The Queen is Dead appears months before the referendum on the Voice,a referendum that tests our ability as a nation to move towards reconciliation. Grant recognises the significance of The Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is,he writes,a gift of love,and in this one phrase he summons up the reasons why it so desperately needs to be accepted. The Statement from the Heart,let us remember,calls for Voice,Treaty,Truth and this year’s referendum is a request to commence that journey.
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There is an unresolved tension in this book around the possibilities of reconciliation:at one point,Grant writes:“There is no justice for the immense crimes that have been committed here.” But he also recognises that the thirst for vengeance leads to the very politics of identity that he deplores.
Hope,he claims,lies in religion. Grant is a committed Christian,while acknowledging the apparent contradiction:“Why would we look to a Christian god? Isn’t this the faith of the coloniser? Didn’t those who brought the Bible also bring the gun?”
I wish Grant dove deeper into this dilemma,a dilemma I have seen playing out today in Uganda,where homosexuals are being killed in the name of a religion that is also the legacy of colonialism. There are obvious parallels with the African-American church. In both cases,an alien faith is re-imagined and becomes the source of comfort and forgiveness for some.
I want to ask Grant to explain how he can be a Christian while maintaining that “translation is colonisation. Every translation is an act of betrayal”. Is it not also the case that translation can be an act of liberation,of bridging tribal loyalties and hatreds?
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Despite its title,The Queen is Dead is not an argument in favour of a republic. Grant challenges the limited ambition of Australian republicans,whose focus is limited to replacing the symbolic rule of King Charles III with a largely powerless head of state. “How silly,” he writes,“to think that becoming a republic would give us meaning.”
But this is almost a throwaway line in a book that feels more like an extended conversation,moving seamlessly from childhood in the bush to the corridors of power in Washington and Beijing.
ThroughoutThe Queen Is Dead,Grant is torn between anger and love,between a deep bitterness for the harms inscribed in his family memories and his desire to find ways to transcend them. I am reminded of Freud’s comment that:“Only in logic are contradictions unable to coexist;in feelings. they quite happily continue alongside each other.”
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The strength of Grant as a writer lies in his willingness to reveal the contradictions that lie at the heart of how we understand contemporary Australia.
When he is writing of Country,Grant is a poetic and moving writer;when he writes of the continuing denial of Indigenous suffering,there is a searing anger that demands empathy.
In the spirit of the Uluru statement,Grant has shared his own deep struggles to make sense of his place in the world. In the year of the Voice,his struggle speaks to all of us.
Stan Grant is a guest at Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au).
Dennis Altman is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University. He is the author ofGod Save the Queen:The Strange Persistence of Monarchies. His novel, Death in the Sauna, is published by Clouds of Magellan.