Friends, readers, Australians, lend me your imaginations and imagine this.
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What if every person who ever contemplated migration to Australia listened to and (timidly, unadventurously) heeded the inner voice that whispered to him or her "If you don't know, don't go"?
That doubt-stoked paraphrase and close cousin of the referendum "no" campaign's banal, contemptible but seductive slogan "If you don't know, VOTE NO" has probably been whispered into the ear of every prospective grown-up migrant.
![Picture by Keegan Carroll Picture by Keegan Carroll](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/Z4Q6sUEHdcmw72MBPYgZkU/a262ab0b-5fe7-47bf-a4a2-71181f7a7a7f.jpg/r0_256_5000_3078_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
To migrate is by definition to leave the known and to venture into the unknown. And yet here we are today, a nation unimaginable without migration. Almost half of all Australians have a parent born overseas and 7.5 million of us were ourselves born in foreign parts.
My point is that in matters of migration, and in all of life, a life lived without some ventures into the unknown is a life not worth living.
The same is true of nations, and so for example our beloved nation only exists as a nation because the bold bewhiskered leaders and plain people of the Australian colonies resisted their "If you don't know, DON'T DO IT" voices of doubt.
Instead they took the leap of faith into federation, a mighty unknown that dwarfs the wriggly little unknowns that seem (I am writing this before October 14's polling day) to be about to help spook today's faint-hearted Australians into saying "no" to the Voice.
Even the federal capital city in which I am scribbling these sentiments from the heart owes its existence to adventurous, imaginative thought. Who could have known with certainty that a brand new city could arise and be successful on bleak, empty, intended-by-God to at best be sheep paddocks, limestone plains beside an unreliably trickling, sluggish, platypus-infested creek of a river? At the time the forces of "If you don't know it will succeed then don't build it, especially there" were loud and doubt-stoking. But dreaming and daring prevailed and this miraculous metropolis arose.
Timid, frightened-of-your-own-shadows, so easily manipulated by bad-faith puppeteers, so adventure-averse Australians of 2023! Who are you? Our founding fathers would hardly know you.
As recently as last Monday the "If you don't know, VOTE NO" slogan leapt out at readers from a "no" campaign advertisement on the front page of the paper edition of The Canberra Times.
The advertisement's predominant colour was an eye-grabbing yellow, as if (I mused to myself in my bitterness) to illustrate the yellow-bellied yellow cowardy custard intellectual cowardice of not daring to challenge the ignorance of one's Not Knowing with some thought, perhaps even (perish the weird, contrary thought!) with a little actual reading.
READ MORE IAN WARDEN
The advertisement featured a photograph of a smirking federal Liberal senator (and why is it that the smirk is the signature facial expression of all Liberals?) above the legend "I am voting NO," in his imagination imagining (alas probably correctly) that he is a charismatic role model simple-minded Australians will want to imitate.
The "no" campaign's "If you don't know" has been an appeal to our incuriosity. What if incuriosity is now revealed as a national characteristic and we are found to be more a land of incuriosity than a land of a fair go?
Only love can break your heart *
Instinctively the disappointed "yes"-minded Australian looks for something positive, however teensy-weensy, in the sad angry catastrophe of the Voice debate and the triumph of the "no".
Dismayed-by-the-"no" readers, what are your teensy-weensy positives?
One of mine has been the reminder all this has brought of how much I deeply, truly love and care about Australia.
True love of one's country is a very hard thing to define (and I am not talking of banal, jingoistic, juvenile patriotism but something more like what Dorothea Mackellar does her inadequate best to say in her "I love a sunburnt country") but one does know when that love is alive and kicking and aching in one's bosom.
Born and bred Australians may, in their incuriosity, take their feelings for Australia for granted. But those of us who didn't grow up here but who now call Australia home (I was 19 when I came here from England) are more likely to have some confusions and to do some probing and investigating of our feelings about Australia.
The UK's Brexit vote gave my residual inner-Englishman some passing light bruising of the heart but there was something somehow remote and none-of-my-business about it. It was as if hard-to-fathom foreigners had done something naughty, silly and harmful to themselves.
But the distress caused me by my chosen country's ignorant and often racist "no" to such a modest request, to such a golden opportunity to show our First Nations people and the world a generosity of spirit, feels truly heartbreaking.
Readers, if the "no" has broken your heart then you have at last been shown that Australia, your country, is the core of your heart. Only love can, like this, smash a heart into smithereens.
And now that we've got that straight, we can see that, after a short convalescence, love of Australia requires that we forgive "no" Australians their trespasses, pick ourselves up, take a deep breath, dust ourselves off and start all over again to ask ourselves what we can do for our country.
* Title and sentiment of Neil Young's mournful, cautionary hit.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist
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