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Large-scale state and national memorials to World War I dead embody complex symbolism, spanning pride and grief. Built at a time when Australia sought to assert a more independent national identity, they provoke the question of how Australian designers chose to express national identity through the medium of commemorative architecture. To address this question, this article examines a range of designs submitted to three major Australian competitions held in the 1920s: for the National War Memorial of Victoria (Melbourne), the Australian War Memorial (Canberra), and the Australian Memorial (Villers-Bretonneux, France). It draws on visual documentation of these designs, unpublished competition reviews, and responses from the contemporary press, while its examination of both built and unbuilt designs enables a new analysis of contemporary architectural thought about memorials. In looking beyond the predominantly classical nature of these designs, this article discerns efforts by designers to create a deeper symbolic representation of nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Montefiores were an international Jewish family including prominent bankers, insurers, and merchants. Four brothers of the family were also leading members of the amateur photography movement in Britain, Belgium, France, and Australia. An album containing photography now in the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, but made by Eliezer Levi Montefiore in the Colony of Victoria, reveals aspects of his family's identity. The album reflects their role in the British colonisation of Australia, as well as their interest in the development of Australian national identity. The enthusiasm for photography manifest in the album was shared by the brothers across national borders, and so also reflects their transnational, diasporic experience. Furthermore, the album represents aspects of the family's class and gender identities, and functioned as a kind of visual primer for its recipient, Eliezer's young daughter, Caroline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The mixed race subject is increasingly emerging in popular Australian media as a poster child of multiculturalism, entangled with post-racial discourses. This dominant representation perpetuates reductive understandings of mixed race experience rooted in compulsory optimism and the erasure of history, which in turn bolster exclusionary imaginings of Australian national identity. I seek alternatives to these constructions through an analysis of the 2004 Australian film Peaches, a markedly understudied text, which centres the coming of age of mixed race protagonist Steph. I adopt Eve Sedgwick’s ‘reparative reading’ approach, which enables generative modes of analysis that seek to imagine new alternatives through textual critique. I focus on two key filmic sites – the ambivalent affects circulated by Steph, and the haunting queer temporality pervading the narrative. I argue that these two sites hold the potential for complex, open-ended understandings of mixed race identity, and in turn, modes of national identity that can re-centre unresolved histories and contested dynamics of race in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014–2016 offered Australia an opportunity to display its national identity and cultural industry on a global stage. Concentrating its analysis on a comparison of the 2014 and 2015 performances, this article argues that Australia presented a strategic display of minority performers in order to showcase Australia’s professed multiculturalism. The Indigeneity and non-European ethnicities of Jessica Mauboy and Guy Sebastian are instrumental to the construction of a postcolonial and cosmopolitan Australian identity. Through these performances, Australia articulated a distinctive national image that appeals to the drive for ‘unity in diversity’ underpinning the Eurovision Song Contest and contemporary European political communities more broadly. This allows Australia to claim belonging within the global community that Eurovision seeks to foster, while also maintaining a sense of its national uniqueness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This article investigates the nationalist historiography of the Heidelberg School, an Australian art movement from the Federation period, known for its iconic representations of national life and landscape. Drawing on recent scholarship of Australian nationalism, it questions conventional accounts of the Heidelberg School in Australian art history, especially those based on Bernard Smith’s radical interpretation of this movement. For Bernard Smith, and the generations of Australian art historians he influenced, the nationalism of the 1890s was a progressive force for national culture. Yet, in the post-Federation decades, national art declined (or ‘soured’) into a reactionary form of insular nationalism. By focusing on the ‘souring’ narrative of Australian national art, this article critiques the nationalist interpretation of the Heidelberg School. It explores an apparent contradiction: the role of Britishness in the construction of a distinctly Australian national art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Feelings of community, cultural definition and memory were kept alive through the soldiers’ mass circulation tabloid, theAussie, examined here in the light of theorisation of memory and representation, applied to both text and cartoons. The publication's aim for veterans’ values to become shared national values is analysed in the light of its high-profile usage of soft cartoon humour and also of nostalgia—highlighting the limitations as well as the effectiveness in terms of Australia's evolving national identity. When the post-war economic situation worsened, deeper issues of national tension were glossed over by the use of scapegoats such as “profiteers” and “lazy workers”. The armed forces were obliged to take on a political role of lobbying for their cause, but theAussieas “cheerful friend” experienced its own identity crisis that proved to be terminal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as ‘rising’ superpowers whose prominence offered opportunities for economic prosperity even as it undermined settled regional power balances. This article finds that, rather than a matter of rational strategy, the decision was made in a context of considerable anxiety about the ‘Asian century’ as the Australian public, politicians and policymakers struggled to comprehend geopolitical change. It further argues that the constructivist project in international relations can benefit from engaging with insights from media and communications methodologies and by taking a less hierarchical approach to ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ discursive agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I explore how recent public debates about Australian values impact on the everyday lives of migrants preparing to become naturalised Australian citizens. Framed through the perspective of governmentality, I combine textual analyses of government documents relating to the Australian citizenship test with ethnographies of recently-arrived migrants in order to demonstrate how political practices related to the conferral of Australian citizenship link and interconnect with the production of migrant subjectivities. In this way, I explore what aspiring citizens think about Australian values and how they contest, accept and negotiate these demands on them to adopt the Australian way of life. The analysis suggests that migrants in this study presented multiple and complex ways of being model Australian citizens. They drew on popular national myths about Australianness promoted in citizenship test resources but they also produced alternative subjectivities that promoted identification with everyday multiculturalism as central to living a happy and prosperous life in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immediately after WW1, soccer had acquired a small but secure place in Melbourne sports culture. Soccer's commitment to the war effort potentially gave its adherents entry to the foundations of a new national mythology. Increasing migrant numbers in the 1920s grew the number of soccer's participants and supporters. Perhaps counterintuitively, this growth was accompanied by a growing distance between the game and notions of Australianness. This paper traces the cooling of soccer's welcome in Melbourne between 1920 and 1934 to the point where the game was cast to the margins of Australian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 analyses the social reaction to asylum seekers in Australia through the lens of moral panic theory. It argues that the most recent campaigns to deter ‘boat people’ from arriving in Australia have all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic, which have been successful because they resonate with deep-rooted anxieties about Australia's national identity and way of life, relating, among other things, to fear of Asian ‘invasion’ and concern with multiculturalism. However, the article seeks to extend moral panic theory to propose that rather than being episodic (as the original moral panic model suggests), moral panics over asylum seekers, at least, are now relatively permanent, which, it is argued, is largely a function of the inexorable ‘war on terror’ where the figure of the Muslim-terrorist-refugee is constructed as a transnational folk devil. On the other hand, the article argues that while resistance to moral panics seems to challenge the view that moral panics are forged of consensus (a key moral panic ingredient), societal reactions to refugees do resemble classic moral panics insofar as the negative response is broad and unified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Australia and most of its people, international sporting contests have long been a marker of the nation’s identity, psyche and international standing. Now in the era of global mediasport, the geopolitical role and the economic impact of elite sport has assumed far wider implications. As a consequence, the need for strong, effective and appropriate governance of all sport, particularly at the elite level has become of critical importance. This paper presents an overview and an analysis of the policy shifts that impacted the development of the Australian Sport Commission, its structure and administration from its colonial roots up to the period leading to the Sydney Olympics in 2000. This discussion will look at the development of the centralized governance of elite and community sport in Australia and will be reflected upon through a consideration of the sportization–globalization processes, with sport in the first instance being established as an element of the cultural diffusion of British imperialism to its significant geopolitical role in late twentieth-century Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of International Journal of the History of Sport is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the history of fortune telling in Australia between 1900-1918, focusing on its popularity even though it was a crime under laws inherited from England. Other topics include the prosecution of fortune tellers in the early 20th century, information on how fortune telling was considered an affront to the scientific advances of the era, and a discussion on how views of fortune telling reflected how gender, race, and class impacted Australian national identity.

