numbers of the convicts, the male convicts that were sent out, but they were there.
24:14A number of women who were transported for petty theft, property offences or for political offences were put into female factories on their arrival in Australia, serving the needs of the colony for mass female labour.
24:35That meant they were all brought together and they networked.
24:42It was always said there was a counterculture called the flash mob.
24:46Flash mob were a group of women convicts who were wild.
24:53She bumped into me.
25:00And they were violent, terrible morals, they'd all been prostitutes.
25:04Women who had given up on respectability.
25:10Assigned to female factories with terrible working conditions in the 1840s, they revolt against the system.
25:17There's the we are all alike incident where these women just have had enough with the rotten food they're given.
25:25And they bring in the police and they say, who's the ringleader?
25:29Who's in charge?
25:30Who caused this riot?
25:32And they say, we are all alike.
25:34We are all alike.
25:36It's sort of a, we're all Spartacus moment.
25:37You won't read about them in the history books because essentially men wrote the histories.
25:42And they didn't think that things that women were doing were relevant, necessary.
25:49I certainly didn't learn about Australia's radical women from traditional education.
25:56It's not what's celebrated, it's not what we think is the foundation of our culture as these radical progressive women.
26:01I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not.
26:08Certain vested interests don't want women to progress and be treated equitably.
26:15But I legitimately don't understand what the threat is from women.
26:20I personally am the most non-threatening creature except for maybe when I'm in the lodge and then, you know.
26:31But even then I didn't do anything threatening, I just frowned at someone.
26:41In Australia we've had about 140 years of feminist activism.
26:44From about the 1880s right through to the present day.
26:49And two demands characterise women's activism.
26:54And they are the demand that women be safe from men's violence.
26:59Can we really believe that we're protesting asking for women not to be assaulted?
27:07That demand has been there for 140 years.
27:10Intertwined with that demand, that is the demand for the economic independence of women.
27:18Until women had economic independence they would not be free.
27:22They could not be self-determining.
27:24And we are far from achieving that ideal yet.
27:28Oh, life's a bugger.
27:30Yet Australia was once at the forefront of advancing female rights.
27:39This nation seen as a beacon across the globe.
27:44As an Australian woman I'm proud that we led the world on female suffrage.
27:49In 1902 women were given not only the right to vote, but also to stand for federal election.
27:54Gaining the ballot, of course, was seen as a major form of power.
28:01If women could only get political power, they would then be able to achieve all these reforms that they wanted.
28:07It was going to be a place where there were welfare payments, where there was a widow's payment, where there were maternity allowances.
28:14We had changes to arbitration legislation that saw workers in Australia have the best conditions in the world.
28:22A Labor government was elected very much by female voters.
28:26So all of these things led to Australia in this period to be seen as a land of experiments, a social laboratory.
28:37All of these progressive ideas were going to actually come to fruition in Australia.
28:46And then there's the First World War.
28:48The new myth that was created from there was that Australians were not these progressive radicals,
28:59but were these virile young men who were prepared to put their lives on the line.
29:04In the making of the Australian nation and the formation of our identity, the horror and commemoration of war has loomed large.
29:23It's impossible to come to these sacred places and reflect on the loss and sacrifice of so many and not be moved.
29:30And yet the interplay between the battlefield and the national character is a complex one.
29:37It conjures a clash between myth-making and truth.
29:43Also, too, a suppressed and selective telling of our history.
29:50We celebrate and acknowledge the sacrifice in those wars, First World War, Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, etc.
29:58We should also acknowledge the people who fought in what I call the Australian wars.
30:10There are the British wars, the American wars and the Australian wars.
30:13And the Australian wars are how the Australian people, our First Nations, fought against the British.
30:20What an heroic story.
30:23It's what Australia is, it's what it was founded on, is this violent territorial struggle for the continent.
30:32That's what made the nation a hundred years of war.
30:36Thousands and thousands of Aboriginal people died.
30:38We pretend like it just didn't happen.
30:41Well, I'm here today to tell you that it did happen.
30:45And my great-grandmother survived it and so did my Kaukadoo ancestors.
30:51We survived it and we're here to tell you that it happened.
30:54I think it's fair to say that over time, most nations have been formed and forged through war.
31:08Australia had a war.
31:09It had a long, protracted guerrilla war that went on and took enormous tolls.
