WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.260 The Hindmarsh Island affair is one which explores those most contentious issues in an admirably 2 00:00:07.260 --> 00:00:15.460 clear-headed and even-handed way, and I think in ways that have let us hope, put the case 3 00:00:15.460 --> 00:00:20.660 for the secret women's business as something to be deeply respected. 4 00:00:21.880 --> 00:00:29.400 The third speaker will be Peter Balharts, who is actually sitting in position number 5 00:00:29.400 --> 00:00:30.000 four here. 6 00:00:32.700 --> 00:00:37.640 Peter, some of you met this morning at the session on fundamentalism, and you will know 7 00:00:37.640 --> 00:00:47.820 that his interests range through many aspects of social theory, but he's particularly distinctive, 8 00:00:47.960 --> 00:00:49.880 I think, in being able to combine 9 00:00:50.660 --> 00:00:57.000 postmodern approaches and a dedication, I think, a commitment to rethinking socialism 10 00:00:57.560 --> 00:01:00.220 for the late 20th, early 21st century. 11 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:05.820 He too is currently working on a study of Australia, which I understand is to be called 12 00:01:05.820 --> 00:01:12.280 The Unhappy Country, which I imagine is at least an allusion to the famous text of Donald 13 00:01:12.280 --> 00:01:19.560 Horne's of the 1960s, The Lucky Country, where he berated us all for being smug lotus eaters. 14 00:01:20.580 --> 00:01:24.540 The fourth speaker will be Tamina Faryal, who is sitting in the middle. 15 00:01:24.740 --> 00:01:26.640 Some of you met her this morning too. 16 00:01:27.460 --> 00:01:35.200 She's a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, but has lived 17 00:01:35.200 --> 00:01:39.900 a great deal of her young life, I should say, I think, in Pakistan. 18 00:01:41.660 --> 00:01:46.880 And the fifth speaker is Seth Shostak, an astronomer. 19 00:01:47.300 --> 00:01:49.540 Now we wonder what an astronomer will have to say about the world. 20 00:01:49.560 --> 00:01:53.800 I don't have much to say to us about identities, but the title of one of his recent books is 21 00:01:53.800 --> 00:01:58.280 Sharing the Universe, Perspectives on Extra-Terrestriality. 22 00:02:02.860 --> 00:02:08.640 And so perhaps we might learn something about the relationship between possible alien identities 23 00:02:08.640 --> 00:02:09.460 and our own. 24 00:02:09.520 --> 00:02:10.060 Who knows? 25 00:02:10.140 --> 00:02:11.900 It's an entirely open question. 26 00:02:12.640 --> 00:02:18.000 So the topic that this panel will address is Uncertain Identities. 27 00:02:18.260 --> 00:02:18.940 National. 28 00:02:18.940 --> 00:02:23.840 virtual. And I wondered when I first saw the topic whether it meant national, virtual, 29 00:02:24.440 --> 00:02:29.000 or various other kinds of identities, like there might be three dots and you might think 30 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:34.340 of various other kinds of identities. But certainly the question of identity has been 31 00:02:34.340 --> 00:02:42.040 a great preoccupation of postmodern culture. And indeed, Ihab Hassan has written recently 32 00:02:42.040 --> 00:02:49.680 that we might even see contemporary culture in terms of a continuous exercise of self-definition, 33 00:02:49.780 --> 00:02:57.800 constantly asking the question, who am I? Who am I and where? Indeed, he refers to the 34 00:02:57.800 --> 00:03:06.360 clamours of identity. But certainly identity has proved to be an absolutely crucial stage 35 00:03:06.360 --> 00:03:12.020 in the political definition, self-definition, of many groups who had previously been 36 00:03:12.020 --> 00:03:17.900 without a major public voice. And I'm thinking of women, I'm thinking of indigenous peoples, 37 00:03:18.020 --> 00:03:23.980 I'm thinking of gay people, I'm thinking of multicultural groups within a multicultural society. 38 00:03:24.380 --> 00:03:29.600 So an assertion of identity has been the basis of a politics, and yet there are problems 39 00:03:29.600 --> 00:03:36.220 with this fixed identity, I think. So perhaps the phrase uncertain identities is inviting 40 00:03:36.220 --> 00:03:40.300 us to think about some of the positive as well as some of the negative implications 41 00:03:40.300 --> 00:03:41.120 of uncertainty. 42 00:03:42.080 --> 00:03:47.320 Anyway, I'll leave it to our speakers to raise those, Many 43 00:04:03.020 --> 00:04:10.640 actually to be invited to speak at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas and very happy to have an 44 00:04:10.640 --> 00:04:13.740 excuse to return to Adelaide in style, so to speak. 