Whereas for contemporary Europeans, colonialism is just one of our middle-ranking, midway sins, for Australians colonialism has become the nation’s founding, original sin. And not because like European nations it stands accused of having plundered other countries in its search for wealth, but because it stands accused of plundering itself – of being a colonialist project still sitting on its colony. For Australia colonialism is said to have started at home. Today’s Australian schoolchildren are taught that whatever its present virtues, their nation was founded on genocide and theft. The fact that those original colonial forces were also white and European makes the act unsurpassably worse than it would be were the story the equally familiar one of dark-skinned peoples taking land from other dark-skinned peoples. The conquering of one group by another and the ill-treatment of the losers by the victors is the story of most nations on earth. But for Australians the historic treatment of the Aborigines and other ‘first peoples’ is a subject that has in recent decades moved from the margins of public debate to the core – to the country’s deepest, founding sin. Strangely, this narrative of guilt seems actually desired and welcomed by Australian society.

As with anything that people truly desire, some inflation of the truth is bound to occur along the way. And so in Australia the policies of missionaries and officials in removing some Aboriginal children from their parents (the ‘stolen generation’) has even been promoted to a ‘genocide’.5 It has been the focus of numerous popular books, films, government inquiries and repeated apologies from politicians including prime ministers.6 Rebuttals are hard to introduce because even the most extreme claims are welcomed whereas their contradiction is only taken as evidence of the culprit’s ongoing denial and racism. As a consequence, all that appears left open for discussion in Australia today is what degree of compensation ought to be distributed to Aboriginal communities for this historic hurt. The cumulative effect of this ingrained guilt has caused a palpable change in the world’s impression of Australia and in the country’s image of itself, from a generally sunny and optimistic place to one that has become palpably darker, not to mention mawkish about its past.