Introduction

A book on civilisation should very likely be full of wonderful lies, and a book on Australia would seem to require, almost as a matter of course, that lies be told. This much, at least, those two marvellously loaded words Australia and civilisation appear to share in common. 'It's all lies', wrote one of Australia's most civilised authors, David Malouf, in the closing scenes of his early autobiographical novel, Johnno (1975), 'And in the end perhaps it is ... Maybe in the end, even the lies we tell define us. And better, some of them, than our most earnest attempts at truth.' We live and die by the lies we tell and the lies we choose to believe. It seems to be in the nature of things that lies are the things that blind and bind us