Abstract
Jonathan Lear, inRadical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation,movingly writes: ‘We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name … It is as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse’. It is this ‘vulnerability’ and ‘anxiety of collapse’ that has led to what has been called in Australia the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ and the ‘terror of history’ which refers to the silence that surrounded the Stolen Generations and still surrounds the psychic distress of our indigenous first peoples. This article explores Lear's statement in terms of the psychic pain of a culture founded upon waves of migration and traumatic dispossession to think about the question ‘What does it mean to live here?’ And what can that teach us about the formation of identity and cultural identity?
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