During one of my darkest periods, I wrote a book. The pain is still palpable

Nationalism is a perplexing concept – aperfect example of how having too much of anything can turn even the sweetest things sour. In this case, it’s pride. So we Australians are proud of our beautiful beaches and carefree lifestyle. We’re proud of the virtues we value – mateship, valour and an attitude so relaxed we shorten words until they’re barely recognisable. We’re prideful of places, ideas and people.

When we examine nationalism in an academic context, it’s more about protecting that pride – to the extent that it’s no longer about what’s inside, but rather what we keep out: foreign fruit, foreign meat, sometimes foreign people and especially foreign ideas.

Brooke Boney: “More than anything, I’ve yearned for Australian skies.” Credit: Bec Parsons

About 12 months ago, during one of the darkest periods of my life, I wrote a book. Reading it now, the pain is palpable. It was only months after the referendum on the Voice was defeated. I was devastated. How could a country I love so much turn its back on Aboriginal people the way it did?

I felt as though I wanted to withdraw from speaking to the broader public about issues facing Australia’s most marginalised people. It seemed there was a lack of willingness to truly understand the dynamics that caused these issues and allowed them to propagate over the past couple of hundred years.

In the past, we’ve been able to attribute historical consequences and blame to people from history who didn’t know better, but the impact and implications of the results sit squarely on our shoulders. It’s our shame to carry.

I felt I didn’t know my country any more. I thought ideas from far-flung places, from kid-brained adults who subjugate women and oppress minorities, had become a fixture in our collective psyche. That the decline in decency was being met equally by a rise in “trad wife” culture and a lack of respect for knowledge, truth and expertise.

A mere suggestion of scarcity can provoke fear.

As time passed, and I moved overseas, the pain loosened its grip. The adage that absence (or distance) makes the heart grow fonder is true in most contexts. I constantly think, for example, about the sweet smell of Australian mandarins; people in the UK must think I’m a freak show the way I talk about Australian produce.

More than anything, I’ve yearned for Australian skies. They’re so expansive and clear that it’s impossible to forget how infinitesimally small we are by comparison. I wonder if that’s the genesis of our obsession with reminding each other not to get too big for our boots. Tall poppy syndrome can be limiting, harsh and dispersed unfairly, so I offer the explanation not in defence but as a reason.

Australia’s distance from everything else, particularly those foreign cultures we align with, only reinforces the idea that we’re the same, but entirely different. What we have is precious and special and not to be taken for granted.

At the recent election, we stood at the precipice and considered adopting aspects of a culture and policies that aren’t our own. A mere suggestion of scarcity can provoke fear, make us panic, turn us towards hate and division. But too much of that same fear, intentionally stoked by those who ought to know better, somehow inspired in us the courage to return to who we were.

Inherently, Australia is a place where we want people to have access to things such as healthcare when they need it, and where we don’t leave our countrymen behind. So when the world looked dangerous and unpredictable, we returned to our values. We chose kindness, or at least stability, over culture wars and moral panic.

Those who think Australians value individualistic ideals more than they value holding each other up and supporting one another underestimate what it means to belong to this great nation – and what we might choose, in this instance, to exclude.

This tension between who we are and who we are not is part of what inspired me to write a book, All of It, that examines the pride, the pain, the contradictions of what it feels like to love a country that sometimes forgets how to love you back.

Since writing the book, I am not as cynical about the way the situation has unfolded and as it continues to unfold. Nor do I attribute this situation solely to a shift towards individualism and away from being community-minded. Grace and levity were borne out of what I’ve learnt while I’ve been away, and through the process of writing it all down.

I am eternally grateful to have been lifted from that despondency, but the process has forced me to reckon with how privileged I am to be able to alchemise that suffering and turn it into hope.

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