The Enigma of Being Australian

By Ruth Skilbeck

Throughout the posts on this media publication site made since its inception in the last days of April 2011, as author and editor,  I have followed a theme of flight which has emerged from the spaces beyond words in my sleep and in my dreams of writing, such a poetic not usually articulated in contemporary journalism however did drive the early journalistic writings of Romantic poets such as Thomas de Quincey in the early 19th century, as the inhabitants of the British Isles struggled to adjust to the changes of industrialisation that- historically and culturally - brought into being the era of modernity and in arts the era of modernism that reflected the alienation of the individual in modernity. Part of the enterprise of industrialised modernity was colonialism, and colonial exploration and discovery- and "conquest" of "indigenous" peoples was part of this power trip as it may now appear retrospectively.
As I have written into this online media publication,  I have voiced some impressions from my perspective as an Australian, and emotionally driven writings about the experience of finding out about my family history  in the wider history of Australian colonialism, and family histories which make up the body of writings that is known as colonial history in Australia.
I have not directly found any traces of indigenous or Aboriginal family in my research into my own family history on my mother line, which remains mysterious and enigmatic.

What I have found I shall publish in the future in this publication.

Meanwhile I shall say that this has made me profoundly sympathetic to the struggles of all who were affected by the Stolen Generations, and that as far as I am concerned this deeper cultural impact is greater than the enforced divisions of "aboriginal" and settler in the history of being Australian.