Tony Abbott's 'Australia: A History' Criticized for Culture War Tropes

“Go forth in search of dragons to destroy,” Tony Abbott, in a lyrical moment, tells his audience at the Sydney writers’ festival.

Certainly, there is no rest in Australia’s seemingly endless culture wars, the Manichean struggle of good versus evil, righteous versus ignoble, the virtues of straight-talking versus the perils of nuance and complexity.

“This is a good country, not a bad country,” Abbott declares, for those playing along at home.

The former prime minister’s dragon metaphor on Friday was a reflection on the deployment of the Australian military – he argues Australian F-35s should have been dispatched to America and Israel’s war to bomb Iran – but Abbott’s call to arms could have been for any number of dragons that need slaying: environmentalism, welcomes to country, multiculturalism, dual-placenames, republicanism.

Abbott has written Australia: A History. And it is that, a history, one which prosecutes a very particular conception of what this nation is, and how it came to be.

The false dichotomy of Black Armband versus Three Cheers history felt antediluvian when I first encountered it at school (too many decades ago now). A tiresome debate then for ancient, irrelevant figures.

That it is being litigated again in 2026 is evidence of how little Australia has progressed, how there is, for some, almost a comfort to be found mired in the same, tired old culture wars.

Abbott’s talk – with no questions from the audience – hit all the predictable notes.

Donald Trump should “finish the job in Iran”, Australia has a “core Anglo-Celtic culture … a foundational Judeo-Christian ethic”, the country has suffered because of “the injection of this concept of multiculturalism”.

Abbott believes great and powerful people (usually men) shape world history – he cites “Alexander the Great or Richard the Lionheart or Nelson or Wellington or Napoleon”.

“In the end what happens in this world is far less a function of great impersonal forces beyond our control, but of the decisions, for better or for worse, that individual people make.”

Did I imagine that pandemic?

Make no mistake, Abbott can write.

He can be eloquent and erudite, waxing especially lyrical when he is on the firmer ground of favoured subjects such as the government of John Howard (“arguably our best prime minister” and in whose cabinet he served).

Elegiac even, when (briefly) talking about his own premiership, or reflecting on the “destructive political cannibalism” of recent political history, the antipodean bloodsport of tearing down political leaders.

But self-reflection is not a strong suit. “One of my former colleagues made my life almost impossible,” he bemoaned.

Et tu Brute?

And Abbott is blind – wilfully so – to so much.

He glosses over the role of state governments in Australia’s history, despite their fundamental significance in the lives of Australians every day, in policing, in providing hospitals, in educating children.

He is sceptical of climate change, rejecting the view that “the science is settled”.

Over years in public life, Abbott has, admirably, dedicated significant time to sitting on country, meeting with Indigenous communities and leaders. But he seems to have learned little from it.

His book does not mention genocide at all (the word features once in the book, in an endnote, the title of a different book).

He rejects the term “First Nations” as fundamentally misleading, and celebrates the defeat of the voice referendum, repeating the canards of racial division from the no campaign, knowing that the question was never about race at all, but about indigeneity.

Even within his arguments, internal inconsistencies abound.

He says he disapproves of Indigenous acknowledgements of country – “metastasized into a form of separatism and a practice of grievance politics” – but his disapproval is selective.

“If I’m at Hermannsburg … and someone stands up and says, ‘look, you’re in Warlpiri country’, or if I’m in Alice Springs and someone says ‘you’re in Arrernte country’, fair enough, because there are lots of Warlpiri people and Arrernte people around.

“But if I’m in Forestville and someone says, actually, I’m in Tony Abbott country.”

Hermannsburg, also known as Ntaria, is on the traditional lands of the Western Arrernte people.

Abbott describes Australia as “colourblind”, surely not an experience that accords with that of any person of colour in this place. To claim to be colourblind is the privilege of the unoppressed, of one who has never had to live with the grinding miserable small-minded racism of everyday existence for millions in this country.

But he then argues that there are too many migrants who haven’t signed up to his (narrow) version of Australian values.

He writes: “It seemed that at least some of our recent migrants were living in ‘hotel Australia’ rather than joining ‘team Australia’. It’s our broadly Anglo-Celtic culture and fundamentally Judeo-Christian ethic that’s made our country attractive to migrants from all over the world.

“Yet it is record migration, without any effective discrimination on values, that could put this at risk.”

So which is it? The colourblind country, or the polyglot boarding house?

It takes only a small act of grace to imagine the world, or the history of this country, from another’s perspective.

But the book does not assent to that.

The Lucky Country, as originally penned by Donald Horne, was not a compliment, but a scathing, vituperative criticism: that Australia is safe and stable and prosperous not because it is well-led, but because of sheer dumb luck, coasting by on the flukes of geography, natural abundance and the achievements of other nations.

“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck,” Horne wrote. “It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”

An inability to be honest about one’s own past is just another sorry example.