31:13But we didn't factor that into the notion of the formation of the nation.
31:23We had to wait for World War One to be retrospectively invented as the war that formed the nation.
31:34And there's the battle at Gallipoli that was lost, let's remember.
31:39It was an absolute balls-up.
31:41A seminal moment in our history, mythologised, of course, on film.
31:47Get away!
31:52Out of those losses and defeats emerged this story that the Australian nation was made on the shores of Gallipoli.
32:01The First World War did so much damage to the country, but nations gain their strength.
32:13They gain their legends and they gain their mythology through genuine sacrifice.
32:18The sacrifice which forms the Australian soul.
32:21Well, the Anzac myth is very important because people gave their lives fighting for their country.
32:29But it's not the only thing that defines our country.
32:34But at the time, actually, World War One was hugely divisive.
32:37The Prime Minister argued for conscription.
32:42By referendum in 1916 and 1917, the people rejected the proposals.
32:47It was pretty dicey putting these questions to enfranchised men and women, particularly putting these questions to women.
32:56Prime Minister Billy Hughes thought women would put their family interests first and not the national interest.
33:01And he actually said women voters were on probation.
33:06And we'll be watching how they vote.
33:10And if they don't vote for the national interest, in his case, conscription,
33:15well, we'll have to think about their citizenship.
33:19I mean, it was a shocking claim, but it shows you too how radical it was still then
33:23that Australian women had the vote and defeated referenda twice.
33:27Meanwhile, in central western New South Wales, a propaganda campaign springs up.
33:35A grassroots movement determined to boost Australia's dwindling number of diggers.
33:41William Thomas Hitchin was a local of Gilgandra.
33:45He and his brother, they would often get together and have an evening smoke and a chat
33:50about the casualties in the trenches over in France and in Turkey.
33:57They came up with this idea of doing what we would call a snowball recruitment scheme.
34:04And the idea was to start here at Gilgandra, march the way through to Sydney.
34:11And as they passed through each town or village, they would send out call of Cooey.
34:20And the hope was that they would get one recruitment per mile.
34:24On the day of October 10th, 1915, out of a shire of 4,000 people, 3,000 people turned up.
34:34There were bands playing and there was people cheering and they marched down and went slowly but surely.
34:44And each township along the way had like a fate or a little festival.
34:48There's lots of other like-minded people who choose to join them and go off and fight.
34:57By the time they got to Sydney, they were faced with a crowd of 100,000 people.
35:04And so from that success, there was an additional eight more recruitment drives done throughout New South Wales.
35:14And there was a total of about 1,200 more volunteers to go over into the First World War.
35:21November the 11th, 1980, battered and tired, we were going home.
35:35After World War I, people thought, what were we fighting for?
35:38You know, there was a real cynicism throughout the 1920s about what Anzac meant and what the war meant.
35:43And then as we move forward, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, Australia is fighting in Vietnam.
35:51And Anzac Day feels like, what does Anzac Day mean? Is it militaristic?
35:55And in fact, Anzac Day was, you know, really on the wane during that period.
36:01Perhaps rejecting what war is. It's at the height of the peace movement.
36:05It's not until the 1990s that new life is breathed into an old mess.
36:10It was a very conscious decision of John Howard, the then Prime Minister, to invest deeply in the memorialisation of war,
36:21to give Australians a sense of identity around the Anzac tradition.
36:28Today, we do pay homage to those men and women who either offered or gave their lives in war.
36:35It was a sort of Anglo-Celtic white dreaming. This is who we are as Australians.
36:40It was forged in the trenches of World War I.
36:44With the huge observance of Anzac Day, the numbers of young Australians that were going to Gallipoli and the Western Front,
36:50there is an argument that Howard struck something deep in the Australian psychology with Anzac.
36:54Howard was speaking to the country. He was speaking to the identity of the country.
37:01He wanted to express the spirit of Australia.
37:03John Howard says right at the end of his autobiography that the sight of thousands of young Australians wrapped in the Australian flag warms the hearts of Australians.
37:17It's never warmed my heart. If I feel anything out of the Anzacs, and I do, I feel sadness. I feel immense sadness.
37:23The Anzac myth was seen to be an easier way to talk about Australian identity that didn't have to take into account the multicultural story or the story of Indigenous dispossession.
