Australia has a special relationship with failure

For many, our greatest national failure has been our treatment of the First Australians. And in a dark victory for bigotry and wilful ignorance, we failed to pass the voice.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney walk to a media conference at Parliament House. Picture: AFP

Australia rhymes with failure. Some have jokingly suggested that’s why we have such a woeful national anthem. But the Australia/failure connection runs far and wide and deep.

For example: long before controversially declaring January 26 as Australia Day, our real national day was, yes, Anzac Day – in which we pay tribute to the monumental military failure of Gallipoli.

If Advance Australia Fair is a failure as our official anthem, our beloved unofficial anthem Waltzing Matilda is a sad and sorry song of failure – a dirge about a swagman who hurls himself into a billabong to drown. This is no historic gesture of political principle; the swaggie commits suicide over a stolen jumbuck. Rather than face the wrath of the squatter mounted on his thoroughbred – and the accompanying troopers – he condemns himself to death. Surely to die over the possession of a shabby sheep is a failure.

Talking of the death penalty takes us from the ghostly presence of the swaggie to another anti-heroic failure, our beloved bushranger Ned Kelly, who comes off second best with the cops and is doomed to die on the scaffold. His last words, we’re told, were an embittered “Such is life”. Failure, failure, failure.

Add to the roll-call of failures the seemingly endless numbers of explorers who perished in the deserts. Perhaps most infamously those famous failures Burke and Wills.

Fifty years ago I wrote a column about how the principal characters in our New Wave feature films invariably ended in failure. Jack Thompson made it a sub-genre – he wanted to be the gun shearer in Sunday Too Far Away – and failed. He tried to save Breaker Morant from the firing squad – and failed. In Petersen Jack’s character wanted to be successful at university – and ended up repairing TV sets.

In US films the heroes almost invariably win the battle, get the girl and ride off into the sunset. In Australia, they’re flops.

We’ve failed as a nation to have an independent voice in foreign affairs – joining the US in its succession of failed wars: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. We were once a significant manufacturer – producing, for example, the majority of our own cars. Choosing between Ford or Holden was almost religious, like being Catholic or Protestant. Finally our auto industry failed, too.

In recent memory Australia failed to become a Republic. We failed at Reconciliation. We failed to treat refugees with humanity. And we failed to defeat our own denialists and effectively tackle climate change; the impact of this failure is evidenced in floods, fires and devastating droughts.

But for many, our greatest national failure has been our treatment of the First Australians. Two centuries of abuse, massacres, rapes, poisoning, enslavement, displacement, incarceration, introduced disease – and stolen children. Closing the gap? Look at the stats on indigenous health and life expectancy.

And finally, in a dark victory for bigotry and wilful ignorance, we failed to pass the voice.

Even before the treasonable Trump, I was describing the US in broadcasts and columns as a Failed State. Let’s hope that Australia can avoid that designation.