Life & Wisdom Quote by Colleen McCullough

McCullough’s line lands like a thrown chair: blunt, unbeautiful, and designed to force the room to look at what it’s been politely stepping around. The phrasing is deliberately clumsy - “fits of horrors,” “somebody like me,” “might saying” - which paradoxically makes it feel more like an unfiltered provocation than a polished argument. She’s not trying to persuade with elegance; she’s trying to corner a political tribe into admitting what it wants to forget.

The specific intent is accusatory: to pin the Labor Party to the historical project of “White Australia,” not as an unfortunate backdrop but as a policy they actively “bought in.” That verb matters. It frames racism as procurement, an institutional purchase, not a vague cultural bias. The subtext is also personal and combative: McCullough positions herself as a socially disreputable messenger (“somebody like me”) whose very presence offends contemporary sensibilities. That’s a preemptive strike against dismissal - she’s anticipating the liberal recoil, the reflex to treat certain observations as impolite regardless of their truth.

Context does the heavy lifting. Australia’s White Australia policy wasn’t merely a conservative obsession; it was bipartisan nation-building, with Labor historically entwined with protectionism and the “workingman’s” racialized security. McCullough is poking at the modern party’s brand management: the desire to be seen as anti-racist without fully owning how foundational racial exclusion was to its early identity. The line works because it weaponizes embarrassment. It’s not asking for a nuanced reckoning; it’s demanding one by making denial feel more humiliating than admission.