Nation

 

On this Day we are asked to celebrate and make penance and protest and mourn. The Day is neither festival nor fast. It commemorates a process of takeover that was one of the easiest prizes of Empire. The outline of the prize had not been full mapped at the time. The Day claimed a terra nullius, a nothing everything, the scale and richness and mystery and humanity of which it was ignorant. It was a chance moment, a peculiar occasion obscure on a shoreline impossibly remote from the education and sensuality and affections of those in attendance. On that, as it were, first Day there was no call for celebration or penance or protest or mourning. On that Day the calendar was introduced into an island continent, the place that was still incomplete outlines to those lined up to salute, unchained or chained. It takes a lot of ink to make calendars. They are rigorously speckled with new year celebrations and monarchical birthdays and Whitsunday passages. Their grids are reminiscent of longitude and latitude, and do not instantly raise affections. The sense that one day is much the same as any other day is easy to feel as we look upon those 365 empty squares, though 1788 was a leap year. It is similar to the overlay of grids on land outlines where there is, theoretically at least, nothing there. Terra nullius is not interested in our affections. It does not argue for celebrations or penance or protest or mourning. It ignores the shapes of things as they are, and to come. On that Day certain unchained leaders drew from their coat-pockets and carry-cases the very solid notion they called nation. Nation had never been so much as an outline for those who had lived for hundreds of years in this newly visited remote place, long before the Day commemorated in this report. Or rather than report, we could call it an aesthetics. For example, Spain is frequently an object of address amongst Spanish poets. They address Spain as though Spain were a person for whom they will sacrifice everything. Spain gets stacked up with prize attributes as though Spain were a god, or a bullfighter, or a pulchritudinous woman. An ode to Spain may go through every affection in the dictionary. This is not the kind of poetry addressed, on the Day, to the outline later named Australia. There is normally a terra nullius of poetry addressed to Australia. Anything said in that mode is likely to be ironical, or so laconic as to be soundless. Words of celebration and penance and protest and mourning occur around the edges of the Day, poetry not being as loud as sound systems or talkback opinions or outboard motors or maskless beer-gardens, or we could go on. Whereas, what are the right words for the Day, if only private thankyous and individual sorrys and quiet rebukes and whispering losses?