By wonderful coincidence I happened to see Nick Cave, Jim Sclavunos, Martyn P. Casey and Warren Ellis perform in their latest band, Grinderman, at The Palace (St Kilda) in the same week that saw the ABC screen Nick Cave’s The Proposition.

It is a film that tells a violent yet sublime story of estranged souls struggling to make sense of a place that appears to have been forsaken by god.

It is far more honest and confronting than Baz Luhrmann’s jingoistic Australia, which was screened on the same night on Channel 10 as a follow up to Oprah in Australia.

In Cave’s representation of Australia’s colonial past, there are no churches or priests – only redundant religious rituals that the local law enforcement officer, Captain Stanley, clings to the hope of preserving a god who, as one of the characters laments, has already evaporated.

Hell-bent in civilising this bestial bush town by Christmas, the well meaning yet hopelessly misguided captain sets out to rid the place of the psychotic yet curiously endearing Arthur Burns by blackmailing Arthur’s younger brother, Charlie, to search him out and kill him.

Charlie Burns eventually finds his brother hiding in a hovel amid a beautiful yet inhospitable part of Australia that seems a world away from “civilised” Europe.

Unlike “the motherland” and the fertile European plains, the Australian bush seems to produce nothing but dust, flies, pests, forlornness and explosive violence.

In this representation of Australia, the brutal and the brutalised are equally dehumanised by a society that is spiritually detached from its land.

Since European settlement, the Australian bush has been predominately depicted as a harsh, baron and deadly place.

It is usually after profound loss when a strange and mysterious spirit emerges and penetrates our mortified hearts.

We sense this spirit when we see distressed indigenous trees flowering after a bush fire or during drought. We will also sense it in the flora that will emerge as the floodwaters recede – an image that is haunting yet life-affirming as the fresh flowers that a mother, brother or friend ties to a tree trunk in memory of a life lost to road trauma.

I can only compare this spirit to the one that arrives on the back of a northerly around Christmas time in Australia.

It is a spirit that prompts us to reflect on our mistakes. And just as the two brothers in The Proposition‚ reflect on acts of murderous folly to the haunting Cave/Ellis score, so too should a nation take time to reflect on its treatment of the desperate, the defenceless, the lonely, the disadvantaged and the innocent.

Some Australians will refuse to take this so called ‘black armband’ view of our past, choosing instead to drape the Australian flag over their shoulders in a frightful display of national pride.

They will focus on our capacity to keep our backyards pristine by ensuring that our flowerbeds remain free from weeds and pests. Aussie boys will celebrate our ‘glorious’ past by tattooing the Southern Cross on their arm just as fair skinned girls will display it on their rosy cheeks on Australia Day.

I have no time for public displays of national pride, Australia Day celebrations, Channel Nine’s Carols By Candlelight or, for that matter, religious services that praise the virtue of spiritual imposters and are nothing more than facades of civility designed to keep our demons at bay.

I am hopeful that Australian art and especially its unique music can sustain a spirit that is in danger of being snuffed out by fervent nationalism and maddening jingoism.