What Does “Australia,” the Land of the Antipodes, Mean?

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I read The Songlines in the 1990s, during my long wanderings through South and Southeast Asia. As a long-term traveller, I found the book captivating. In many ways, it confirmed—and even justified—the restlessness that had driven me onto the road: the suspicion that sedentary life, borders, and property did not exhaust the human possibilities of inhabiting the world.

Since then, Bruce Chatwin’s work has been subjected to incisive criticism. His way of blending observation, invention, appropriation, and literary stylisation has been examined with a severity that, to a large extent, it deserves. In Argentina, his vision of Patagonia also aroused strong objections among those who had spent years reconstructing the region’s history of exploitation, workers’ resistance, and state violence. The distance between these approaches was profound. Where committed historical research encountered a story demanding restitution and remembrance, Chatwin found material for a literary composition governed by the traveller’s gaze and obsessions.

None of this erases the impact his work had on my own imagination. That travelling imagination also fitted the cultural background taking shape during those years: a world of apparently more permeable borders, global communications, and incessant movement; the world that the “new world order,” geopolitically proclaimed by George H. W. Bush, presented as the horizon of a finally unified humanity, and that we now recognise as the cultural configuration of neoliberal globalisation.

The traveller of the 1990s could imagine himself as an inhabitant of a planet that was beginning to open up. Travel appeared as a form of liberation from inherited identities, compulsory allegiances, and national borders. Movement promised a broader life, a receptiveness to difference, perhaps even an elementary form of cosmopolitanism.

Today, it is difficult to recover that innocence. We know that mobility was never distributed equally. While some of us crossed borders in search of experience, learning, or adventure, others were displaced by war, hunger, expropriation, or economic necessity. The same world that celebrated the circulation of commodities, capital, and travellers turned those who moved without the appropriate documents, money, or nationality into objects of suspicion. The road could be a choice for some and a sentence for others.

Australia occupied a particular place within that imagination. It was the land of the antipodes: the remote edge of the world, the place where it might be possible to begin again. In Mondays in the Sun, directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, even those expelled from the productive order by industrial restructuring can imagine Australia as a way out, as the name of a different life beyond the immediate horizon. That Australia belongs to the imagination of those seeking escape: a distant territory onto which the possibility of another existence can be projected.

But seen from Alice Springs, the image is reversed. Australia ceases to be the other side of the world and becomes the name of the political order that turned the first inhabitants of that territory into second-class citizens. For some, a promise of escape; for others, a historical form of dispossession. And perhaps it is precisely this reversal that forces us to ask what “Australia” really means.

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This essay emerges from the intersection between my memory of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and a recent report by Cédric Gouverneur published in Le Monde diplomatique. Returning to Australia through that report also compels us to read Chatwin differently.

Where the European traveller found a powerful metaphor for human nomadism, Aboriginal peoples recognised—and still recognise—a concrete web of territories, ancestors, obligations, memories, and forms of life. The songlines were not a romantic invitation to set out on the road. They were, and remain, a way of relating to the land and of keeping a world alive.

Gouverneur’s report begins in Alice Springs, in the heart of Arrernte country. There, Brian Youngy explains:

“Where the white man sees a desert, we see resources. We read the sand like a book and, when you use your GPS, we have our songlines.”

The scene condenses two radically different ways of inhabiting the world. One conceives the land as available space, property, and resource; the other recognises it as memory, relation, and home.

These are not merely two intellectual conceptions of territory. They are two practical worlds, two ways of understanding who we are, what we owe to those who preceded us, and what it means to belong to a place. For the colonial gaze, the land appears as an external surface that can be measured, divided, bought, and exploited. For Indigenous peoples, territory is not something possessed from the outside. It is a web of relations within which life acquires orientation and meaning.

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Colonisation begins when one of these ways of inhabiting the world claims a monopoly over reality.

Indigenous land can be declared empty because it does not conform to the European form of property. Its inhabitants can be judged backward because they do not organise their existence around wage labour, the market, and the proprietary individual. Their knowledge can be reduced to mythology, while the coloniser’s knowledge presents itself as a neutral description of the world.

This is why the decisive issue in Gouverneur’s report is not simply the continued existence of two different ways of relating to the land. It is the question of what Australia has done with that difference.

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Gouverneur describes a country that has incorporated Indigenous symbols into its public image for decades. Australia has celebrated Aboriginal art, recovered traditional place names, and turned certain elements of Indigenous cultures into part of its international identity. In Alice Springs, murals reproduce Indigenous motifs and galleries sell works by Aboriginal artists. The antiquity of these cultures forms part of the story through which Australia presents itself to the world.