45 00:04:15.700 --> 00:04:21.640 Though born in Egypt, I've lived three quarters of my life in the United States and consider 46 00:04:21.640 --> 00:04:22.500 myself American. 47 00:04:23.700 --> 00:04:28.300 The question of identity, therefore, is crucial, I think, to the talk I'll be giving tomorrow, 48 00:04:28.300 --> 00:04:34.780 but I can't miss this opportunity to declare my puzzlement about the notion of identity 49 00:04:35.540 --> 00:04:37.460 and seek your advice, actually. 50 00:04:38.560 --> 00:04:40.360 The mystery for me is this. 51 00:04:41.660 --> 00:04:43.900 Identity exactly with what? 52 00:04:45.220 --> 00:04:47.180 The question is not frivolous. 53 00:04:47.740 --> 00:04:54.620 Language is cunning, as you know, in both concealment but also in revealing some of 54 00:04:54.620 --> 00:04:57.080 the hidden and embedded meanings in it. 55 00:04:57.080 --> 00:05:05.280 So, with what is a person supposed to conform or correspond or to be identical with? 56 00:05:06.460 --> 00:05:11.600 Is it perhaps an inner sense that bestows on us authenticity? 57 00:05:12.920 --> 00:05:17.680 Or is it an outer norm that grants us belongingness? 58 00:05:18.100 --> 00:05:20.480 Or is it a combination of both? 59 00:05:21.560 --> 00:05:26.180 I ask because authenticity and belonging are not the same, necessarily. 60 00:05:27.080 --> 00:05:34.600 Though in traditional or collective societies, these two meanings can merge, or they can 61 00:05:34.600 --> 00:05:36.460 be made to merge. 62 00:05:37.200 --> 00:05:39.600 They are coerced into merging. 63 00:05:40.920 --> 00:05:43.760 Well, the cat is out of the bag. 64 00:05:44.020 --> 00:05:48.220 By using the word coerced, I have betrayed my prejudice. 65 00:05:49.660 --> 00:05:51.700 I value authenticity above belonging. 66 00:05:51.940 --> 00:05:57.060 Though I recognize that many, many people would need it. 67 00:05:57.060 --> 00:05:57.500 I value both. 68 00:05:58.600 --> 00:06:05.280 And I realize also that authenticity is an individualist value, not necessarily shared 69 00:06:05.280 --> 00:06:08.460 everywhere in the world, let alone in the cosmos. 70 00:06:08.960 --> 00:06:13.220 What would identity look like on planet X, I wonder? 71 00:06:14.360 --> 00:06:15.600 You'll hear about that in a moment. 72 00:06:18.720 --> 00:06:24.480 So authenticity is a value that I hold to personally. 73 00:06:26.280 --> 00:06:27.040 I'm not a person. 74 00:06:27.040 --> 00:06:27.640 I can tell you why. 75 00:06:28.640 --> 00:06:33.720 A great deal of politics is physiological, Emerson said. 76 00:06:36.400 --> 00:06:38.340 But forget my values now. 77 00:06:38.500 --> 00:06:40.020 Let's look together at the world. 78 00:06:41.680 --> 00:06:43.620 Clearly, identity has become the rage. 79 00:06:45.080 --> 00:06:53.040 Empowered by culture and religion, by race, gender, and class, identity has become a major 80 00:06:53.040 --> 00:06:56.820 issue, often lethal, in our geopolitics. 81 00:06:56.820 --> 00:06:59.200 Many Many 82 00:06:59.200 --> 00:06:59.440 Many 83 00:06:59.440 --> 00:07:00.820 the 84 00:07:00.820 --> 00:07:22.660 the, the more 85 00:07:22.660 --> 00:07:32.120 The more vengeance and vindication are required to achieve dignity, the more violence must be released. 86 00:07:34.060 --> 00:07:39.080 History may be written by the victors, but it's the losers who remember. 87 00:07:41.680 --> 00:07:46.400 Therefore, it won't do a bit of good to say that identity is constructed. 88 00:07:47.160 --> 00:07:48.100 It's a silly word anyway. 89 00:07:48.100 --> 00:07:57.440 Need, anger, pain, belief will make the construction more enduring than the pyramids at Giza. 90 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:00.560 My point is obvious. 91 00:08:01.500 --> 00:08:11.160 Identity has become a historic issue because in the aftermath of colonialism, in an age of globalization, as we say, 92 00:08:11.360 --> 00:08:18.080 in a time of diasporas, large populations feel deprived. 93 00:08:18.100 --> 00:08:24.120 They feel displaced, dispossessed, disenfranchised, feel mad as hell. 94 00:08:25.740 --> 00:08:33.360 The cry for recognition rings everywhere on this planet and echoes perhaps in outer space. 95 00:08:35.760 --> 00:08:39.720 Victims and victimizers both claim to be victims. 96 00:08:41.500 --> 00:08:45.120 But does the cry also ring a little hollow, I wonder? 97 00:08:46.260 --> 00:08:48.080 Now, that's a gnarled and trite question. 