Australia is a nation divided. It always has been

Unity is a national rallying cry but the reality is different. This is the nation of rabbit proof fences, of city versus bush and Covid-induced fracture.

‘We Australians must continually work at coming together and staying together.’

Australia is a nation divided. And I suspect it has ever been thus. Pre European Indigenous Australia was comprised of hundreds of tribes and language groups, each unique to a specific territory. European settlement brought further division between jailers and the jailed, between free settlers and others. Later, on the diggings, there was simmering resentment between free-willed miners and troopers. This idea of free-spirited Aussies having to navigate authority is also explored in Waltzing Matilda.

Bush poet Banjo Paterson put into words a then ascendant city-bush divide with his city clerk’s lament about being stuck in a dingy little office while longing to wander, like (the drover) Clancy, the sunlit plains extended.

Australia’s British heritage brought with it class divisions and, perhaps most potently, an entrenched schism between Protestants and Catholics that has only recently subsided with the broader diminution of religious affiliation.

We erected rabbit-proof and dingo fences to keep at bay both pests and predators. In 1865, South Australia’s Surveyor-General George Goyder created Goyder’s Line, notionally delineating the northern extent of arable land based on rainfall. These lines merely confirmed the idea that Australia was a land that needed to be divided, indeed protected from an untamed and at times hostile interior.

A scene from 2001 the film Rabbit Proof Fence.

During Covid, when push came to shove, our nation quickly and worryingly fractured into a series of self-preserving states. My beloved city of Melbourne even created a ring of steel to separate the possibly infected from the probably uninfected.

Victorian police and Australian defence personnel manage roadside checkpoints near Donnybrook to enforce coronavirus travel restrictions in 2020. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

During WWII, an ill-founded rumour circulated that Australian forces were to pull back to defend a heartland south of Brisbane. There is no evidence that a Brisbane Line was ever considered but its rumour suggests a sensitivity to the idea that there might be – again, when push comes to shove – gradations of a defendable Australia.

In 1978 historian Ian Turner playfully coined the term the Barassi Line to describe the spread of Aussie Rules beyond Victoria. State-based social division often derives from the time of colonial settlement and thus favours different football codes, language patterns (potato scallops, not potato cakes, in NSW), accent (SA and FNQ being most distinctive, I think) and even the Queensland preference for the Iced VoVo biscuit.

My own contribution to the concept of social division in Australia is the Goat’s Cheese Curtain, an imaginary line at about a 5km radius from the CBD that contains and constrains the hipster lifestyle. Although with the Millennial generation now pushing into their early forties, I wonder whether the impetus behind the whole hipster milieu isn’t gently shifting in favour of the suburbs. (I also think there was until recently a “tie line” in Australia that prescribed a tie for men in business meetings in capital cities south of a line extending from Brisbane to Perth.)

While social division is part of every community, I think that given the scale of our continent and the broad mix of our community, we Australians must continually work at coming together and staying together. This commitment to unity should be part of our national values and story.