We saw Australia change from a monoculture into something rather various and worldly with more than sports stars and soldiers to offer the world. And our unique sort of culture was reflected in art and literature and film.

We also knew we had political clout and were building a good society here. Civil liberties and the public interest went hand in hand.

As students with cheap rents and no HECS burden, we had time to take to the streets. We quizzed every politician in the land about opportunities for women. We changed the legislation on abortion and equal pay and homosexuality. We eventually stopped Australian participation in the Vietnam war.

Now, like many people I know, I wonder if what we did will be seen as a blip on the screen. We think about cultural shifts and generational change. Certainly much that we took for granted is not as firmly in place as we thought it was.

A lot of hard work is unravelling and the disturbing thought confronts us that we are talking to ourselves.

One of the hard facts we have to face is that the vast majority who are easy about the country’s great lurch back, xenophobic and self-absorbed, into fortress Australia – and the rest who are deeply disturbed by it – are separated by as wide a gulf as existed early in the Vietnam era.

That period of radical action and gradual bridging of the divide is far more remote to the under 30s than the second world war was to us. And now the young are likely to be on the conservative side – or too distracted to care much either way. Recent immigrants and the poorly paid are there with them – which is less surprising – and this time there’s no leader on the horizon to inspire a generation.

Good words are needed more than ever before – words that cut through the mockery and pre-emptive labelling of critics and skeptics. But the hard truth is that a lot of the words we’ve been using don’t work anymore.

Unless we find new ways to take our convictions apart and rephrase them in language that rings true for a new generation, we have no hope of persuading our leaders to act differently.

Writing well into the public debate has rarely been as important as it is right now – and I mean by novelists, poets, playwrights, screenwriters as well as all those who write nonfiction.

Writers are not very different from anyone else of course – except that they have the great gift of words. They don’t have a better moral sense than the rest of us. They might even be worse than most at suggesting policy solutions. They are not even always better at understanding how the world works.

But we need them to come up with the words that move us, that cut through the selfishness and the fear, and the prevailing pragmatism that judges policy, rather like television shows, not by its intrinsic merit or moral value, but by its popularity.

The public spaces available for trying out ideas and debating issues have shrunk in recent years. The magazines that can respond fast and reach wide readerships are at an all time low. Local websites haven’t yet filled the gap. Our precious ABC’s audience is still largely monocultural and well over forty.

The range of ages and voices heard is limited. The same names keep cropping up and the young are notably excluded. They are not reading newspapers or listening to news radio. Student debate and political activity is hard to find.

In Australia we have a healthy suspicion of combining literature or art with politics – all the deeper in an age when the market’s seductions are international, of course. But it’s a perennial subject at writers’ festivals. Is art properly above and beyond politics and bound to degenerate if it makes contact or do writers have an obligation to engage?

A fairly luxurious debate in most parts of the world - and we may be reaching a point in this country when some of us would agree.

But apart from the social realism of the thirties, novels from feminist, gay and more recently indigenous writers, most Australian authors, have tended to avoid present day political dilemmas in their art. Perhaps the past still has to be grappled with in order to make sense of what’s happening now.

Not long ago I watched a televised debate between four Nobel prize-winning authors - Gunter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney and VS Naipaul – on the subject of politics and literature.

They were poles apart but gentle with each other.

For Grass, as a German, to opt out of political engagement with the realities of the present and the ramifications of the past was inconceivable. Why write at all – if not to try to understand the impact of politics on people and of individuals on public affairs?

Nadine Gordimer’s novels are set in South Africa where she spent most of her life and all have engaged with apartheid. She seemed to be saying that her writing was a gift to be used in the service of the country she loved.

VS Naipaul, Trinidad-born and living in England, declared himself not the slightest bit interested in politics – despite a life of much travel throughout the colonised world. It was human character and behaviour that concerned him. Yet, as Gordimer pointed out, from where Naipaul sits in English literature, he and his subject matter are pervaded with political significance whether he likes it or not.

For Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, the literature/politics question was a conundrum at the heart of language itself – and anyway one could never know what political effect would flow from fine writing.

Some of our best known authors would still argue that politics is not the stuff of literature. With Naipaul, they choose not to see how embedded they are in Australian culture’s eroding position in the world, nor how the post-colonial condition, consciously or unconsciously, informs their work.

What has happened to language in the last decade or so has exacerbated the divide not bridged it. The meaningless rhetoric of ‘the world’s best practice’ and business world terminology and processes sit uneasily on our public institutions weakening them by denying the differences.

With the corporatisation of our public institutions – especially our universities which succumbed almost without a murmur – the impoverished mind-set of the client state and the marketplace received a dreadful kind of endorsement.

So it came as no surprise that our politicians, in the aftermath of Tampa and SIEV X, got away with describing people a ‘rejectees’ or ‘illegals’ and ‘as the kind of people we don’t want here’ – or that, shortly after, Peter Reith was given a teaching role at Monash, Mount Eliza campus.

We need words that resonate and sink slowly in. Just as some American writers soon after September 11 asked ‘Why are we so hated?’ - we need to reframe the certainties some of us thought defined this country.

Only writers can do it – find words that make waves or cause ripples beneath the surface of our complacency.

Hillary McPhee