Yet the same report shows that this cultural visibility coexists with profound social, political, and legal inequality. Many Aboriginal people live in deteriorated settlements, are vastly overrepresented in the prison system, and are frequently treated as a security problem. Aboriginal culture can be celebrated while actual Aboriginal people continue to be ignored, placed under supervision, or criminalised.

A fundamental distinction emerges here: some transformations alter the appearance of a society, while others alter its character.

The first are visible and easily incorporated into the story a community tells about itself. Names are changed, monuments are erected, festivals are organised, ceremonies are adopted, language is revised, and representations of diversity multiply.

None of this is necessarily irrelevant. Symbols can repair silences, restore visibility, and alter the limits of what can be said. It would be a mistake to dismiss them as merely decorative gestures.

But these transformations can coexist with structures that remain largely intact. A society can admire a culture, appropriate its stories, and commercialise its images without recognising its members as political interlocutors. It can celebrate difference so long as that difference remains confined to food, art, spirituality, spectacle, or heritage.

In this way, the culture of others appears as something visible and particular: their food, ceremonies, languages, clothing, kinship systems, and songlines. The dominant form of life, by contrast, remains invisible. It does not recognise itself as one historical culture among others. Private property, individualism, the market, the state, and a particular conception of citizenship simply appear as the neutral reality within which other ways of life must accommodate themselves.

This asymmetry makes it possible for a society to be multicultural without ceasing to be colonial. It can tolerate a plurality of cultural expressions so long as the dominant culture retains the exclusive power to determine the conditions of tolerance. It can invite others to share their customs without allowing them to participate in defining the common rules.

Deep transformations operate at another level. They do not merely alter the signs through which a society represents itself. They change how its members perceive others. They alter what a community considers intolerable, which voices it recognises as authoritative, and which forms of suffering it feels obliged to answer.

In other words, they transform its moral character.

The character of a society is neither a national essence nor a psychological disposition shared by all its members. It is the historical result of institutions, habits, affects, and narratives that teach us who fully belongs to the common world and who remains at its margins. It reveals itself in what arouses compassion or fear, in the inequalities that provoke outrage, and in those that come to be accepted as part of the natural order of things.

A society changes deeply when it ceases to tolerate practices it once considered normal. When it learns to listen to those it had reduced to silence. When the humiliation of others ceases to appear as someone else’s problem. When it understands that equality does not mean treating identically those who have been placed in radically unequal historical positions.

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The failure of the referendum on The Voice, held on 14 October 2023, makes it possible to measure the distance between these two forms of transformation.

As Gouverneur recalls, the proposal did not grant Indigenous peoples a right of veto or a separate sovereignty. It sought to establish a constitutionally recognised advisory body through which they could express their views on policies affecting them. Even so, 60 per cent of voters rejected the reform.

For many Aboriginal people, the defeat was not simply an institutional disagreement but a new humiliation: confirmation that Australia was prepared to celebrate their culture, but not necessarily to listen to their voice. “Why do they hate us so much?” asks social worker Walbira Murray in the report.

The campaign against the reform succeeded in presenting the specific recognition of Indigenous peoples as a threat to the equality of all Australians. The attempt to repair a historical inequality was translated into the language of privilege. Giving a particular voice to those who had been dispossessed and silenced for generations appeared to violate the neutrality of common citizenship.

This reversal is one of the most characteristic political operations of our time. Inherited inequality becomes invisible, while any attempt to correct it appears as preferential treatment. The majority presents itself as the potential victim of minorities. Reparation becomes discrimination. Memory is interpreted as resentment. The demand to be heard becomes a threat to national unity.

Abstract equality can thus become a mechanism for preserving concrete inequality.

The Aboriginal person can be accepted as an ancestral figure, an artist, or the custodian of an ancient spirituality. It is more difficult to accept that person as a contemporary subject, a citizen with a specific history, and an interlocutor whose words should acquire institutional form.

Societies tend to accept those they have excluded more readily when they appear stripped of demands. The other can be recognised as heritage, memory, or cultural identity so long as they do not challenge the existing distribution of power. Symbolic inclusion then becomes a form of neutralisation: the other is honoured precisely where they can no longer call us into question.

This is why The Voice, despite its institutional modesty, raised a qualitatively different issue. It did not merely ask that Aboriginal peoples be represented. It asked that they be heard.

And listening means something more demanding than tolerating. It means accepting that the other may say something capable of changing our decisions, our understanding of history, and the image we have of ourselves. It means recognising that the common world is not finished, and that those placed at its margins possess a word without which that world remains mutilated.