98 00:08:48.100 --> 00:08:52.540 A tricky and prickly question which I can't hope to engage here. 99 00:08:53.600 --> 00:09:02.620 Let's just say that there are limits to what grievance can achieve, as even suicide bombers must know. 100 00:09:04.100 --> 00:09:05.760 What then is the solution? 101 00:09:06.800 --> 00:09:09.700 I'm afraid I have no solutions, only suggestions. 102 00:09:10.700 --> 00:09:15.840 The suggestions refer to both the geopolitical and personal levels. 103 00:09:16.980 --> 00:09:18.080 On the geopolitical level, there are no solutions. 104 00:09:18.080 --> 00:09:26.260 On the geopolitical level, it's clear that the wealthiest nations must address the problems of poverty, disease, and oppression everywhere. 105 00:09:28.080 --> 00:09:30.720 I really have nothing original to add here. 106 00:09:31.460 --> 00:09:38.680 Every leader of the developed world, whether sincerely or hypocritically, has spoken to this point. 107 00:09:39.040 --> 00:09:46.140 Every speaker at this festival has touched or will touch on this issue. 108 00:09:47.320 --> 00:09:48.060 Every speaker at this festival has touched or will touch on this issue. 109 00:09:48.080 --> 00:09:52.580 It's on the personal level that my suggestion may seem a bit strange. 110 00:09:55.080 --> 00:09:56.680 The first suggestion is simply this. 111 00:09:57.220 --> 00:10:01.400 Let's recognize, indeed cultivate, multiple identities. 112 00:10:01.600 --> 00:10:03.720 Not a single, but multiple identities. 113 00:10:05.100 --> 00:10:14.100 That's the main theme of Amine Malouf, that's the other Malouf, French Malouf who lives in Paris, of Lebanese origin. 114 00:10:14.600 --> 00:10:18.060 That's the theme of Amine Malouf in his very same book, The 115 00:10:18.080 --> 00:10:18.860 The theme of Amine Malouf in his very same book, The 116 00:10:18.860 --> 00:10:20.860 called In the Name of Identity. 117 00:10:22.420 --> 00:10:26.880 Amine Malouf should know he grew up in ravaged Lebanon, 118 00:10:28.080 --> 00:10:33.220 and he was torn as a human being in 16 different directions at the same time. 119 00:10:35.060 --> 00:10:39.280 Beyond that, beyond the cultivation of multiple identities, 120 00:10:39.700 --> 00:10:41.540 and more radically perhaps, 121 00:10:42.020 --> 00:10:46.080 consider that the solution to the problem of identity is, 122 00:10:46.180 --> 00:10:48.140 get lost. 123 00:10:48.780 --> 00:10:53.060 The solution to the problem of identity is, getting lost. 124 00:10:54.060 --> 00:10:56.240 Now that's a spiritual solution, 125 00:10:57.180 --> 00:11:01.960 honored by mystics and visionaries of the so-called Via Negativa. 126 00:11:03.140 --> 00:11:06.440 But it may lie beyond the grasp of most of us, 127 00:11:07.180 --> 00:11:11.560 simply because we lack the mystics' powers of self-abnegation, 128 00:11:11.780 --> 00:11:13.380 self-dispossession, 129 00:11:14.180 --> 00:11:15.780 self-emptying, 130 00:11:16.180 --> 00:11:20.320 and even, we find it very hard to think against ourselves. 131 00:11:23.180 --> 00:11:25.060 But if not the mystics' way then, 132 00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:30.840 what about making our identities more uncertain rather than less? 133 00:11:32.040 --> 00:11:35.360 What about making our identities more uncertain? 134 00:11:35.740 --> 00:11:40.820 What about calming the clamor of our ideologies and partisanship, 135 00:11:41.180 --> 00:11:43.780 of our needs and our desires? 136 00:11:45.000 --> 00:11:46.160 What about making our identities more uncertain? 137 00:11:46.160 --> 00:11:46.820 What about making our identities more uncertain? 138 00:11:46.820 --> 00:11:49.620 And what about evolving, however slowly, however painfully, 139 00:11:49.900 --> 00:11:53.140 toward a politics not of rights, 140 00:11:53.260 --> 00:11:55.260 not even of responsibilities, 141 00:11:56.320 --> 00:12:00.160 but a politics of outright giving and receiving? 142 00:12:00.920 --> 00:12:03.820 That's a point I think that another speaker here, 143 00:12:03.900 --> 00:12:04.960 whom I have never met, 144 00:12:05.120 --> 00:12:07.280 Ghassan Hage, has addressed. 145 00:12:08.800 --> 00:12:11.220 As you see I am leaving you with questions, 146 00:12:11.380 --> 00:12:13.220 questions, not even suggestions. 147 00:12:13.220 --> 00:12:20.220 The questions, however, and this is my concluding comment, point in one direction. 148 00:12:21.280 --> 00:12:26.040 They recognize the limits. I say the limits, not the futility. 149 00:12:26.360 --> 00:12:33.000 They recognize the limits of reason and power in resolving human conflicts. 150 00:12:34.300 --> 00:12:38.760 We repeat history not because we forget or remember it. 151 00:12:38.760 --> 00:12:42.300 We repeat history because of what we are. 152 00:12:43.820 --> 00:12:51.680 A little de-identification then, a little self-evacuation may help us to change. 