I have lost count of the number of times I have asked a plain question of people who invoke “Australian culture” as though it were a fixed and self-evident thing under siege. What is it? And when, precisely, in our history did we possess something even marginally close to it? I have never received an answer that survives five minutes of scrutiny. What I have received, more often, is abuse – the reflexive kind reserved for anyone who asks a believer to point to the object of their faith. That reaction is itself instructive. People do not usually respond with fury when you ask them to describe something real. They respond with fury when you ask them to describe something they have never actually looked at, because the asking threatens to dissolve it.
This is not an abstract irritation for me. I write from a particular vantage: Wiradjuri on one side of my family, Jewish heritage on the other, and a working philosophy assembled from the Hebrew prophetic tradition, Stoic ethics and Persian poetry rather than from any single national catechism. When someone tells me they want their culture “back,” I am entitled to ask, as a simple matter of intellectual honesty, back to what state, and for whom. The question is not hostile. It is the most basic due diligence anyone should perform before agreeing to rebuild something. Yet the request for a date and a definition is treated, again and again, as an act of provocation rather than of clarification – which tells you the myth cannot survive being pinned down, and that its defenders know it, even if only at some pre-verbal level.
I want to test that observation against an unlikely witness: a nineteenth-century American boys’ adventure book. Thomas W. Knox’s The Boy Travellers in Australasia, published in 1888 as a contribution to the Australian Centennial, is not a work anyone would nominate as a foundation stone of national identity. It was written for American schoolchildren, by an American journalist, as one instalment in a long commercial series that had already taken its fictional young heroes to Japan, Russia, the Congo and South America. But its very incidentalness is what makes it useful. Knox was not writing propaganda for or against anything. He was taking a snapshot, for money, of the Australian colonies at the exact moment – 1888, a century after the First Fleet – that the hard right’s imagined “golden age” is supposed to have either already arrived or been just around the corner. If the golden age exists anywhere in the historical record, it should be visible here. It is not.
An Unlikely Witness
Knox came to travel writing by an unusual road. He began as a New York Herald correspondent during the American Civil War, where his dispatches on General Sherman’s operations around Vicksburg so enraged Sherman – who considered reporters “paid spies” and worse – that Sherman had Knox charged with giving intelligence to the enemy, acting as a spy, and disobeying orders, in a court-martial that reopened public debate about Sherman’s own sanity. The military tribunal acquitted him of espionage but convicted him of disobeying orders, and he was expelled from the theatre of operations by court-martial sentence, a decision President Lincoln was petitioned to overturn. That episode belongs to another story, but it establishes what kind of observer Knox was: not a naïve romantic, but a reporter who had already paid a price for writing what he saw rather than what a powerful man wanted said, and who carried that same habit of noticing things into the travel writing that followed.
By the time he wrote the Australasia volume, Knox was one of the most prolific travel authors in America, and the book was explicitly commissioned to mark the centenary of British settlement. The publisher’s note states plainly that the first settlement in Australia was made in 1788, and that the inhabitants of “the great southern continent” were that year celebrating their centennial, with the two fictional boy travellers and their guardian, Doctor Bronson, offering the volume “as their contribution to the Australian centennial.” Knox drew not only on his own travels through the region but on books, newspapers, maps and correspondence with numerous Australian gentlemen – in other words, on the self-understanding the colonies themselves were producing about who they were, at the very moment their apologists now claim as the wellspring of “real” Australian culture.
It is worth letting Knox speak for himself here, briefly, so the reader can judge the snapshot directly rather than take my word for its texture. Describing the social mobility he found remarkable in the colonies, Knox has a squatter tell the young travellers that a colonial premier had once worked on the public roads and that a government minister had driven a Sydney coal-cart, adding that in Australia “nobody thinks the worse of him for it.” It is a genuinely attractive detail, and a genuinely real one: colonial Australia’s egalitarian “fair go” self-image had actual social substance behind it, at least for white settler men who arrived free. But notice precisely what is being praised: a fluid class hierarchy among Britons and their descendants, not a multi-ethnic democracy, and not a country that had yet extended the same fluidity to the people whose country it actually was.
What The Snapshot Actually Shows
Here is the inconvenient part. The Australia of 1888 was not a nation. It was six separate British colonies – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania – each with its own parliament, its own tariffs, its own defence force, and no shared citizenship. Federation was still thirteen years away. There was no Australian passport, no Australian currency, no Australian anthem, no Australian flag as we know it. There was no “White Australia Policy” in the form the twentieth century would give it – that architecture of exclusion belonged to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, a Federation-era invention, not a colonial one. Whatever “Australian culture” people imagine themselves defending when they gesture at 1888 did not yet exist as a legal, political or civic entity at all. It existed as a set of overlapping, often mutually suspicious British colonial societies bound together mostly by cricket, horse racing and a shared anxiety about their neighbours.
