ABSTRACT
Parenthood is one of the most difficult tasks, both for the parents and the parented, that people have inherited from the Enlightenment tradition and its redefinition of family and education. Australia and Britain are both currently engaged in a difficult phase of “transference”, redefining themselves, externally and internally, in terms of a rapidly changing global situation in which the “New” that is programmatically attached to “Labour”, “Britain” and “Europe” seems less a statement of fact or even intention than of necessity. For the British people must be most powerfully and peculiarly endowed if so small an island could become the ruler of the greatest empire since Rome. There was one other consequence of the imperial contribution to Britishness. Ultimately, Britain will need to rewrite its history, to review it from the perspective of a New Britain and a New Europe and uncover past alternatives which can be made productive in present and future.