153 00:12:52.200 --> 00:12:53.320 Thank you very much. 154 00:13:02.160 --> 00:13:03.700 Thank you very much. 155 00:13:03.720 --> 00:13:06.260 And there's something for us to think about right from the beginning, 156 00:13:06.300 --> 00:13:08.420 about whether the uncertainty of identities 157 00:13:08.420 --> 00:13:08.740 between the two of us is really the most important thing. 158 00:13:08.760 --> 00:13:12.500 And this might not be the principle that needs some emphasis now. 159 00:13:12.760 --> 00:13:20.200 Now our next speaker, Margaret Simons, will give us her ideas about uncertain identities. 160 00:13:21.600 --> 00:13:22.780 Thank you. 161 00:13:28.580 --> 00:13:33.960 Well, the reason I'm here today and indeed at this festival is because of my most recent book, 162 00:13:34.120 --> 00:13:36.520 which is about the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair, 163 00:13:36.580 --> 00:13:38.740 which of course is an episode of the 164 00:13:38.760 --> 00:13:44.500 recent Australian history, which resonates here in this city more than any other. 165 00:13:45.300 --> 00:13:48.680 The story of Hindmarsh Island, which is, for those who don't know, 166 00:13:48.820 --> 00:13:51.220 the island that sits at the mouth of the Murray River, 167 00:13:51.580 --> 00:13:57.940 is more than anything about Australians in landscape and Australian communities in landscape, 168 00:13:58.240 --> 00:14:03.980 and particularly, of course, South Australians in landscape and indeed Adelaideans. 169 00:14:04.580 --> 00:14:08.740 In fact, it is here with us now, in this city, that we are. 170 00:14:08.740 --> 00:14:14.160 In the landscape of North Terrace and among the institutions we see strung out along this boulevard, 171 00:14:14.280 --> 00:14:20.140 celebrating or perhaps enforcing a particular way of understanding and thinking about the world 172 00:14:20.740 --> 00:14:21.580 that I want to begin. 173 00:14:23.000 --> 00:14:25.900 Indeed, I think it's a little ironic that I'm here, 174 00:14:26.460 --> 00:14:31.300 because in the early pages of my book, I took a bit of a shot at the Festival of Ideas. 175 00:14:31.660 --> 00:14:33.980 And I'm going to be brave and read that bit. 176 00:14:35.580 --> 00:14:38.720 Adelaide is a nice town and a comfortable place to live. 177 00:14:38.720 --> 00:14:43.080 They call it the Athens of the South because its climate is Mediterranean 178 00:14:43.720 --> 00:14:46.240 and its intellectual life said to be so lively. 179 00:14:47.060 --> 00:14:50.220 The centre of that intellectual life is North Terrace. 180 00:14:50.580 --> 00:14:56.800 This street, Adelaideans like to call it a boulevard, represents civilisation and scholarship. 181 00:14:57.580 --> 00:15:01.920 The city's cultural credentials are strung out along it in what appears to the visitor 182 00:15:01.920 --> 00:15:06.840 as a single campus stretching from the city down to the River Torrens. 183 00:15:08.060 --> 00:15:12.040 Adelaide hosts one of the best and first arts festivals in Australia. 184 00:15:12.500 --> 00:15:16.800 It's held every second year and many events are in the rolling parklands 185 00:15:16.800 --> 00:15:20.920 that stretch from North Terrace down to the Torrens, grandly called a river, 186 00:15:20.980 --> 00:15:24.860 but in fact one of the many creeks that trickle out of the dry Adelaide hills. 187 00:15:26.000 --> 00:15:30.540 The Torrens though has been damned to make a lake and there are ducks and paddle boats 188 00:15:30.540 --> 00:15:35.980 and green lawns and the Festival Centre, an extension of the cultural precinct of North Terrace. 189 00:15:36.840 --> 00:15:41.460 In the years when there is no Festival of Arts, Adelaide holds a Festival of Ideas. 190 00:15:41.700 --> 00:15:44.560 It is both a fine and a worrying thing. 191 00:15:45.260 --> 00:15:51.500 It is wonderful that in this small city ideas are fated and sizeable crowds turn up 192 00:15:51.500 --> 00:15:54.620 to the North Terrace venues to hear thoughtful people speak. 193 00:15:55.340 --> 00:15:59.260 Here is civilisation at its pinnacle, one is tempted to think. 194 00:15:59.820 --> 00:16:03.520 The desert on the other side of the hills is somehow held back. 195 00:16:04.480 --> 00:16:06.820 And yet there is the worrying thought that the city is a place of the past, 196 00:16:06.840 --> 00:16:11.680 that at least some big and wild ideas are unlikely to be fated at Adelaide's festivals. 