This essay argues that the tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is not contingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state. Through an analysis of ‘the Chinese’ in ‘Australia’ it aims to demonstrate that seemingly unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national), multiculturalism (the ethnic coexists with the national) and diaspora (the ethnic transcends the national) cannot capture the diverse difficulties, ambivalences and failures of identification, belonging and political agency experienced by Chinese Australians. A more satisfactory analysis requires a questioning of the groupness of ‘the Chinese’ (as well as ‘the Australians’) and overcoming conceptual groupism (Brubaker): the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life. Instead a more processual and flexible understanding is proposed, where the relationship between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is one of constant evolution and mutual entanglement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides an overview of the contribution of Professor Geoffrey Sherington to the study of the history of Australian education and immigration. His academic and leadership roles are summarised and the main themes of his work are briefly discussed. These themes comprise: Australia as an immigrant nation, British colonial values and meritocracy, public, private, and corporate schooling, and the interconnectedness of educational institutions. These themes recur in the discussion below and are aimed at providing a context for the analyses and assessments of his major scholarly projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have debated whether citizenship regimes in Western democracies are tracking a liberal universalistic path or continue to follow distinctive national traditions. This essay argues that the Australian case does both through a distinctive liberal nationalist architecture. Increasingly since the 1970s, Australian citizenship acquisition and status have largely followed a civic nationalist or liberal universalist formulation. However, this has been executed within a broader liberal nationalist approach to national identity and culture that accommodates these aspects of national life. The essay discusses the idea of liberal nationalism as a political architecture of differentiated domains, Australia's construction of this architecture, and how Australia's two recent citizenship tests illustrate this framework in action. It concludes with some thoughts on the symbolic significance of citizenship tests for liberal legitimacy and the future of the liberal nationalist project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the psychological aspects of home in Australia, including its relation to the country's immigration history. The author explores the concept of Australian identity, through referencing his genealogy, travel throughout Europe, his family history and his 1941 birth in Kiev, Ukraine.

