This is the best summary I could come up with:

It says a lot that for the past two decades clever advertisements for lamb have come closest to a state of the nation report: inventing, popularising and then demolishing the notion of being unAustralian as a proxy of identity.

At the end of the Great War, communities all around the adolescent Australian nation raised money to build monuments to grieve and commemorate the 60,000 volunteers who had lost their lives fighting for king and empire.

Each was unique – obelisks, arches, cairns, clocks, stairs, an armed soldier with bayonet drawn – but almost all evoked memory, often reduced to the imperialist Rudyard Kipling’s burnished words, Lest we forget.

Digitisation made official records accessible and cheap air fares delivered young people to distant battlefields to wipe a tear for great-great-uncles who only lived on in copperplate captured in cyberspace.

The great paradox is that the same tools that made these real and virtual journeys possible have generated a tsunami of information that makes it almost impossible to hold on to anything for long enough to begin to reflect.

The gap between the reality of the protracted and violent struggle to eliminate the First Peoples – which had been reported in graphic detail in the press and debated in parliament – and the more palatable myth perplexed me.

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