197 00:16:12.680 --> 00:16:15.360 Adelaide is a self-consciously civilised city. 198 00:16:15.920 --> 00:16:21.780 Perhaps cities on the edge of deserts must necessarily be either self-consciously civilised 199 00:16:21.780 --> 00:16:23.640 or self-consciously lawless. 200 00:16:25.080 --> 00:16:27.960 Well, I am here, which I didn't know I would be when I wrote that. 201 00:16:29.880 --> 00:16:35.920 And perhaps that fact that I'm here means that I'm wrong about some ideas not being debated here, 202 00:16:36.840 --> 00:16:40.780 because of course I have written a book which overturns or at the very least challenges 203 00:16:40.780 --> 00:16:45.960 what has been the conventional wisdom on an episode of recent Australian history. 204 00:16:46.700 --> 00:16:52.040 To an Adelaide audience, perhaps it's not necessary to detail what this was all about. 205 00:16:52.380 --> 00:16:57.080 How in 1995 a Royal Commission held just a few city blocks from here 206 00:16:57.080 --> 00:17:02.340 and with some of the denizens of this boulevard as key institutions, as important witnesses, 207 00:17:02.620 --> 00:17:05.960 found that Aboriginal women had lied about their culture. 208 00:17:06.840 --> 00:17:11.700 A finding which I believe any fair-minded assessment of the evidence now on the public record, 209 00:17:11.960 --> 00:17:16.380 including that in my book, would have to conclude was almost certainly wrong. 210 00:17:17.220 --> 00:17:23.640 The story of how and why the Royal Commission was wrong is a story about secrets and power in this city 211 00:17:23.640 --> 00:17:25.000 and how they work. 212 00:17:25.820 --> 00:17:30.140 It's also a story about Adelaide's identity and its fragility. 213 00:17:30.980 --> 00:17:35.740 But of course I'm all wrapped up in that because I am an Adelaide girl, brought up in Adelaide. 214 00:17:35.740 --> 00:17:40.140 And when I come here I have that difficult ambivalence of true homecoming. 215 00:17:41.060 --> 00:17:45.760 I am of course also the sort of person, the sort of participant in civil society, 216 00:17:45.900 --> 00:17:47.440 who speaks at festivals of ideas. 217 00:17:48.560 --> 00:17:53.820 But I am aware of the people who are not here, condemned to be the subjects of my discussion 218 00:17:53.820 --> 00:17:55.640 rather than participants in it. 219 00:17:56.460 --> 00:18:00.320 Civil society is a very fine thing, I don't want to suggest otherwise. 220 00:18:00.660 --> 00:18:02.040 Here we celebrate it. 221 00:18:02.600 --> 00:18:05.720 But very angry people can find it hard to participate. 222 00:18:05.740 --> 00:18:11.780 Or to speak with ease, or indeed in this venue here today believe that they will be heard 223 00:18:11.780 --> 00:18:15.740 or fit themselves to these forms and these venues. 224 00:18:16.560 --> 00:18:18.980 I'm speaking among other things of the Narenderi. 225 00:18:19.340 --> 00:18:24.200 The people who eight years ago were found in this city to be liars. 226 00:18:25.700 --> 00:18:30.860 But let me return to my own identity and Adelaide and how we're all wrapped up together. 227 00:18:31.940 --> 00:18:33.340 Some things strike me. 228 00:18:33.380 --> 00:18:35.720 Some things in common with the rest of our society. 229 00:18:35.740 --> 00:18:37.380 Some things in common with Australia and some unique. 230 00:18:38.120 --> 00:18:43.100 One is of course the dependence on water, the dependence indeed on the Murray River, 231 00:18:43.760 --> 00:18:46.440 the mouth of which this story is all about. 232 00:18:47.740 --> 00:18:52.440 The fact that we meet here in a circle of irrigated green, a circle of parkland, 233 00:18:52.620 --> 00:18:54.420 that we're dependent on that river. 234 00:18:55.740 --> 00:18:57.800 And of course there is our short history. 235 00:18:59.540 --> 00:19:04.560 Sometimes I, like others I suspect, are weary of the eternal debate Australia has 236 00:19:04.560 --> 00:19:05.540 about its identity. 237 00:19:05.960 --> 00:19:11.360 But I think it is understandable that we do so, necessary, and that it can be healthy. 238 00:19:12.380 --> 00:19:16.420 Older countries after all have longer histories, longer European histories. 239 00:19:16.840 --> 00:19:22.020 And as a result they have densely mythologised relationships with their landscapes. 240 00:19:22.820 --> 00:19:25.580 Although I was brought up in Adelaide, I was born in England, 241 00:19:25.800 --> 00:19:32.660 I still remember trips to this or that place, clambering all over Roman ruins as a girl. 242 00:19:32.660 --> 00:19:34.760 Every place had a story. 