An essay is presented which discusses use of the idea of domopolitics (home politics) in Australian politics and discourse from the end of World War II through the 1950s. An overview of the social aspects of Australian suburban homes, including in regard to housekeeping, is provided. The role that the concept of home played in Australian identity is discussed.

The article argues that nationalism played a role in Australian politics in the mid-twentieth century as part of an Age of Decolonisation, suggesting that the researcher Neville Meaney underestimated the impact of Australian nationalism in the article "Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography," published in the periodical "Australian Historical Studies" in 2001. Topics include teleology, hegemony, and the views of some historians.

The article discusses the end of empire and imperialism in Australia as of 2013, focusing on the impact of transnationalism and economic and political integration in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s on Australian history. Topics include Australian national identities, British race patriotism, Australia's foreign relations with Great Britain, and the book "The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire," written by the author and Stuart Ward.

The article discusses the impact of the First World War on the national identity of Australians, arguing that a transnational Anglo-Saxonism that identified with Germany and the U.S. was replaced by a British imperial loyalty following the war. Topics include the author Sir Henry Rider Haggard's visit to Australia in 1916, the historian E. A. Freeman, and the work of the professor Neville Meaney concerning British race patriotism.

Light has long served as a key symbol of national identity and place in Australia. Myths of a distinct national light and the sun as a symbol of the nation helped white Australians to establish and naturalize a connection to the land. The convergence of national myths of light and photography, a medium of light-writing, made for a striking partnership. This union formed a powerful mythology in Australian photography that is inseparable from the nation's Federation in 1901, but has evolved, been adapted and transformed in the hands of many Australian photographers ever since. After analyzing the special role of light as a myth of place in Australia, this article draws on the work of the contemporary Australian photographers Trent Parke and Ricky Maynard to offer a fresh perspective on the complexities of light and place in Australian photography. As they adopt alternative approaches to light and place, Maynard and Parke problematize assumptions about the transparency of light in photographic representation and reveal the overlapping temporal, cultural, and historical qualities of place today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic accounts of Muslim integration and inclusion in multicultural Australia are often at pains to emphasize that Muslim identity and Australian national identity are compatible with each other. While this political manoeuvre remains both important and relevant, it nevertheless chances reinscribing the very terms of debate it seeks to contest and worryingly aligns closely with prevalent governmental techniques to “domesticate” Muslim difference. Furthermore, it risks presenting both “Muslim” and “Australian” identities as self-evident, taken-for-granted categories. In this article, I consider two Muslim Australian popular cultural productions – namely, the television programmeSalam Caféand the stand-up comedy showFear of a Brown Planet– in order to explore how Muslim and Australian identities, and the relationships between them, are performed, contested and rearticulated. What is most salient about both productions, the article argues, is that they present the identity of “Australian” as a site of political and cultural contestation, with the “nation” a contingent site through which multicultural politics are actualized. Such a move is salient for Australian multiculturalism more broadly, but is especially so for Muslim communities – not least because it undermines the West/Islam dichotomy altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the essential characteristics of modern nationhood is singularity. There is one Australia, with one story, one foundation, one destiny and one face to the world at large. However, singularity limits good history. It makes a particularly strong impact on our understanding of those episodes which seem to be crucial turning points in the history of the nation, including in Australia's case the period of federation and World War One. Good accounts of that period, and thus of the whole Australian experience, depend on avoiding the seductions of singularity, and the impact on scholarship of ‘the lethal chimera of the modern nation-state’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the 2008 literary anthologyGrowing up Asian in Australia, edited by the young Australian writer and award-winning memoirist, Alice Pung. Featuring a collection of auto/biographically based prose, poetry, and comics by “Asian-Australian” authors, each short text within the anthology focuses on coming-of-age in modern-day Australia. Informed by auto/biography and Asian-Australian studies, this paper explores the cultural work that Pung's anthology aims to do. Through a reading of the anthology's paratexts as well as the short, individual childhood autobiographies, the discussion considers the strategies Pung employs in order to attract a broad readership, and how the anthology mobilizes life narratives of childhood to intervene in debates about Australian national, local, and personal identities at the start of the twenty-first century. I argue that Pung's text skillfully balances politics and populism, critiquing fundamental issues of national identity and self-representation while simultaneously appealing to a broad readership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Masculine sentimentality played an important role in Australian culture in the 1930s and 1940s, as in other places where plaintive country music songs attracted a passionate following. Using ‘Australia's Singing Cowboy’ Tex Morton as a case study, we show