They own the prestige
Whichever way you swing it, the mainstream avenues of politics, academia, culture and the arts remain shut to Australians — by which we mean ethnically aware Australians, for no other kind exists. Of these closed domains, the cultural theatre is among the most commanding: art, literature, film and music, or what still passes for them in this digital age of low attention, low input and low participation.
The arts shape consciousness. They furnish shared symbols, narratives and emotional frameworks through which a people interpret their collective past, present and possible futures. These forms organise perception by selecting which experiences are rendered significant, which conflicts define the zeitgeist, and which moral lessons will govern behaviour.
Literature supplies the language and interior perspectives that allow a community to recognise itself across time. Film compresses and intensifies those recognitions through image and sequence, making abstract social forces viscerally present. The visual arts fix enduring icons that anchor memory and identity. Together they create the repertoire of stories and images from which a society draws its sense of continuity, its standards of the admirable or the intolerable, and its capacity to critique or affirm its own arrangements. Cultural production, in short, participates in the formation of common consciousness; it does not merely decorate it.
Yet these avenues are blocked to us. Instead of identifying and unifying those who, through ancestral toil and establishment, created a country reflecting the values, iconography and culture of its pioneering peoples, we confront a parasitic ideology that uses the same mediums to alter, demean, shame and control—to demoralise. Access is granted only to those who submit to the dominant ideology. That ideology rules through institutional pressure rather than popular consent, because it is an invasive set of coded assumptions and behaviours.
One need not be consciously nationalist to feel the effect. Take an average White male who dreams of becoming an author. He writes from the perspective of things he knows. He does not inhabit the didactic world of “progress” with its obligatory signifiers of gender identity, racial embarrassment and historical revisionism. He may simply want to write about alienation from a country now ruled by these isms. He will not find a mainstream publisher. He may self-publish on Amazon and hope someone of influence notices. His lived experience — a phrase so often invoked by the revisionists — is ignored. The official literary story of the country becomes untrue because it selects only the ideologically acceptable narratives.
The publishing world, like academia, is run by and for chauvinistic White liberal females. A writer may equal Tolstoy in profundity and storytelling ability and still must wait for posthumous discovery. The prestige will not accept him. Yet who decided we must accept their prestige, which has reorganised every cultural aspect of Australian life?
Why has nothing effective been done? The would-be author does not live in a vacuum. Even if he possesses a clear idea of what should replace the present order, reaching the great outspoken yet apathetic mass remains extraordinarily difficult. We are all sick of the mainstream news and its skewed editorials that advance the same ideological project as the arts, yet we return to it from habit. It has greater range, and the social-media channels that might otherwise disseminate alternatives are themselves policed. Lack of money is a more honest explanation. Most existing “alternative” outlets, moreover, are constrained by the non-liberal predator that is conservatism — which is no better. The distance from the conservative and the far-right isn’t much at all when it’s national contains no social.
Let’s make our own prestige
We need to retake the culture on our terms. We must turn our backs on everything they control and cut the cord to the demoralising structures of an occupied society. Even if that society remains a shell we cannot fully penetrate, we can erode it from within by creating culture they cannot control. Prestige? We will decide what deserves it, and nothing in the mainstream will qualify.
We will write books for ourselves and nominate the best of them according to our own standards. We need a sub-economy built by us and for us. We will buy and sell for our own to our own. When they release a film like The Odyssey, thick with race-based historical revisionism, we will work low-tech and digital to make films of our own. Then we will judge the best by criteria that are ours.
If you dislike the conversation, change it. If you dislike the culture, make your own — or resurrect the one that was taken. When they turn Anzac Day into a vehicle for Aboriginal grievance, we will simply turn our backs and hold our own ceremonies. When they dilute or cancel Australia Day in the name of “diversity,” we will celebrate it ourselves and keep the Australian spirit alive through this occupation, just as our Diggers did in the great patriotic war against Japan.
Their arts have no taste and no flavour. While they swallow the bland slurry of official culture, we will feast on the sharp, flavoursome work that comes from our own nationalist recipes. This is not standard propaganda. It is rebellious, earnest and sincere art beyond their control. If the will is present, our will shall be done. █