Empty-hearted Country or Shining Land: On the Discriminations of Postcolonialisms in Australia and New Zealand
Mark Williams

Writing in 1985, Simon During described New Zealand as beginning to know  itself in Maori terms; in Australia, he discerned a 'crisis of emptiness' caused by the continued silencing of indigenous voices.  Over the next decade the differences in the way each country negotiated a postcolonial identity were played out in cultural policy directions, figured in literary texts, dramatised through the assertions of minority identities, and reflected in the way each country managed the intersections of economic and cultural policy. While Australia, under Paul Keating, positioned itself as 'part of Asia' and promoted itself as a vibrant multicultural destination, New Zealand,  under David Lange, embraced biculturalism and acknowledged its cultural situation as a Pacific nation.

In this paper I argue that these seemingly contradictory stances responded to a common crisis - the vulnerability of national identities formulated around settler concerns, adjustments to the new imperatives of an expansive capitalism, the fragility of traditional pastoral economies - and that neither country resolved the underlying problems.  My purpose is to consider, with particular reference to New Zealand, how assertions of indigenous rights, rearticulations of national imageries, and the conscripting of international intellectual and economic trends, were all caught up in an energetic but confused period of cultural revaluation that resulted in a greater sense of distance between the two countries than at any period in their history.  The nations that emerged refurbished by this process of redefinition looked backwards as well as forward, inward as well as outward, but rarely sideways at each other.  What connected them was the blindness by which historical patterns of settler consciousness influenced efforts to reconfigure the nation in the eyes of tourists and migrants as well as citizens.  What separated them were the dramatically different ways in which ethnicity was enlisted - immigrant versus indigenous - in the enterprise of rebranding the nation by purging it of the embarrassing legacy of colonial dependency.