Space, Memory, and Power in Australia: The case for No Nation. Elspeth Tilley Bond University & The University of Queensland Narratives of nation-building, as attempts to impose "the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force" (Bhabha), contain the seeds of their own destruction. Certain fetishised themes in Australian non-indigenous literature, for example the vanishing explorer, can be read as working against any idea of a coherent national identity. Vanishing characters undo the colonial narrative project's attempts to a) inscribe the imaginary landscape with markers of imperial presence and b) thereby cement both ownership of property and the identity of the coloniser. That the vanishing narrative trope persists in contemporary literature indicates not only that the discursive annexation of Australian space continues, but that questions about ownership of land are not confined to landrights battles in the courts. Rather, they pervade our culture, our everyday lives, and our sense of who we are. An important consequence is that the imperative for reconciliation extends beyond the rights of non- indigenous Australians to encompass the symbolic needs of all Australians. In 1942, immediately after the Japanese army took Singapore and bombed Darwin, Vance Palmer wrote an essay called “Battle” that articulated a strong (non-indigenous) Australian sense of national inadequacy: The next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at any rate in the sight of the outer world. We have no monuments to speak of, no dreams in stone, no Guernicas, no sacred places. We could vanish and leave singularly few signs that, for some generations, there had lived a people who had made a homeland of this Australian earth. A homeland? To how many people was it primarily that? How many penetrated the soil with their love and imagination? We have had no peasant population to cling passionately to their few acres, throw down tenacious roots, and weave a natural poetry into their lives by invoking the little gods of creek and mountain. The land has been something to exploit, to tear out a living from and then sell at a profit. Our settlements have always had a fugitive look, with their tin roofs and rubbish-heaps. … Very little to show the presence of a people with a common purpose or a rich sense of life. (1942, reprinted in Lee, Mead & Murnane, 1990, pp. 7- 8). Two decades later, on the other side of the world, Frantz Fanon penned a sentence that serves as a useful reply: If you really wish your country to avoid regression, or at best halts and uncertainties, a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness. (1961, cited in Al-Kassim, 2001, p. 2). Had Palmer and Fanon engaged in actual dialogue, Fanon might have addressed the regressive consequences of Palmer’s sheer blindness to indigenous achievements, monuments, “dreams in stone”, and sacred places. He may have pointed out that the Australian continent could boast at least 40,000 years of tenacious peoples who wove “natural poetry into their lives by invoking the little gods of creek and mountain”. And he would certainly have problematised the need that Palmer takes for granted, to leave visible signs of our (non- indigenous) presence that mark out a unified, singular, national identity. The concept of national identity has lately become problematic. There have been calls for its retirement, not least because, as Hobsbawm pointed out more than a decade ago, “the ongoing removal of the flow of capital from the