Knox’s own book preserves a telling anecdote from the earliest colonial decades: an escaped convict, near death in the bush, was found by an Aboriginal group who fed him, nursed him and eventually “made him understand that he was their chief” – a detail that quietly undercuts any tidy story in which settler and First Nations worlds never touched except through violence, even as the frontier violence itself was real, ongoing, and far more common than this one act of hospitality.
Nor was it culturally uniform in the way nostalgists assume. Knox’s book itself is proof of this: a travelogue that spends roughly a third of its pages on Hawaii, Tahiti and the Pacific islands before it ever reaches the mainland, because the “Australasia” of 1888 was understood – correctly – as a plural, maritime, multi-ethnic zone rather than a single Anglo enclave. The colonies Knox actually describes were being built, in the same decade, by indentured South Sea Islander labourers cutting cane in Queensland, by Chinese miners on the goldfields and market gardens of Victoria and New South Wales (against whom several colonies had already passed restrictive legislation, precisely because their presence was so significant), by German Lutheran farming communities across South Australia, by Afghan cameleers opening the continent’s dry interior, and by an English, Irish and Scottish population that was itself riven by sectarian hostility between Protestant and Catholic that would take generations to cool. Women could not vote in a single Australian colony until South Australia extended the franchise in 1894 – six years after the date the golden-age myth apparently begins. Aboriginal people, whose “corroboree,” marriage customs and material culture Knox’s book treats with the detached curiosity of an ethnographic exhibit rather than as citizens of the country he was visiting, had no political standing in any colony at all, and the frontier violence that had accompanied dispossession across the continent for a century was still an active, ongoing project in 1888, not a closed historical chapter. This was the actual texture of the year that gets waved at as a lost inheritance: fractured, hierarchical, actively violent toward the people whose land it was, and not yet a country.
There is also the matter of how Knox’s book treats the continent’s first peoples, and it is worth dwelling on because it cuts against the myth from an unexpected angle. The volume gives real space to descriptions of Aboriginal life – diet, corroboree, courtship and marriage custom – drawn from Knox’s own observation and from the Australian correspondents and published sources he consulted. He treats this material with the curiosity of a foreign visitor cataloguing something exotic, not with the respect due to sovereign nations whose law had governed the continent for tens of thousands of years before 1788. That framing is itself the tell. A book written specifically to celebrate a centennial of British settlement could only place Aboriginal Australians in the position of ethnographic subject, because the civic category of “Australian” that the centennial was busy inventing had no room in it for the people the settlement had dispossessed. If you are looking for the year multicultural, post-colonial Australia supposedly corrupted a prior unity, 1888 will not give it to you either, because the “unity” on display was a unity that expressly excluded the oldest continuous cultures on Earth from its own self-portrait. Whatever was lost between then and now, it was not a shared culture that later fractured. It was closer to the opposite: a narrow, one-sided settler self-image that has only slowly, and still incompletely, been made to widen enough to include everyone who actually lives here.
The Other Candidate: Menzies’ Australia
If 1888 will not hold the golden age, the myth’s more common fallback is the mid-twentieth century – the Menzies era, roughly the 1950s into the 1960s, which is where most actual nostalgists, as opposed to the historical curiosity I began with, tend to point when pressed. This is a fairer test, and it deserves to be credited before it is qualified. Real goods were genuinely present: near-full employment and rising real wages gave most households a security their parents’ generation had not known; home ownership expanded rapidly and became normal rather than aspirational; a two-party system with broad public trust in parliament, the courts and the public service gave political life a settled, low-drama quality; and postwar reconstruction, the Snowy Mountains Scheme and an expanding manufacturing base produced a tangible, shared sense of a country visibly being built. None of that is imaginary, and none of it should be waved away as false consciousness. It is exactly the kind of stability a society reasonably values, and its loss, where it has been lost, is a legitimate thing to grieve.
The trouble is not that these goods are fictional. It is that the golden-age myth asks us to believe they were the product of, or inseparable from, a specific racial and cultural arrangement – and it is that second claim, not the first, that the record refutes.
