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Reader competitions have a long and lustrous place in the annals of publishing, but the key is to announce your contest ahead of the curve, whip up enthusiasm and watch your circulation soar. Alas, while Quadrant loves new subscribers, the whiff of an idea to award a prize to the sharpest-eyed reader was too slow out of the starting box. The notion had been to gift a book to the person who spots the first of this year’s inevitable columns lamenting the national shame that is Australia Day. Like those Yuletide depictions of Mary and Joseph as a homeless couple (they weren’t) every year brings its crop of hankie-wringers. “Look at me!” they proclaim, “While you bogans scoff your sausages, I’m having a serious and ultra-virtuous snivel.”
Well, neat idea that it was, there will be no Quadrant Online competition, not this January in any case. Martin Flanagan has beaten us to the punch, and all his fellow guilt-mongers as well, with a column in today’s Age.
Australia Day is our Confederate flag. It’s not that a better date can’t be found – a worse date can’t be found. The great historical divide in this country is between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. No day brings that divide into sharper or deeper focus than January 26, and an occasion which supposedly exists to bring us together serves each year to drive us apart.
So, the arrival of the First Fleet is the moral equivalent of a political system that defended slavery to the tune of 600,000 lives. More than that, Australia is allegedly “divided”, even though the most obvious division is the entirely inconsequential gulf between those who do rather nicely spouting tear-stained cliches from ivory towers, in the oped pages of dying newspapers and at each other’s literary festivals. Good work if you can get it, but hardly proof of a societal schism.
Here at Quadrant Online we’ll just have to come up with a fresh reader competition. But not to worry, there are opportunities aplenty. Anzac Day is coming, so with Aborigines and indigenous empathy set aside until next January, a fresh crop of eagle-eyed social critics and lazy writers (pardon the tautology) will be spotting jingoism, militarism, class oppression and, inevitably, national shame far and wide.
If you can be bothered, Flanagan’s thoughts can be read via the link below. Don’t expect anything fresh, however. You have read them countless times before.
— roger franklin