37:35You need to be very careful about how we define our myths, what those myths are based on, and how we use them. They can be abused.
37:44There's usually only one day of the year when everyone's favourite toss of the coins is legal.
37:53Most Australians know something about Anzac Day.
37:56It's synonymous of an Anzac Day that two of us played throughout Australia.
38:00It is the Australian way.
38:02But what else do they know? Do they know that Aboriginal people served at Gallipoli?
38:07Fall out to guard. Most unusual guard this in all the Empire's armies. Original Aboriginal Anzac.
38:21My father was Herbert Staley Lovett. He was born on Lake On The Mission, and this is him here on my jumper.
38:27He was one of nine boys. He went to the First World War in 1917. There was four of them all up. The four Lovett brothers were the only four brothers in the whole British Empire to serve in two world wars.
38:45They thought that it'll pay dividends at the end, because you had input into keeping the country safe. But that only applies to white people apparently.
38:58Australians persisted with the idea that men, white, working class men mainly, should be settling on the land.
39:07Come World War One, it was agreed return soldiers must be put on the land as farmers.
39:13In Victoria, it was so extensive, the soldier settlement scheme, that one fifth of all land changed hands.
39:22The whole concept of soldier settlement didn't include Aboriginal people. Did not include Aboriginal people.
39:32Why didn't my father get what everyone else got?
39:34There's a sort of further tragic irony that in order to find enough land to settle soldiers settlers, they were also taking over Aboriginal reserves.
39:47The soldiers coming back from World War One are given land. Aboriginal people get picked up and moved off into other places.
39:53Like many other indigenous diggers, the Lovett brothers were not only denied soldiers settlement land, but kicked off the reserve where they had lived before the war.
40:06Their land was gone.
40:09Their land was gone. Given to five returned soldiers, non-Aboriginals. And the mission had closed. They actually wanted everyone off there. So they destroyed the church. And there used to be a well there. And they filled that up with stone. So there went the water supply. So there went the water supply.
40:31So it was a real act of determination to, to rid people of that area.
40:40Today, this land is estimated to be worth millions of dollars.
40:45I've been fighting pretty hard for compensation for dad for the last goodness knows how long.
40:52It's been a really hard battle.
40:55In 2021, the Victorian state government commissioned an artwork to commemorate the contribution of the Lovett brothers and their fellow Aboriginal Anzacs.
41:07Is that the best you can give my father?
41:10Is that the best you can give my father?
41:11Recognition on a silo.
41:18I don't ask for anyone's charity.
41:21I do what I do. I'm proud of who I am.
41:24Proud of my father.
41:27Proud of my old uncles.
41:29All my families.
41:30I love this awesome picture by Tom Roberts depicting the opening of our first parliament in 1901.
41:53It is, in fact, 269 lifelike portraits of the most important people who were in attendance that day, including, of course, our first parliamentarians who created the new laws for a new nation.
42:09You'd think a painting like this would have been commissioned for all Australians to be cherished for generations.
42:15But it was, in fact, promptly crated up and sent back to the king.
42:22It only came home in 1958 after Menzies asked his adored queen if perhaps maybe we could borrow it back.
42:31It's still officially on loan.
42:34There is still an extraordinary extent to which Australia still looks towards Britain.
42:44Up until the mid-1980s, God Save the Queen was still your national anthem.
42:50Australians like to think of themselves as fiercely patriotic, green and gold.
43:07And yet you still have an Englishman as your head of state.
43:11I find that bizarre. I find that ridiculous.
43:15You know, why do we still have this Union Jack in the key spot of the Australian flag?
43:25Because we can't be bothered because it doesn't matter.
43:28We appoint Australians as Governors-General, but they're responsible to the Queen of England,
43:32or the King of England now, and not to our government.
43:35Now, that's absurd. Why do we accept it?
43:37That's childlike to accept it, and we do.
43:39I think in many ways, Australia is a conservative country.
43:44And I think the pragmatic view of the Australian people on so many issues is,
43:49well, I'm prepared to change arrangements.
43:53Just tell me the reason.
43:55If it's a good reason, I'll make the change.
43:58So what that means, of course, is if it ain't broke, we don't need to fix it.
44:01This is a very strong model of a democracy that is proving that it has strength and continuity,
44:09and the public generally takes confidence from its strength and history.
