A trip to Uluru defined my Australian identity.

I think a lot about the Australian identity. I sometimes wonder if it will be one of the defining questions of my life.

In David Miller’s 1995 book, On Nationality, he defended the concept of nationalism by arguing that there is a deep sociological need that is tied to our own self identity which the national identity fills. The truth, at least for me, is that I rarely feel Australian. I feel deeply disconnected from inane and corrupt political landscape, the tepid and inept monopolistic media, the meandering languishing of our nations direction and the incoherent, clumsy iconography of a truly unique part of the world.

Is there a glue which holds the people on this land girt by sea together?

As a child the concept is simple. I used to think that glue could be felt when 100,000 football fans reflected during a minutes silence on Anzac Day. Standing tall but dwarfed next to my proud Dad, the Italian migrant whose Father fought for Mussolini in Ethiopia and thinking of my Mums Grandfather buried outside Berlin who died fighting Fascism and Hitler. The glue was a recognition of the sacrifice of our forefathers and unthinkably squandering it.

By the time I hit high school I thought the glue was our ‘melting pot’ of multiculturalism. A mongrel myself this glue resonated deeply as part of me and in my friends with surnames like Xi, Reynolds, Papadopoulos, Nguyen and Chen. Learning, growing and understanding that this world is only filled with people of different creed.

When I left school, it was blindingly following Western Democratic exceptionalism and a faith in unfettered capitalism to solve all the worlds problems. That refugees on boats and Muslims in the Middle-East will just ‘get it’ if we show them how good life is when you get to drive fast cars and play Texas Hold ’Em. The glue was starting to show signs of ignorant optimism. Simply put that anyone can make it in this country if they work hard, but they have to work hard.

I find the Australian identity today most clearly painted by Brown Cardigan, a satirical meme page broadcasting typical Australian behavior. You know, yelling at swooping magpies with colourful larrikinism. Cooked units on roller blades rolling down the streets of Byron soundtracked to Everybody Hurts by REM. Aussies yelling ‘dog c***’ at each other.

Today I find myself returning to the question. The era of post-truth has delivered a world where facts don’t matter. A period of ignorance and obscurantism, growing increasingly impossible to see where you belong and who you are. The historical understanding you gain from reading Horne’s ‘The Lucky Country’ or researching scholarly work that defines us as an ‘anxious nation’.

It became clear to me that there had been a willful coddling of the Australian mind and a more ominous ignorance to it. The inevitable consequence of decades of higher education funding cuts, growing and increasing inequality, loss of community, privatisation and the blind faith in the vision of ‘Big Australia’. Running Australia like a business. Sans ambition Australia feels run by a Board of Directors.

This shouldn’t be all that of a surprise when you think on it. Australia’s geographic location and record breaking run of economic prosperity had insulated us from the problems of the technologically globalised world. The property explosion made a lot of people rich as if through osmosis. Pulling apart the social fabric from those well off and those who missed out. Stigmitising ‘others’ by putting them behind linked fences or locked up in indefinite detention. Hugging close the warm embrace of our far away but familiar colonialism for fear of immediate neighbours.

So what is my national identity? Why is it so important to me?

Does it come from the half-Italian, half-Australian mongrel upper middle class private schooled upbringing of the 90s in suburban Melbourne?

Is it the goon drinking, bush doof nihilistic hedonism of the post 00s world?

Is it the multiple Metricon home owning, jet-ski riding, Mercedes ute driving tradie that is broadcast into our homes for the last decade as the pinnacle of Australian can-do-ism?

None of them fit. Part of me hates them all.

In 2018, my brother broached a trip to Uluru. He wanted to climb it before the climb closed forever. The choice of climbing the rock is a litmus test of your “wokeness”. I reconciled that I wouldn’t ever climb it years ago even if I never openly proclaimed or advocated against it. As time went on the majority of Australians probably agreed it was an archaic tourist attraction that harmed First Nations people.

My brother never saw it as a political or moral question. His decision was based on the spirit of many Australians before him. A reckless, intrepid spirit that sees the desolation of the Australian Outback and wants to feel it physically, through exertion and exhaustion.

“It’s a big rock and when I see a big rock I want to climb it” he would say.

The first time I saw the rock from the plane I instantly felt the power of it. There is nothing else but mostly flat scored earth and this giant rocky monolith smoothly protruding like a freckle on sun burnt skin. This feeling only increases when you’re on the ground. You know that your thoughts are probably the same as those 10,000 years ago. This is a meeting place, a landmark, a history and a story. It’s not just a rock.

