Lockdown is tough but Covid is uniting Australia in its Anzac spirit

Critics claim border closures are tearing the nation apart. But award-winning novelist and historian Thomas Keneally disagrees.

We’re all getting through it but lockdown I think is great.

I think the politics of the last 20 years has been divisive and to have the Australian populous cast back upon themselves and to see there is so much more than the US, so much more moral capital, moral cohesion, community cohesion that people do relate to each other and do try to do the right thing by each other.

This is extraordinary because America in its big effort was very divided and suffered heinously because of it.

So I think the old cohesion is still there and I think part of the Anzac spirit came out of our past fraternity, our traditional fraternity.

It was a flawed fraternity because it didn’t necessarily include the Aborigines or women, and I admit it was flawed, but it was valid and the fact you can fall back on each other now is as important under Covid as it ever was.

Author Thomas Keneally, Covid will unite the nation. Picture: Supplied

There are two secessionist groups in Australia, the Western Australians who actually did try and secede and voted to secede in 1933 before the Privy Council told them they couldn’t because the terms of the constitution said it was an indissoluble union.

So WA stayed with us and then there is Queensland of course.

When I was on the Constitution Commission years ago taking submissions, Queenslanders would always say ‘I am a Queenslander before I am an Australian’.

That’s like General Robert E. Lee saying ‘I have to stand by my country – Virginia’; he actually said that.

Well you can’t lose votes by closing down secessionist states, you are always going to do well. It gives Queenslanders time to think they really are their own country. I’m sorry if I sound cynical but I have observed State of Origin too long to think Queensland doesn’t matter to Queenslanders. Any chance to one up New South Welshmen or Victorians is always going to work for them.

NSW and Queensland at war. Valentine Holmes of the Maroons is tackled during game two of the 2020 State of Origin series. Picture: Mark Kolbe

But many of these (border) close down are conscious and the thing is whether it is because of them there has been no mass Covid cases, WA has been clear for so long and so has Queensland, although it has some problems now.

Sometimes I think it is a fantasy of separatism to close the state borders but sometimes it has worked.

We’ve all found out Victorians are Australians too, even if some don’t want to believe it. NSW people would like to think they are only Australian and we don’t need to identify with our states because we are Australians.

The Gold Coast where Queensland Police stop and check anyone moving from NSW to Queensland. Picture: Scott Powick

But there has been a lot of social capital from Covid – the fact we will be fraternal and sororal, sisterly, with each other there is a strong sorority particularly with women and they are the real heads of households so it works for that reason too.

I had wondered how we’d go.

I did think this could be very dangerous it could lead to great want and great division and will people feel safe living in their houses? I was wondering about safety when Covid became a fact of life and it would take a vaccine many more years of work than it did to actually happen. So it has proved we are pretty much safe.

I do think people do look upon and will incorporate Covid inevitably into their future stories.

Movies are already being made with people wearing masks so it is the inescapable and of course it is big.

ANZAC troops in the Turkish Lone Pine trenches, Gallipoli Peninsula, captured on the afternoon of the 6 August 1915, by the AIF 1st Brigade. Picture: Australian War Memorial

But with Covid we were beginning to ask ourselves questions the old Diggers would never have asked and that is are we post truth, is there anything such as truth? The supporters of Donald Trump would like to say there was something post-truth, you massaged reality and that became the truth. The gods seems to have heard and said we will give you something you can’t deny and something that is not post truths, something you can’t cancel and that is Covid. And whether we think the Right has too much power or the Left has too much power those who talk about cancel culture, well you can’t cancel Covid.

* As said in conversation to senior correspondent Charles Miranda