243 00:19:35.640 --> 00:19:39.940 Here we Europeans are obviously going to be caught self-consciously, 244 00:19:39.940 --> 00:19:44.380 wrong-footed much of the time, working out what we might be. 245 00:19:46.060 --> 00:19:49.980 Hindmarsh Island is of course about stories to do with the land. 246 00:19:50.540 --> 00:19:55.100 You could say it's about what happened when two sets of stories about the land, 247 00:19:55.300 --> 00:19:59.860 two sets of identity bound up with the land, met and clashed. 248 00:20:00.980 --> 00:20:02.640 The most easily European stories are the ones that are most easily 249 00:20:02.660 --> 00:20:09.620 accessible European stories of the land are of course to do with gardens in the desert. 250 00:20:09.800 --> 00:20:12.400 A hugely romantic and beautiful concept. 251 00:20:12.760 --> 00:20:15.160 It is of course a narrative of engineering. 252 00:20:15.520 --> 00:20:20.440 It's to do with barrages across the Murray Bath, with locks, with irrigation schemes. 253 00:20:20.880 --> 00:20:23.180 It's to do in fact with Adelaide. 254 00:20:25.460 --> 00:20:28.960 But the Narranderi stories of course are very different. 255 00:20:29.800 --> 00:20:32.640 And as I say the story of Hindmarsh Island, 256 00:20:32.660 --> 00:20:36.340 is about what happened when some of those stories clashed. 257 00:20:36.520 --> 00:20:39.780 The story of development clashing with older stories. 258 00:20:40.820 --> 00:20:44.040 I think one of the great tragedies of the story of Hindmarsh Island 259 00:20:44.040 --> 00:20:47.140 is that there are no devils and no angels either. 260 00:20:47.940 --> 00:20:52.400 Everybody in the story believed that they were working for the good of the nation, 261 00:20:52.620 --> 00:20:55.660 out of their own sense of the land and what it meant. 262 00:20:56.180 --> 00:21:00.060 As my book reveals, Ian McLaughlin and other people in Adelaide 263 00:21:00.060 --> 00:21:02.320 helped to precipitate the Royal Commission. 264 00:21:02.900 --> 00:21:06.740 Some of them played roles that we might well see as less than honourable. 265 00:21:07.220 --> 00:21:11.060 And yet they believed they were doing what was in the interests of the nation. 266 00:21:11.480 --> 00:21:15.680 They believed their sense of the land, their sense of identity, should prevail. 267 00:21:16.480 --> 00:21:19.700 Exactly the same could be said of the Narranderi people. 268 00:21:22.400 --> 00:21:27.680 I think that ours is still very clearly, very obviously a transplanted culture. 269 00:21:28.100 --> 00:21:31.900 And as we see here on North Terrace, the institutions reflect that. 270 00:21:32.820 --> 00:21:36.180 There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. It's inevitable. 271 00:21:36.800 --> 00:21:40.620 But it behoves us, I think, to reflect on what it might mean. 272 00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:44.080 The self-image of Adelaide and of European Australia. 273 00:21:44.500 --> 00:21:48.640 And perhaps the gap between who we think we are, who we would like to be, 274 00:21:48.800 --> 00:21:51.640 and who we really are and how we really do behave. 275 00:21:52.260 --> 00:21:56.380 Between the cultural strengths we proclaim and the things we really do. 276 00:21:57.600 --> 00:22:02.240 In my mind, these things can't be divided from recent Adelaide history. 277 00:22:02.660 --> 00:22:06.880 And our relationship to it. From the land and our relationship to it. 278 00:22:07.080 --> 00:22:12.860 And the stories all Australians must tell if we're to grope towards some kind of self-knowledge. 279 00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:16.920 And what I think must always be a vagabond sense of identity. 280 00:22:17.440 --> 00:22:18.100 Thank you. 281 00:22:28.260 --> 00:22:29.540 Thank you, Margaret. 282 00:22:29.660 --> 00:22:32.520 And I am glad that the Festival of Ideas Committee took up the challenge. 283 00:22:32.660 --> 00:22:36.180 From the beginning of your book to invite you. 284 00:22:36.220 --> 00:22:41.240 And I think that perhaps one of the big ideas that your talk raises for us 285 00:22:41.240 --> 00:22:45.640 is to think about whiteness as an element in identity. 286 00:22:45.640 --> 00:22:51.520 Which is often passed over and not seen as part of the power structure that operates in our culture. 287 00:22:52.880 --> 00:22:56.000 Now I want to introduce the third speaker of this panel. 288 00:22:56.180 --> 00:22:57.960 Peter Barlharts. Thank you. 289 00:23:06.500 --> 00:23:09.260 Thank you very much for coming. 