A question of fear

The closing years of the last century and most of those of the first decade of the twenty-first century will be remembered in the history of Australia as the time when the country lost its image of innocent carefreeness and wellbeing-an image that had seemingly always represented Australianness. This long-held identity was lost when the federal government of the period could have chosen to engage the country in a dialogue about ideas of difference, but decided instead to join the USA and the UK in a brutal war against what it labelled "the forces of darkness".