As the year draws to a close, Australians should stop indulging in forgetting and myth-making about how the nation responded to the crisis of COVID-19.
In his book The Fear and the Freedom – Why the Second World War Still Matters, the historian Keith Lowe writes about how the nations and individuals who survived through war coped with the emotional consequences of their trauma.
They did two things. First, they tried to forget what had happened. Then, what they couldn’t forget they created myths about. The myths and stories they told themselves might have an element of truth, but they were just as likely to be a consequence of individuals wishing for something to have occurred, when in fact it didn’t.
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John Roskam is a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. Connect with John on Twitter.