290 00:23:09.360 --> 00:23:16.180 I was in conversation earlier with someone and the question came up where the younger people are. 291 00:23:17.380 --> 00:23:19.520 I suspect they're elsewhere having fun. 292 00:23:21.280 --> 00:23:26.920 But I want to take the liberty of offering my personal greetings to the youngest person in the room. 293 00:23:27.020 --> 00:23:28.460 The little creature here. 294 00:23:29.780 --> 00:23:32.340 And to suggest that if you want to know about, 295 00:23:32.340 --> 00:23:33.320 about identity, 296 00:23:34.520 --> 00:23:35.760 watch your children. 297 00:23:36.060 --> 00:23:37.380 Or watch our children. 298 00:23:37.960 --> 00:23:41.740 One of the ways to know about identity is to watch information. 299 00:23:47.340 --> 00:23:50.140 I'm in various people's shadows here. 300 00:23:50.300 --> 00:23:54.420 I think among others I'm in the shadow of Ihab Hassan. 301 00:23:55.680 --> 00:24:01.340 I follow him I think in a sense of ambivalence about our theme. 302 00:24:02.400 --> 00:24:04.280 I begin by wondering, 303 00:24:05.560 --> 00:24:07.860 so what's the fuss about identity anyway? 304 00:24:10.320 --> 00:24:16.500 Ihab has observed the paradox that we use the word identity to indicate its opposite. 305 00:24:17.460 --> 00:24:20.780 We actually use the word identity to refer to difference, 306 00:24:21.000 --> 00:24:23.580 to distinction, to what makes us different from one another. 307 00:24:25.980 --> 00:24:29.980 So in my broodier moments I wonder whether 308 00:24:29.980 --> 00:24:34.880 identity isn't a western middle class neurosis, 309 00:24:35.860 --> 00:24:38.100 a narcissistic obsession. 310 00:24:39.000 --> 00:24:43.500 I wonder how it connects to the tradition that we call romanticism. 311 00:24:44.420 --> 00:24:50.320 It was Rosa Luxembourg in the socialist tradition who claimed on her part, 312 00:24:50.980 --> 00:24:53.680 I am nothing and I should be everything. 313 00:24:55.560 --> 00:24:59.620 And then I think together with another thinker whom I find, 314 00:24:59.620 --> 00:25:01.580 inspiring, Zygmunt Bauman, 315 00:25:02.620 --> 00:25:06.980 that the concern with identity is an expression. 316 00:25:09.080 --> 00:25:10.620 It's a sign of the times. 317 00:25:12.060 --> 00:25:14.120 It's certainly a mark of exclusion, 318 00:25:15.120 --> 00:25:17.000 as the other speakers have observed. 319 00:25:18.360 --> 00:25:22.260 It also seems to me that thinking together with Bauman, 320 00:25:23.420 --> 00:25:29.200 we identify things as problems when they're under threat. 321 00:25:30.480 --> 00:25:34.440 We identify things as problems or as problematical when they no longer work. 322 00:25:36.560 --> 00:25:41.520 So it's plausible perhaps to suggest that we talk a lot about identity these days 323 00:25:41.520 --> 00:25:44.560 because identity is under threat or we feel that it's under threat. 324 00:25:46.800 --> 00:25:51.680 But again, these words aren't adequate to the kinds of problems we're trying to make sense of. 325 00:25:52.520 --> 00:25:57.360 I suspect that the obsession with the identity question 326 00:25:57.360 --> 00:26:03.280 is actually a concern not with identity but with community 327 00:26:04.260 --> 00:26:08.540 and with the question of community under the threat of globalization. 328 00:26:11.280 --> 00:26:14.600 Why? Simply because the question, who am I, 329 00:26:15.560 --> 00:26:18.520 very quickly becomes another question, who are we? 330 00:26:21.220 --> 00:26:26.960 My sense is that the concern with identity, identity politics, 331 00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:29.760 globalization, the postmodern, 332 00:26:29.980 --> 00:26:34.280 these are all words which express exasperation 333 00:26:34.900 --> 00:26:40.800 about the phenomenon of change and our incapacity to deal with it. 334 00:26:44.140 --> 00:26:47.480 Now the particular problem of identity as I see it 335 00:26:48.400 --> 00:26:50.720 has to do with the sense that it's mobile. 336 00:26:52.440 --> 00:26:54.380 Identity is constituted by movement. 337 00:26:55.220 --> 00:26:56.940 Humanity is constituted by movement. 338 00:26:57.820 --> 00:27:03.820 I share Ihab's sense that identity is not singular, it's not fixed. 339 00:27:05.300 --> 00:27:09.220 It's not essential, though our leaders apparently think that it is. 340 00:27:10.300 --> 00:27:14.580 It's marked by movement, by the movement of ideas and people. 341 00:27:15.780 --> 00:27:17.560 It's marked by multiplicity. 342 00:27:18.720 --> 00:27:24.320 What we have to deal with, however, is the nonsense that identities are fixed 343 00:27:24.320 --> 00:27:31.280 and that, for example, there is a firm distinction between something called good 344 00:27:31.280 --> 00:27:32.840 and something called evil. 345 00:27:33.720 --> 00:27:38.460 Or rather that we have to differentiate between good and bad people. 