By making an investment in the nation and its symbols a prerequisite to commencing the process they call ‘reconciliation’, nationalists are not really ‘offering’ reconciliation at all. Rather, they are seeking to reconcile an image of the nation into which they themselves are already invested, and so too are invested in preserving.

The purging of ‘foreign elements’ from the workforce is part of a considered and frightening long-term approach by the Coalition – far too often supported by the ALP – to undermine universal concepts of human rights, politicise citizenship and redefine the meaning of national sovereignty. It puts the Morrison Government squarely in the same mould as the right-wing nativist regimes blighting Poland and Hungary.

The Test is a PR exercise and its omissions are glaring. Most notably, the issue of what actually led this immensely talented team to cheat in South Africa and the ongoing questions associated with it are never addressed. Instead, the viewer is taken through a tediously familiar narrative, littered with Anzackery and generalised notions of what it is to be ‘Australian’ as the team charts a heroic path from despair to triumph in the space of little more than a year.

The Memorial redevelopment completes the transformation of the Anzac myth from one earlier generations would have recognised –a muted, reflective phenomenon, for all its ahistoricism – into the triumphalist spectacle it has become today.

In his book White Nation, Ghassan Hage argued that Australians who feel entitled to the ‘fantasy position’ of whiteness enact ‘governmental belonging’: a sense of one’s own innate right to decide how others are positioned within, or excluded from, the space of the nation.

The visions of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon haunt me, more than a decade on. No glowing heroics, their battlefield a terrifying, futile sound-and-fury for ‘these who die as cattle’ (as in ‘Anthem for a Doomed Youth’). Sassoon’s ‘Counter-Attack’ is a disorienting frenzy of terror and violence, in a landscape ‘rotten with dead’. Owen’s hellish gas attacks in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ linger vividly: ‘… the white eyes writhing … blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer …’ Considering the body-destroying horror of our technological advances in weaponry – atom bombs, napalm, semi-automatic rifles – Owen’s words ring out like an accusation, a trauma collapsing time.

I was stopped by immigration officials and asked questions like: why had I travelled to India in the past? Why had I stayed so long on my previous trip? What were the full names and professions of the friends I’d be staying with? What was my job? How many books had I written? After about an hour of this, and despite having a valid visa and an onward ticket to Bangladesh, I was refused entry to India and ordered to book the first flight back to my port of origin.

The question is, rather, to what extent does the crackdown on foreign influence, and the media blitz surrounding it, needlessly alienate the Chinese-Australian community, and prepare the ground for a possible resurgence of actual anti-Chinese racism? In raising these questions, people have naturally pointed to Australia’s history of suspicions and scare campaigns towards immigrants from China.

Every dollar of the $88 million the Department of Defence is contributing towards the Monash Centre is a dollar not spent on, say, bettering the material and mental lives of Australian veterans, 325 of whom suicided between 2001 and 2015 (almost six times as many as Australian Defence Force personnel have been killed in conflict since 2001).

This scandal differs from the typical cycle of outrage: we’re not angry, we’re dejected. The reporting and comment have been elegiac. Commentators appear to be genuinely upset. ‘I have never seen such emotion and anguish on a national scale,’ wrote journalist Tracey Holmes. ‘Please tell me this is a bad dream,’ former Australian captain Michael Clarke tweeted. Speaking on ABC Grandstand the day after the event, a tearful Jim Maxwell sounded as if he was broadcasting from a funeral. So what exactly is being mourned?

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was designed to keep Australia white via the administration of a dictation test in any European language. Because no prior notice of the chosen language was given, the test was impossible to pass. Dutton’s test was not quite so blatant in its discriminatory intent, but the level of English it required (IELTS level 6) would nevertheless have excluded almost everyone other than native speakers.

Emerging in the wake of a British music scene divided along sharp political lines – the Clash identified as leftists, the Sex Pistols as anarchists, while the Jam (by way of differentiation rather than conviction) initially aligned themselves with conservatism – Morrissey cut a thrillingly protean figure. It was precisely his cultivated opacity, in matters of gender and sexuality especially, that appealed to the kinds of outsiders he made the subjects of so many of his lyrics.

Time itself has waged war on the statue and its very meaning: the source of despair is no longer its grandeur, but the forcefulness of its wearing away at the hands of nature. This is a warning to all humans, but particularly to those who clutch at immortality – even the most elementary forces of history will overpower their hubris.

The third battle of Ypres did not fit easily into this celebratory narrative. Despite having played a leading role in the British victories at Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, the Anzacs’ contribution to the offensive ended in muddy, bloody defeat in front of Passchendaele. It was hardly the stuff upon which to build a bellicose national legend.

Peter Drew’s latest project appears to be a response to the criticism aimed at his previous campaigns, which highlighted the erasure of Aboriginal folk, the traditional owners of this land called ‘Australia’. Indeed, as some of the new posters proclaim, this is Aboriginal land – but when juxtaposed with the slogan ‘Real Australians Seek Welcome’, the cognitive dissonance is unmissable. How does one ‘seek welcome’ in a land that is not theirs to begin with, while simultaneously grappling with questions of what it means to be ‘Australian’?

This is what Klein would call a ‘race toward weightlessness’, a key tenet of contemporary corporatism, which holds that the real work of companies is marketing, not manufacturing – that they are in the business of creating images rather than things. Howie’s claim that ‘lamb is the nation’s favourite meat’ is demonstrably false, but it is the idea itself that matters, framed as it is by language that is both inclusive (‘lamb stands for unity’) and nationalistic (‘Australia is the greatest country on earth’).