Metaphor of Redemption, Myths of State

Abstract

The current revisioning of the nation-state in terms of questioning accountability for violence committed against Indigenous Australians was opened up by a shift in Australian historical scholarship that began to argue nation-building was inseparable from genocidal intent. This historiography has been part of a wider post-imperial turn that has refused nostalgia in order to understand how race was constructed as part of the imperial mission, and continues to refract and reiterate upon colony and metropole alike. This historiography has helped show how myths about the Australian state inform an Australian national consciousness, and has centralised the disruption of those myths, as well as the disruption of the idea that the political community was removed from any past practices of ʻthe stateʼ. Such historiography suggests a story of the state in which the narratives of coloniser and colonised are mutually constitutive, and in which the colonisers are asked to take accountability for the hurt of those who suffered, and continue to suffer, because of the policies of child removal in the past. The public debate that emerged in response to that historiography has been both responsive and resistant. I want to reflect on that historiography, how it emerged, how it operates in film and in law as important sites of public reckoning about race, and what that suggests for a nation-state caught between a denial of, as well as a desire for, redemption from its past shame.