44:14The cold reality of our warm relationship with Britain is that a friend in need is not necessarily a friend indeed.
44:22With Britain in dire straits during World War II, they were unable to come to Australia's aid.
44:32Singapore, now Japanese, where impregnable batteries have roared their last.
44:38The fall of Singapore in 1942 is about the folly of relying on a great power for protection.
44:45Political leaders throughout the late 1920s and 1930s took at face value the kinds of guarantees and assurances from London
44:55that if Australia was ever attacked by the Japanese or a major Asian power, that Britain would send its fleet.
45:0216,000 Australians were taken prisoner.
45:05The British could no longer afford to have an empire.
45:09Australians had to face up to the collapse of the defence and economic nexus of this relationship.
45:13The relationship around which they'd built the whole idea of themselves as a people,
45:18all of a sudden that was being taken from underneath them in decisions they neither sought nor welcomed,
45:24but it forced Australia to come up with a new idea of itself or to attempt to find one.
45:29We had a new enemy and a new ally. American troops came to Australia.
45:34We have clearly shifted from Great Britain as our great protector to the United States as our great protector.
45:45We have tied ourselves more and more and more and more to the relationship with the United States
45:50and in the process we have surrendered more and more and more of our sovereignty.
45:54In the making of the nation, in times of peace and war, prosperity and hard times, Australia has tethered itself to Britain or America or both.
46:07A new security alliance for the Indo-Pacific region.
46:12Australia will become the seventh nation in the world to operate nuclear powered submarines.
46:18The decision we have made to not continue with the attack class submarine and to go down this path is not a change of mind, it's a change of need.
46:25So in the aftermath of the AUKUS announcement, and this of course meant that Australia was ditching its deal to buy French submarines.
46:35The French ambassador said to me, I can understand, he said, why you have gone back to Uncle Sam in a way, he said,
46:43but I can never understand why you have gone back to Mummy.
46:46And this symbolised, I guess, this kind of confusion as to why Australia would see its strategic future bound up with the remnants of Britain.
47:01But could we really be comfortable with an idea of Australia that lets go of its old family ties and becomes a truly independent nation?
47:11If we don't have a great protector, yeah, we'd have to make different decisions about how we defend ourselves,
47:17how we protect ourselves in a very uncertain world, and it would take tough decisions.
47:21But it's not impossible.
47:23Politicians have gone ahead and worked with China, or worked with Indonesia, or worked with India, or worked with the Pacific now, it works.
47:30It functions and in fact it's to our advantage.
47:33The British heritage is still one of the keys to unlocking the character of this nation.
47:41And that is a problem if you're trying to forge a different kind of identity.
47:52The death of the Queen meant we had to defer even more in our grief and our recognition of her passing.
47:58The time of a coronation is the time to talk about the monarch's impact on Australia.
48:04And the crown is not above politics to us, because the symbol of that crown represented the invasion, the theft of land, and in our case, the exterminating war.
48:16And then there's this whole pylon, especially on Stan.
48:21It was so inappropriate to do it on the occasion of the coronation of the King of Australia.
48:28You know, and that's kind of, I think, the motto for Australia at the moment.
48:32Now is not the time.
48:34And people say, well, when is the time?
48:36That's the question for Australia.
48:38When is the time to talk about the monarchy?
48:39When is the time to talk about sexism?
48:41When is the time to talk about terra nullius?
48:42When is the time to talk about racism?
48:44When is the time?
48:47If we're to build a nation fit for purpose for the next century, we must grapple with our past to make sense of today and to help us create a better tomorrow.
48:59Perhaps now really is the time.
49:05Next, the fight to claim Australia.
49:07The law really conceptualises land as a thing to be used, to be owned, parceled up, privatised, built on.
49:17The rush for riches.
49:19Once upon a time it would have been news when somebody bought a $10 million house.
49:22They're now buying $20 million houses, $50 million houses, $100 million houses.
49:26And the hope that looking back, it was the first time an Australian court had recognised native title.
49:33Hallelujah!
49:35Can help us move forward to protect and preserve this ancient continent.
49:40A crown cannot be shared.
49:51The campaign for the throne of England ramps up as tensions rise and a battle brews.
49:57When King and Conqueror continues, Sunday 8.30 on SBS and On Demand.
50:02.
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