The Land of Plenty

I just finished reading Mark Davis’ ‘The Land of Plenty – Australia in the 2000s’, and it turned out to be a pretty easy to read summary of the period in Australian history destined to be termed ‘The Howard Years’.

The book is hit and miss, with a summary of economic rationalism (or ‘radical conservatism’ as Davis terms it) that’s pretty much par for the left wing course, and the resulting discussion around a myriad of issues such as nationalism, citizenship and industrial relations, doesn’t add much to tracts written around the period in question. However, my lukewarm reaction is probably due to the supreme force of Davis’ previous work Gangland, which was all kinds of amazing. It was every good first book, except on crack. Davis didn’t just challenge the established order, he utterly pulverised it. So in comparison, The Land of Plenty seems to amble along in the beginning, caustic and potent in places, but never feeling truly alive with fresh ideas.

The second half of the book has slightly more weight behind it though, even reading it only a year after publication. Davis situates the mood in Australia, very much around questions of geography, identity and control, noting the paradoxical demand of border protection, at a time when national borders seem to be collapsing. But Davis goes further than simply positing an other to mainstream Australia though, and instead highlights the internal breakdown of the social contract – that is, the collapse of a workable model of citizenship, which leads people accepting the removal of rights and protections for others. While the high point for heated discussions around border protection was no doubt in early 2000s, the recent furore over the seventy-eight asylum seekers on the Oceanic Viking, shows that these cultural, geographic and political issues which Davis raises, have yet to be solved.

Yet these questions are all subsumed, under the one key question to the entire debate. Davis argues that ‘everywhere, people are asking the same question: who are “we”?’ and chastises the backers of the ‘utopian, post-racial’ promise of globalisation. This is an interesting criticism, which should be unpacked further. It was this sort of talk, which typified Obama’s election in the United States. His candidacy and speeches were at one level or another imbued with a utopian, transnational identity (through birth, identity and perception), almost as if he was trying to lay legitimate claim to the mantle ‘Leader of the Free World’.

However, Davis isn’t asking Australia to rigidly fix itself to an identity but instead do the work that Obama has already done. Obama was born a global traveller, who could have lay claim to any number of countries, before going through a serious identity crisis and laying down roots in South Side Chicago. He found out who ‘he’ was. In a fashion, that’s exactly what Davis is asking Australia to do: to search for a positive global identity.