On our second day my brother still intended to climb it. When we arrived in the park and approached the base of the climb, we could see it was closed due to wind. What you can also quite clearly see, even from a distance, is the worn path of decades of climbers. After seeing this, and reading the sign, I like to think my brother was beginning to think better of climbing. Instead we walked around the rock. It’s not a long trek, just 10 kilometers.

When you walk around you find waterholes, caves and physical scarring. The places where Gods are born. In one place three parts of the rock have all been sliced out by eons of rain and wind which forms parts of the evidence for the Dreamtime story of Kuniya and Liru.

A day walking and observing goes by quickly and a highlight of the trip is seeing the rock change colour at sunset. When it does the brown rock changes to a vividly statured red, then a dull orange before becoming black, outlined by a rich midnight blue of a looming desert night sky. It all happens in 30 minutes or so and the rock is gone.

It’s a bit of a drive back to the park entrance so it got dark. Real dark. A desert at night is unsettling for city folk. While driving we approached a faded white Holden VS Commodore with its hood up and two people standing by it. An indigenous woman was tentatively waving for help but it wasn’t clear it was an emergency. The cars ahead of us flew past some what understandably.

I flicked on the hazards and pulled over. I didn’t ask my brother, I just stopped. I rolled down my window. ‘You guys need help?’

What occurred to me immediately was how foreign I felt in that moment. Total darkness apart from four car headlights, thousands of miles from Melbourne, two aliens asked four locals if they were the ones who needed help.

One of the women, Marlee, explained in an accent so thick I had difficulty understanding that they had run out of fuel. Two teenagers waited in the back seat, doors open with their legs dangling out. ‘You guys want a lift back to town?’

The Corolla that felt spacious with just my brother and I suddenly became humid and heavy with four people now crammed in the back seat.

We spoke about Football. They supported Collingwood, the suburb I happened to be living in. We spoke about music and when I mentioned Frank Yamma they started howling how much they loved him. I asked what his lyrics were about and Marlee simply replied ‘Family. Being with family ya know?’ Despite obscure commonalities I still felt deeply disconnected.

‘You got a hose?’ Marlee asks. I don’t, of course. One of the teenagers fashions a coke bottle into a funnel. As I sat alone in my car, texting my brother that they were now refueling a bright flash on the horizon flicks in the corner of my eye. A fierce storm is unfolding probably hundreds of kilometers away.

When they refueled they took off with me behind them. All the while out of the park I kept glancing out the passengers window at that storm. Its violent beauty unfolding while I’m speeding at 120km/h in an empty desert. My phone dings with a new message.

Something compelled me to stop. I needed to stop. I needed to be alone.

Near the exit of the park I pulled over again, turned the engine of and exactly like Homer Simpson looking at the stars when his mother left, I opened the door, perched on the metal hood and watched the storm in front of me.

The best seat in the cinema of Australia. The movie of Uluru-Kata Tjuta. There was no sound. Not a single decibel. It was the quietest moment of my life and in the distance was the most violent display of nature unfolding I had ever seen.

The storm did not stop. Flash after flash after flash. Sharp forks and hypnotic waves of light in the distance. For the first time in a long time I saw Australia as beautiful. I felt like this was my home. This was mine and this was yours and to all those who were here before. Time stopped in that moment.

The hair on my arms stood up and chilled to the bone, I cried.

As I left the park a few minutes later the piercing red brake lights of the Commodore were waiting at the exit. Marlee had waited for me concerned when my headlights disappeared behind them. ‘What happened to you?’ they asked when I pulled along side them.

I didn’t have an answer that felt satisfying. I didn’t know how to explain the clarity I had just experienced.

‘I’m okay. Thanks for waiting.’

Like I had done for them, they had done for me. Concerned for someone they didn’t know, they waited so they could help if they needed to. As the fork to town came up, we tooted our horns and watched the brake lights fade into black.

I have an answer for what it means to me to be Australian. An idea for what glue holds us together. Despite decades of growing inequality, a pandemic where we were shamed for caring for our community, government principles that has pitted us into tribal ideologies, I’m sure of it. Despite it all, being Australian to me means simply a patience for others to catch up. An unspoken duty to help. An understanding that we are all the same and not the same. A connection to this land that has placed us here from all different lands and penetrates deeper than anything placed on it or taken from it.

That’s my national identity.