- David Malouf, 2000

On the southern shore of Lake Burley Griffin, along the promenade directly in front of the National Library, a series of stone plaques, erected in 2006, commemorates every Australian of the Year since the award's inception in 1960. Manning Clark and Alan Bond are there, as are Patrick White, John Farnham and Paul Hogan. Taken together, this odd procession of sporting champions, writers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, military heroes and adventurers offers some kind of insight into the sort of people we have become and the forms of human achievement we admire.

The plaques stretch from the southern side of Commonwealth Avenue Bridge, almost to the front of the National Portrait Gallery. Standing in front of the first, dedicated to Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet, and looking east along the lakefront, the remaining plaques take on a stark funereal quality, appearing like the tombstones of fallen soldiers. They are also a stunning example of the art of memorialisation. While each plaque memorialises an individual, en masse these individual identities are subsumed by a much greater presence: national pride. In some ways they remind me of Italian cemeteries, where the names of the Catholic dead are accompanied by photographs of the deceased - passport-style headshots blanched pale and almost indistinguishable by the sun - forming a sea of fading faces staring back from times past, somehow making our attempt to mark the significance of each human life all the more futile and all the more poignant.

When I first saw the plaques, last December, I counted at least another 40 standing beyond the one that bears the name and photograph of the 2007 Australian of the Year, Professor Tim Flannery. These blank plaques - memorials to the future - stand as if waiting for the years to pass before they can be filled in and become whole. Yet strangely, they seem more intriguing than the plaques that precede them. It is possible to imagine the line of blank plaques stretching on endlessly, and their emptiness begs the question: What sort of nation will Australia become over the next few decades?

Now that the interminable election is long over, can we cast our gaze beyond the vision of Australia's conservatives - individual liberty, home ownership and material prosperity - and strike a genuinely new and more inclusive national settlement? Not a vision founded on political ideology or empty feel-good rhetoric, but one grounded in the difficult marriage of symbolism and substantive political, legal and social change, a vision that recognises the power of symbolic politics to act as a unifying force in the struggle to bring about practical change.

If I were asked to choose one word which reflected the feeling of Australians following the election of the Rudd Labor government, the word I would choose is ‘hope'. It is a cautious hope, but it is hope nonetheless. One reason for this hope is that Australia might finally build a national consensus on the two great nation-defining issues of the past two decades, the declaration of an Australian republic and the achievement of reconciliation with Aboriginal people. These two issues have refused to die because they remain central to what Kevin Rudd recently referred to as the "national soul". If it is possible for any nation to possess a soul or spirit, then it surely must be one with moral legitimacy, democratic values, inclusiveness, and a coherent and believable combination of constitutional language and national symbols, one that resounds with the spirit of place, of the very country in which we live.