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THE centenary of Federation promised us the opportunity to re-imagine ourselves and take pride in our achievements. But, by and large, we have done little more than attempt to retouch the image of Federation, to retell the story within its original terms of reference. And we have tended to doze off in front of the television when the Federation story comes on.

What a lost opportunity, for by remembering in this purely celebratory but inevitably half-hearted way we have really been forgetting. Deliberately forgetting.

We are forgetting that the primary motivation for Federation, the only issue on which Australia really wanted to maintain an independent line from London, was race. Federation set in place three distinctively local initiatives: White Australia; protection of the industry and trade of white men; and a regime of racial separation for Aborigines. The first two provided the new commonwealth with some of its finest and most impassioned public rhetoric. The last was a new way of still not having to speak about historical processes that, had one chosen to talk, could have been called invasion and genocide.

Had it been possible in this moment to remember truly, we would have been able to take pride not only in what is the same about Australia in 2001 but in how much we've changed, and we would have been able to take heart also in the promise inherent in this self-transformation, the promise of what we could still be. This would have been indeed an interesting story. Sad to say, I don't think we're good at knowing our history in Australia.

Take one emblematic site in another country with a troubled history: Germany. Whether today's Germany is a country that should be more troubled or less by its history than today's Australia is an entirely relevant question. The site I want to mention is the new Foreign Office, opened in Berlin a year ago. This building is modern Germany's point of contact with the world. But it is a building with a terrible and still palpable history. Constructed as the Nazi Reichsbank, the design was chosen by Hitler in 1933. Not only was this where financing of the Nazi war machine was planned and executed, but reportedly was also where the gold teeth of Nazi victims were melted down. Then, after the war, it was rebuilt as the offices of the central committee of the East German Communist Party. In the 1959 reconstruction, another heavy aesthetic layer was added, the aesthetics of the Stalinist Third International. When the decision was made in 1999 to make this building the new Foreign Office, a furious public debate erupted. The debate was not about whether either of the meanings of the two former layers of history should in any sense be restored but about how to start history afresh. Were the ghosts in this place so repugnant that it should be demolished?

No, it was decided that the future be made through an act of historical transformation of the old structure, yet an act that is at the same time one of always having to remember. The solution was to leave the two former layers of historical meaning partially intact and to add a third layer of meaning to the building. The hope for the future is in the deliberate juxtaposition of motifs from 1933, 1959 and 1999, in remembering the past and deliberately contrasting the past with the present.

This is not the stuff of guilt or of younger generations having to take responsibility for the sins of older generations. Rather, it is an act of moral self-definition and the insistence that, always, history should be remembered. And this, as the only guarantee that the future will be better.

But what of our capacity to remember? In fact, there are two Australian Federation stories. In the first, our history is entirely different to Germany's. And in the second, we have been similarly modern people.

Federation story No 1 runs like this. The first nation to be founded at the ballot box, Australia is arguably one of the oldest and most stable of liberal democracies. The Federation compact was built on the politics of peaceful compromise rather than bloody revolution. Coming at the end of a decade of virulent class struggle, Federation represents the moment of class accommodation. It was the moment in which the world's first government of the working class was elected. It was a moment in which unions were institutionalised as part of the fabric of society. It was the moment of social welfare, the creation of a basic, living wage, the eight-hour day and regulated working conditions. The result was standards of living not rivalled anywhere else in the world.

This is how Australia averted the communism and the fascism that plagued other parts of the world: Germany, for instance. Australia, in this story, has also been a peaceful place. We have become a place where our history is not characteristic of our geography.

This is the story of the Australian nation on its own terms. By world historical standards, it's not a bad story, and it's true.

But there's another Federation story. Only 11 per cent of the adult population was both eligible to vote and bothered to vote in the referendum that created the commonwealth. The constitution document, drafted in Australia and subsequently enacted in the Westminster parliament, is purely procedural, dividing powers between the commonwealth and the states. It is not even a document that could be called democratic. There was no mention of universal franchise (because there wasn't such a franchise; women couldn't vote until the Franchise Act of 1902, an act that at the same time explicitly barred Aborigines from voting). There was no mention of voting as a right (because these rights could be determined in a racially discriminatory way and were). There was no mention of the rule of law. There was no mention of citizens and their rights (because, Australians were still subjects of the imperial monarch). There was no mention of freedom of speech or association. And the pinnacle of the constitutional system was an all-powerful, unelected head of state whose Australian representative could appoint an executive council to rule.

This was hardly a moment that could be called the making of a nation, in the sense of an independent power whose sovereignty rested in the people. Australia was unequivocally a part of the British Empire and its people were subjects, not citizens. In fact, Federation was not even an act of independence on the part of Australians. Federation was what the imperial government had wanted for Australia as early as 1846.

The one point of difference with the imperial government was on the question of race. This was the only thing distinctively Australian about Federation, and if there was an Australian nationalism, albeit a relatively weak nationalism, this was its essence. The other main difference between Australians and the imperial government was over Aborigines. In the relative silence that continued to veil the processes of invasion, Federation marked a new way of not speaking about the fate of formerly sovereign indigenous nations. Aborigines were mentioned only twice in the new Constitution.

When we dare to tell this second, more difficult story of Federation, it's a modern story that in its fundamental shape is not dissimilar to Germany's. The big picture ideas are no different to those of the German 1930s and 40s: of the necessity to create "one people, without admixture of races" (to use Deakin's words); of unbridgeable racial inferiority; of races destined to die out; and of the eugenics of progress. Neither were the technologies of race management so dissimilar: the enforced separation in concentration camps; the petty regulation of freedoms of movement and association. Nor were the effects so different: in the Australian case, a genocide in which 90 per cent of the Aboriginal population died during the period of a century, and the wholesale destruction of people with distinctive languages and ways of life.

In the first story of Federation, 1901 represents a high point in Australian history. In the second story, it is probably the lowest. Told on its own, story one is a way of using the process of remembering in order to forget, of selective memory as a way of forgetting through omission.

Story two is much harder to tell, as it is bound up with the problem of how to remember things you don't want to remember. The problem is that these are not really two stories. The logic of Federation in the second version was inseparable from the logic of the first. To be true to ourselves, we must struggle to tell both stories as one.

This is not for the sake of wallowing in angst. This is no black-armband view of history. If race was the primary motivating force for Federation, it is hardly worth asking whether the solution was right for then. The only point is that it is wrong for now.

Mary Kalantzis is executive dean of the faculty of education, language and community services at RMIT University. This is an edited version of the third in the Barton lecture series organised by the NSW Centenary of Federation Committee. Radio National will broadcast the lectures from 5pm on Sundays.

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