For indigenous Australians, as the Governor-General, Sir William Deane, has observed, the millennium is a reminder of the brevity of the white settlers' timescale. Indigenous peoples have inhabited this continent for at least 40 millennia, and 1000 years ago they were in unchallenged possession of it. The millennial comparisons might be different for indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, but the effect of those comparisons need not be, for in each case it is bound up with that indispensable human virtue, hope. Hope is not the same as optimism, though it is frequently found alongside it. And sometimes, human affairs being what they are, those expectations will be confounded.
Hope works very differently.
It involves no calculation, for there are times when a reasonable estimate of our prospects might seem to warrant despair rather than hope. To live in hope is to live as though despair is never an option, for despair always dehumanises us. It is because human beings live in hope that they can rebuild shattered lives and shattered societies after cataclysms such as the Holocaust or the Killing Fields. And it is because people live in hope that a society marked by darkness and bondage, such as Europe at the turn of the first millennium, might develop into a global civilisation that, for all its failures and self-doubts, strives for enlightenment and liberation. On 1 January 1901, the leading article in The Age greeted the 20th century with an enthusiasm driven by both hope and optimism.