The referendum’s defeat therefore forces us to ask a more uncomfortable question: what does “Australia” really mean?

Does it mean belonging to a nation whose history begins with British colonisation and whose citizens appear before the law as formally equal individuals?

Or does it mean recognising that this nation was built on lands inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples whose sovereignty was never voluntarily ceded?

Can Australia incorporate the art, names, and stories of its Indigenous peoples without acknowledging that those cultures also contain conceptions of land, community, and authority capable of calling the existing order into question?

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The question does not concern Australia alone.

For several decades, it seemed that our societies were undergoing an irreversible moral transformation. The language of human rights became the shared vocabulary of public life. Freedoms were expanded, identities once persecuted were recognised, and openly expressing certain forms of racism, misogyny, or social contempt became unacceptable.

All this had real effects and should not be reduced to mere appearance.

But perhaps we mistook the modification of our forms of representation for a deep transformation of our character. Words changed, institutional codes changed, and the boundaries of what could publicly be said changed. It is less clear that the affects, hierarchies, and reflexes through which we decide who deserves protection, who may be heard, and which lives we consider expendable changed with the same intensity.

For years, the expansion of rights and the recognition of differences seemed to consolidate a culture of respect for human dignity, freedom, and equality. Seen retrospectively, many of those advances can be understood as superficial transformations in a precise sense: not because they were false or irrelevant, but because they did not completely transform the deeper dispositions on which our societies rested.

Today, we are witnessing a deeper transformation in the opposite direction.

Beneath the surface of that public culture of respect, a more visceral disposition is re-emerging. Fear of the other, the desire to punish, the defence of privilege, and impatience with demands for reparation no longer need to hide. What once had to be concealed now presents itself as candour. Cruelty is called realism. Indifference, common sense. Inequality, merit. Exclusion, self-defence.

We are not simply retreating on particular policies. The moral threshold of what can be tolerated is changing.

Entire populations can be treated as threats, burdens, or collateral damage. Those who claim rights are portrayed as privileged. Those who remember a historical injustice appear as enemies of social harmony. The majority imagines itself besieged by those it has kept in subordinate positions for generations.

The failure of The Voice belongs to this historical moment. Not because Australia is an exception, but because it shows with particular clarity the transition from superficial tolerance to a deeper reaction. Aboriginal culture may be celebrated so long as it remains in the museum, the mural, the festival, or the tourist narrative. It becomes threatening when it claims a voice capable of intervening in common decisions.

The problem of our time may not be that we have ceased altogether to believe in dignity, freedom, and equality. It is that we are discovering how far those words had been incorporated without fully transforming the dispositions that organise our relationship with others.

When conditions harden, the unresolved foundation reappears: the impulse to exclude, rank, and sacrifice.

That is the deep transformation we are living through.

And this is why the Australian question concerns us all. The issue is not simply what place Indigenous peoples occupy within a nation. It is what kind of society emerges when it ceases to feel ashamed of its own contempt.

The songlines made it possible to cross the land without reducing it to an empty surface. They recalled that the world was made of journeys, stories, ancestors, and obligations. They did not merely describe a geography. They taught a way of inhabiting.

Perhaps every society also possesses its own songlines: narratives that orient its steps, establish its forms of belonging, and determine who may appear within the common world. Some remind us that we depend on those who came before us and that no life sustains itself alone. Others repeat that the land is a resource, that everyone deserves what they possess, and that those who remain outside are a burden or a threat.

The question raised by Australia today is not whether it sufficiently appreciates Aboriginal culture. It is whether it is willing to be transformed by it.

And that question applies to all of us. A society does not change deeply when it adds new symbols to its public image. It changes when it allows historically excluded voices to alter its understanding of itself; when it ceases to turn difference into ornament and recognises in it an authority capable of calling the whole into question.

A community ultimately reveals its character not through the cultures it celebrates, but through the voices it is prepared to hear.

The quotations from Brian Youngy and Walbira Murray are taken from the report by Cédric Gouverneur listed below.

References

Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.

Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.

Gouverneur, Cédric. “La indignación de los aborígenes en Alice Springs: ‘Un racismo sin precedentes por parte de la Australia blanca.’” Le Monde diplomatique en español, July 2026.

León de Aranoa, Fernando, dir. Mondays in the Sun. Written by Fernando León de Aranoa and Ignacio del Moral. Spain, France, and Italy, 2002.

Uluru Statement from the Heart. 26 May 2017.