346 00:27:40.140 --> 00:27:43.240 This reminds me of Robespierre, I think it was Robespierre who said, 347 00:27:43.300 --> 00:27:46.800 I know of only two kinds of people, good citizens and bad citizens. 348 00:27:49.580 --> 00:27:54.300 Whereas in fact good people, as we all know, periodically disappear. 349 00:27:54.300 --> 00:27:57.340 They do bad things and bad people are capable of doing good things. 350 00:27:57.420 --> 00:28:00.860 The implication of which is that the categories really don't work at all. 351 00:28:02.600 --> 00:28:06.940 What we're living within, however, is a context in which there's a renewed 352 00:28:08.060 --> 00:28:13.100 prescriptive sensibility of good and bad people, of friends and enemies. 353 00:28:14.860 --> 00:28:21.500 And this is a kind of new traditionalism against the more practicable sense 354 00:28:21.500 --> 00:28:28.040 that identity is always mobile, multiple, or situational, or role related. 355 00:28:28.160 --> 00:28:30.460 We are each of us many things to many people. 356 00:28:32.980 --> 00:28:36.160 But we are also placed or situated. 357 00:28:38.420 --> 00:28:44.240 And here I refer to another thinker I've found useful over the pattern of the last several years, 358 00:28:44.900 --> 00:28:45.820 Bernard Smith. 359 00:28:47.580 --> 00:28:50.780 The claim of imagining the antipodes 360 00:28:50.780 --> 00:28:57.880 is that the antipodes, the place we live in, is not so much a place, 361 00:28:58.720 --> 00:28:59.920 but a relationship. 362 00:29:01.400 --> 00:29:05.600 It's a relationship formed between cultures, the cultures that we all come from 363 00:29:05.600 --> 00:29:08.440 and that we carry with us, residually or more strongly. 364 00:29:09.860 --> 00:29:13.360 It comes from identities that are formed in cultural traffic. 365 00:29:16.020 --> 00:29:19.700 Now that claim that the antipodes is a relation, 366 00:29:19.700 --> 00:29:21.140 rather than a place, 367 00:29:22.580 --> 00:29:27.960 sidesteps the question of what place is and what place means to us. 368 00:29:29.760 --> 00:29:33.240 I suspect that we do have a need of place. 369 00:29:34.620 --> 00:29:36.760 But often on this continent, 370 00:29:37.700 --> 00:29:39.700 what this means is colony, 371 00:29:40.540 --> 00:29:41.580 or city, 372 00:29:42.700 --> 00:29:43.480 or suburb, 373 00:29:44.700 --> 00:29:45.440 rather than nation. 374 00:29:47.760 --> 00:29:53.220 These things remain important because it seems to me that loyalty to place, 375 00:29:53.440 --> 00:29:55.740 however conceived, 376 00:29:56.500 --> 00:29:59.360 loyalty to place is a precondition of politics. 377 00:30:02.380 --> 00:30:04.620 But against this there's a broader issue as well, 378 00:30:04.700 --> 00:30:07.260 which I'll in passing try and discuss tomorrow. 379 00:30:07.860 --> 00:30:11.340 I want to suggest that Australia is an accidental nation. 380 00:30:12.740 --> 00:30:15.420 This refers to another broader issue, 381 00:30:15.420 --> 00:30:15.880 a broader question, 382 00:30:16.640 --> 00:30:21.960 which is that between the connection between identity and national identity. 383 00:30:24.640 --> 00:30:26.300 The question, who am I, 384 00:30:27.420 --> 00:30:29.900 is routinely raised within frames of belonging, 385 00:30:30.720 --> 00:30:32.000 geographical boxes. 386 00:30:33.040 --> 00:30:37.400 And I suspect that Australians have not done well enough yet 387 00:30:37.400 --> 00:30:41.940 at addressing the ambivalence of our nation state, 388 00:30:42.060 --> 00:30:45.080 the gains and losses of white Australia. 389 00:30:46.420 --> 00:30:49.240 We've failed sufficiently to make sense of the ways in which 390 00:30:49.240 --> 00:30:54.580 our state machine is a mechanism of inclusion or citizenship 391 00:30:55.240 --> 00:30:58.060 at the cost of substantial patterns of exclusion, 392 00:30:58.200 --> 00:31:00.180 which we've still of course yet to resolve. 393 00:31:02.620 --> 00:31:05.200 The point about the antipodes, however, 394 00:31:05.280 --> 00:31:10.620 is that in cultural terms we are always already global. 395 00:31:12.620 --> 00:31:14.000 Tuesday gone in Melbourne, 396 00:31:14.160 --> 00:31:15.040 Hilary McPhee, 397 00:31:15.040 --> 00:31:19.260 launched the latest issue of Mee Anjin at the National Gallery. 398 00:31:20.100 --> 00:31:23.160 And in discussion of the contribution of Clem Christensen, 399 00:31:24.040 --> 00:31:24.740 made the observation, 400 00:31:24.940 --> 00:31:26.880 I think Christensen's rather than hers, 401 00:31:27.740 --> 00:31:31.140