Consider what the record actually shows. The White Australia policy, inherited from Federation, was at its most rigorously enforced in exactly this period, formally maintaining Australia as, in the government’s own conception, a country of European settlement. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were being removed from their families under state assimilation policies throughout the very years being idealised – policies that stopped Aboriginal people from raising their own children, from freedom of movement, from award wages, from marrying without permission, from eating in restaurants, from entering a pub or a public pool, and from voting – and the removals continued at scale into the late 1960s and, in places, into the 1970s. This is not a peripheral footnote to the era; it was official state policy, conducted openly, and defended at the time as humane. First Nations Australians did not gain the Commonwealth vote nationally until 1962, and remained, for the whole of the “golden” decade, non-citizens in the fullest civic sense. Married women were routinely barred from permanent employment in large parts of the public service. Non-British, non-Christian and non-white migration was actively restricted by policy design, and even the growing numbers of Southern and Northern European migrants who did arrive in this period were expected to shed their languages and customs entirely and disappear into an unmarked Anglo-Australian mainstream rather than be welcomed as they were. If you remove the assimilation regime, the exclusionary immigration law, the near-total absence of Indigenous civic standing and the enforced conformity demanded of new arrivals from the 1950s and 60s, what is left of the “cohesion” being praised is not a culture; it is the comfortable experience of the group the system was built to favour, misremembered as a national default. That misremembering is the whole trick, and it works precisely because the people for whom the decade actually felt cohesive are the ones telling the story.
The Mirage
This is where the desert metaphor earns its keep. A mirage is not simply an illusion; it is a real optical phenomenon produced by light bending through layers of air at different temperatures, so that the mind – quite reasonably – interprets the distortion as water. The traveller is not stupid to see it. The mistake is in walking toward it, because a mirage recedes at exactly the pace you approach it. It is always the same distance away. That is precisely the relationship the contemporary hard right has with its “golden age of Australian culture.” Every time you ask them to name the year, the policy, the demographic composition, the actual lived arrangement they want restored, the answer dissolves and reforms slightly further off. Ask about 1888 and you are pointed to the 1950s. Ask about the 1950s – a decade of White Australia enforcement, of children being forcibly removed from Aboriginal families under state assimilation policy, of women legally barred from many workplaces after marriage, of a Returned Services League that could and did exclude people on the basis of race – and you are pointed vaguely backward again, or forward to some undated moment before “all this happened,” where “this” is never specified because specifying it would require naming multiculturalism, or native title, or feminism, or secularism, all of which are treated as recent corruptions of something ancient, when in fact they are simply Australia becoming more accurate about itself over time.
I do not think most people making this argument are lying, exactly. I think they are doing something more common and more forgivable, and also more dangerous: they are mistaking a feeling for a fact. The feeling is real. Rapid social change is disorienting, and a person who feels their world has been reorganised without their consent is not wrong to feel unsettled. Nor is every question about the pace or scale of change illegitimate on its face – how quickly a society absorbs new arrivals, how institutions balance continuity against reform, how much say a community gets over the speed of its own transformation, are all fair and ordinary subjects for democratic argument, quite separate from the claim that change itself is a corruption to be reversed. But the object the nostalgist attaches that feeling to – a coherent, harmonious, culturally unified Australia that once existed and has since been dismantled by immigration, multiculturalism, feminism or secular government – has no address in the historical record. It is Gossamer: fine enough to catch the light and convince you it’s substantial, and gone the instant a real current of air – in this case, an actual date, an actual statute, an actual census – passes through it. I have watched that happen in real time in conversations, where a specific question about a specific year produces not an answer but anger, because the anger is doing the work the missing fact cannot do.
Whose Minority, Whose Tyranny
It is worth being fair to the strongest version of this position before dismissing it, because there is a genuine thread of truth tangled inside the myth. Modern Australia’s civic and legal architecture does have its roots in British colonial settlement; there is no serious argument otherwise, and I do not make one. Our public holidays at Christmas and Easter are Christian feast days, tied to that same colonial inheritance, and I see nothing wrong with a country marking them, including for people like me who hold a personal theism outside any organised church. Acknowledging that lineage honestly is simply good history. The trouble begins at the next step, when a fairly small constituency – hard-right cultural conservatives, and within that group a smaller constituency of hard-right Christian nationalists – asserts that their particular, selectively remembered version of that inheritance is not one legitimate strand among several but the only authentic Australian culture, binding on everyone else, and enforceable through law, curriculum or public shaming of dissenters.
It is important to be precise about where the line actually falls, because the two things on either side of it are easy to blur on purpose. On one side is ordinary cultural attachment: a majority of Australians marking Christmas and Easter, singing the national anthem, valuing the common law’s presumption of innocence, or simply feeling more at home in institutions shaped by a particular history than in ones shaped by another. None of that requires apology, and none of it is coercive merely by existing; a majority culture expressing itself through shared, non-binding custom is exactly what pluralism is supposed to accommodate. The line is crossed only at the point where attachment turns into an attempt to make those norms compulsory for people who do not share them – writing a particular religious position into law that binds the non-religious, demanding public institutions perform a single version of “Australian-ness” as a loyalty test, or treating a school curriculum, a citizenship ceremony, or a workplace as the proper venue for enforcing what should remain a personal or communal choice. Attachment asks nothing of anyone else. Enforcement conscripts everyone else. The hard-right and hard-right-Christian minority I am describing does not simply hold the first position, which would be unremarkable; it agitates for the second, and then borrows the language of the first – heritage, tradition, “what most Australians believe” – to make the demand for compulsion sound like a plea for tolerance.
