Search

The question of what Australian identity means has re-emerged, as globalisation and a concerted political effort to reconstruct an ‘Anglo’ identity have caused uncertainty about ‘who we are’. To explore how Australians conceptualise identity, this paper examines empirical research since Phillips’ [1998. Popular views about Australian identity: Research and analysis. Journal of Sociology, 34(3), 281-302. doi:10.1177/144078339803400305] seminal work synthesising research on Australian identity. Nearly two decades on, a civic/ethno-nationalist distinction and traditional socio-political correlates remain; but less dichotomous constructions are also being explored and more progressive values included. Key differences are found in the increased range of meanings of Australianness, as well as an apparent shift, for some, towards a cosmopolitan identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating and sustaining a shared sense of national identity is important in all societies, but it is especially crucial in societies with large immigrant populations. This paper uses a national public opinion survey collected in Australia to examine how Australians see their identity, and in turn to examine the consequences of these identities for views of immigrants and for party political support. The results confirm international research which shows the predominance of an ethno-national identity based on inherited characteristics, and a civic identity based on achieved characteristics. Both identities have consequences for the Australian public's views of immigrants – an ethno-national identity leading to negative views of immigrants and a civic identity leading to positive views. In turn, identities and views of immigrants significantly shape support for the major political parties, with parties of the left being more supportive of immigrants and parties of the right less so. From a public policy perspective, the results suggest that successive Australian governments have made only partial progress in generating a strong sense of civic identity within the Australian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian way of life is claimed to be a celebration of sporting rather than intellectual achievement. The influence of sport for contemporary Australians is examined by asking a nationally representative sample of Australian adults to identify their most 'influential' sporting heroes. Men are far more likely than women to view male sporting heroes as influential with a similar pattern apparent for Liberal/National Party identifiers over other party supporters, although younger people are less likely than their older counterparts to nominate male sports stars. Cricket legend Donald Bradman's iconic status transcends sport, signifying conservative, white, masculine elements of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the primacy of importance of Australian national identity as underpinning belongingness of Anglo-Celtic and Chinese cultural groups. A mixed-method approach comprised focus groups and interviews was used. Australian national identity did not hold primacy of importance to a sense of belonging in either group, however family identities were of primary importance to both, together with cultural identity of the Chinese. Anglo-Celtic's felt culturally disassociated, whereas Chinese sought majority acceptance through cultural promotion, and bicultural identification. Findings call for further research of Australian national identity of the majority and other minority cultural groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since Prime Minister Howard's declaration in 2007 that child sex abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities was Australia's ‘own Hurricane Katrina’, the trope of natural disaster has been a regular feature of print and television media coverage of Indigenous affairs in Australia. The effect of this rhetorical strategy is to separate what happens to Aboriginal people from the fabric of ‘mainstream’ Australian cultural and political life; to render it alien and unconnected to the relative privilege enjoyed by other Australians. This strategy also produces peculiar temporal effects by erecting acordon sanitairearound Australian history and the national identity that it supports. Howard's comparison of Aboriginal disadvantage with Katrina, if read alongside his politicization of the teaching of Australian history, demonstrates an unwillingness to incorporate systemic injustice toward Indigenous people within the composition of that history. This article interrogates the relationships between the manifold understandings of Aboriginal disadvantage and attempts to commemorate its violent history, as these aspects of Australian life are both integrated and refused by national identity narratives. Specifically, the paper reinterprets the trope of natural disaster as a means of comprehending Indigenous disadvantage and Australian identity by drawing on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Benjamin's understanding of activism as a constructive retrieval of the past will be developed to reconnect catastrophe to history, and to enable an exploration of responsibility for that history as an integral condition of contemporary Australian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores nation-making at the intersection of the imagination and practice of national capital cities, portraiture, and the politics of recognition. Specifically examining Canberra's National Portrait Gallery as a national cultural institution, it seeks to account for the development of the Gallery as a place of portraiture and the Australian national politics of historical recognition. After situating the Gallery generally in the context of the development of national cultural institutions as a practice of national capital city and nation-state production and reproduction, it then briefly examines the role of particular contingencies and the specific imagination of national portrait galleries in the 'Anglosphere' in producing the Gallery. I subsequently then explore the development of the Gallery as a visual-material national centre through its built accommodation and its discursive framing, along with its practice in the field of portraiture intersecting with the building of a Australian national history through the recognition of individuals. The article concludes by emphasising that while the Gallery is a place of national pasts, presents and futures, it should be stressed that it, and Canberra's other national cultural institutions, are also very much spatial products (and producers) of particular spatial imaginations and practices of nationality and the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate young people's conceptions of Australian national identity, 242 school students were invited to write a small essay about what they think it means to be Australian. Multiple constructions of national identity were evident, including both traditional understandings relating to lifestyle and personality characteristics as well as more expanded views. Expanded views were characterised by plurality, and 'voices of care and justice'. Despite recent terrorist world events (including September 11, but excluding the Bali bombing), a dominant view concerned national well-being and the notion that to be Australian meant that one lived in a safe and prosperous environment. In accordance with social identity theory, students' understandings of conditions and sentiments existing in other countries were often used as points of reference, leading at times to somewhat rose-coloured views. There was no reference to an identity that encompassed intellectual, economic, scientific or cultural pursuits or achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article is presented in response to the article "Our Own Hurricane Katrina: Aboriginal Disadvantage and Australian National Identity," by J. Faulkner which appeared in the 2015 issue of "National Identities."