This is a mania, clearly. A specific and common European mania. The political calculus appears to be that making such statements is an entirely cost-free exercise. Except that it isn’t. Because nations whose leaders appear to be constantly offering up apologies for their country’s history may finally appear (in a world in which such apologies are prodigious from some countries yet entirely absent from others) to be nations that have special cause for such guilt. If Australia is forever opening up and apologising for its own past while China remains silent, the impression may eventually be instilled, in children in Australia as much as anywhere else, that Australia is the country with more to apologise for. And while upgrading big historical mistakes into genocides may be cost-free for polemical scholars and ambitious politicians, they focus an impression of wrongdoing that may eventually burrow not only into the world’s view of a particular nation but deep into that nation’s view of itself.9

Beyond an appropriate level of historical humility what can actually be achieved by the extremes of such a tendency? Even if Australia had been born in sin, there is nothing that can be done to rectify it, other than – centuries after its founding – for everyone in Australia to be divided out by race and those believed to have descended from the earliest settlers ordered to hand over their wealth to anyone believed (after appropriate genetic testing) to be descended from indigenous peoples. The genetic codes of those of mixed race would perhaps be adjudicated by a genetics court, which – depending on the findings – might then order people to give up some wealth, get a cash windfall or keep a precise amount, depending on their DNA tests. If theft is the crime then restitution is the only possible punishment.

Absenting such an unlikely conclusion the interim agreement appears to be that Australians can continue to reside in Australia so long as they live in a state of perpetual remorse, an attitude supplemented by regular tribute to Aboriginal culture, including Aboriginal art and the generalised depiction of indigenous culture as possessing some especial purity or truth that can then be compared unfavourably with contemporary Australia. In recent years this trope has developed into Australia’s version of the ‘noble savage’ myth.10 This portrays what went before the present as better or purer even where it was demonstrably worse. It depicts as sympathetic those behaviours that would ordinarily cause people to abandon sympathy. It is a fashion of romantic primitivism that may have come to fruition in modern Australia, but does not only exist there. Another country that can now be blamed as an export of the Europeans is the one that, by economic standards, is also the most successful country on earth.