That is not the defence of a shared culture. It is a minority attempting to impose its preferences on a majority that does not share them, dressed in the borrowed language of restoration. Call it what it actually is: not the tyranny of the majority the classical liberal tradition warned against, but its mirror image – an attempted tyranny of a minority over a majority, using nostalgia as the delivery mechanism because a direct argument for religious or cultural exclusivity would not survive contact with the Australian public as it actually exists and votes today. A genuinely plural, secular democracy is entitled to resist that, not because it disrespects the colonial and Christian threads in its own weave, but precisely because it takes pluralism seriously enough to refuse letting one thread claim to be the whole cloth.
There is a further, quieter dishonesty in the position, which is its selective relationship to history itself. The same voices that invoke 1888, or 1901, or 1950 as a lost Eden rarely wish to import the whole of what those years actually contained. They do not campaign for the restoration of colonial tariff walls, sectarian exclusion, the legal disabilities once imposed on married women, or the frontier violence and assimilation policy that actually produced the cohesion they admire. They want the cohesion without the machinery that manufactured it. That is not history. It is set-dressing: a costume drama assembled from favourable fragments, with the ugly machinery airbrushed out of shot. Genuine engagement with the past does not get to be this selective. It has to hold the whole of the historical record in view – including the parts that are inconvenient for the argument being made – or it is not history at all, only nostalgia wearing history’s clothes.
Selective Memory Is Not A Partisan Disease
Fairness requires me to note that this habit of curating the past to fit a present-day argument is not a hard-right specialty. It is a general temptation, and progressive retellings of Australian history are not automatically exempt from it merely because they aim at a more defensible conclusion. A version of the past that treats the colonial project as producing nothing but dispossession and violence, with no space for the real if partial reforms, the genuine acts of solidarity Knox himself stumbles into recording, or the slow, uneven expansion of rights that followed, is exactly as selective as the nostalgist’s airbrushed 1950s – it has simply chosen a different set of inconvenient facts to leave out. The 1967 referendum is sometimes remembered as the moment Aboriginal Australians “became citizens,” which flattens a more complicated legal history; the White Australia policy’s dismantling in the early 1970s is sometimes told as a clean, linear victory of enlightenment over bigotry, when the archival record shows a slower, more contested, more bureaucratically messy process driven as much by trade and foreign-policy pragmatism as by principle. None of this weakens the case against the golden-age myth – the asymmetry in scale and consequence between the two kinds of selectivity is real, and dispossession is not a rhetorical even-handedness exercise – but intellectual honesty, which is the whole of what I am asking the nostalgists for, has to apply to my own side of politics as readily as to theirs. A history assembled only from the facts that flatter the story you already wanted to tell is not history, whichever direction the flattery runs.
What Knox Actually Leaves Us
Here is the useful, almost accidental gift of a forgotten boys’ travel book: it lets the colonies of 1888 describe themselves in their own words, before anyone had a political incentive to tidy the picture up. Knox’s Australia is confident, expanding, provincial, occasionally cruel, genuinely diverse in its labour and settlement patterns, entirely un-federated, religiously and ethnically contested, and organised around a racial hierarchy that had not yet been given the National Origins Policy’s neat legislative form because it did not yet need one – colony-level exclusion laws were already doing that work. None of this is the golden age. It is simply a year, inconveniently specific, sitting exactly where the myth wants to plant its flag, and refusing to hold it up.
That, in the end, is what I would say to the people who cannot answer my question. Culture is not a photograph you can return to; it is a river, and every generation stands in a different stretch of it, inheriting sediment from upstream and depositing its own. Australia’s sediment includes British common law and Christian feast days, and it also includes Wiradjuri and other First Nations law that predates all of that by tens of thousands of years, the Chinese and Afghan and South Sea Islander labour that built the colonial economy Knox toured, the Jewish, Lebanese, Italian, Greek and Vietnamese communities that followed, and the ongoing, unfinished work of reckoning honestly with dispossession that is still not complete. A person is free to love any part of that river they like. What they are not entitled to do is insist that their preferred tributary must be treated as the only legitimate one by everyone else, backed by state power. The mirage will keep receding for as long as they keep walking toward it, because there was never any water there – only light, bent just enough to look like something worth chasing.
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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, July 2026