that this sentimentality became part of both the bush tradition and country music in Depression- and Second World War-era Australia, associated with the bushworker or rugged ‘lone hand’. This sentimentality was deeply problematic from a feminist perspective, as indeed was Morton's personal life. It romanticised what he called ‘the sins of the son’; that is, the lone hand's inability to do right by those he loved. It also glamorised his tears and self-pity, treating them as signs of his hardy masculinity. Given the significance of this form of sentimentality both in Australia and elsewhere over the rest of the twentieth century, feminist scholars of popular culture and historians of gender and the emotions need to pay more attention to country music songs about errant sons and lovers from the 1930s and 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article considers the relation between gender, sex and identity in the context of Italian migration to Australia, between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, through the analysis of a series of letters written by migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns for the Italian newspaper in Australia La Fiamma. The first part of the article focuses on ethnic moralism, ethnic misogyny and the generational gap between Italian migrants and their children. The second part argues that sexual fantasies and dilemmas played a central role in the everyday life of migrants, and in the elaboration of their sexual and ethnic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In nations with a record of historical injustice, guilt about the past is deeply implicated in both efforts towards reconciliation and the construction of national identity. This is as true in notionally postcolonial nations, where past injustice is often denied or avoided, as it is in situations where conflict and injustice have been more recent, overt or visible to the rest of the world. Taking the Australian case as an example, this article considers the dimensions of historical collective guilt, and explores the implications of that guilt for contemporary national identity in postcolonial nations. It argues that until a nation is able to deal with social psychological barriers to addressing historical injustice, it is likely to construct and maintain a narrow and defensive form of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is variously characterised as: an ‘unlikely paradise of sport’, a land of ‘muddied clods’ and the home of ‘Bronzed Aussie Gods’. From 1870 to 1901 Australian writers, particularly those writing in The Bulletin, contributed to the creation of a nationalist tradition and the development of a national persona. The writing of ‘visiting’ writers, such as Nat Gould and Mark Twain, characterised the image of the emerging nation through the depiction of life in the bush and equestrian themes. The images such authors evoked were proliferated globally and the imaginary of Australia and its culture was mythologised. Sport in Australia has long been a powerful component of national identity and a source of national pride and efficacy. Sport was a central element in the creation of an initial imagined community and it continues to be germane to the ongoing redefinition of the Australian identity. As Benedict Anderson famously remarked, a nation is, in the first instance, an imagined community and, in the case of Australia, both cultural icons of sport and literature inspired a host of constructions of the earliest image of the nation, its heroes and heroines which now form a core constituent of its assigned and assumed identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Of the different museums commemorating Australia’s past perhaps none are more popular – or potentially problematic, philosophically, aesthetically and politically – than maritime museums. In recent years there has been considerable interest in the nation’s seafaring history, helped along by new museums established on both sides of the country. Like any museum dealing with the past, maritime museums are no less likely than others to make for anachronistic history. They may ignore or fail to take their cue from a past composed of varied and different sensibilities and experiences to our own in order to compose a comprehensive account of seafaring cultures. Perhaps this is even more likely given the tendency to treat the sea, ships and boats with forgetfulness and nostalgia. However, in Australia, is this romance sustainable given the complexities of the nation’s maritime heritage? This paper explores the latent messages of two Australian maritime museums to show how the narratives conveyed therein are variations on the theme of ‘transience’. It describes how exhibits and displays work to manipulate the geographical and temporal aspects of seafaring so they make all arrivals largely inevitable and relative to one place and nation: Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past is just one device used in advertisements to attract the attention of the consumer. This article examines Australian advertising's use of the past, asking when and how it has been used and what histories have been invoked. Based on a study of the magazine Australia To-day from 1905–63 and supplemented by interviews with contemporary advertising creatives who have also used the past, the article finds that Australian advertising has always drawn from a narrow repertoire of pasts, and that these usually have little connection to the product or brand. The use of the past in the Australia To-day advertisements reveals a great deal about the historical contexts in which they were conceived. Future scholars might find that today's advertisements provide a similar record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of architectural theory and practice in the Australian setting from 1880-2000. It says that e architectural theory and practice in Australia involved the combination and recombination of various themes including landscape and climate, feeling of marginality and isolation, as well as the link of notions of origins with national identity. It adds that discussion and demand for a proper Australian style showed the independence of the country's architecture.

The Black Power Salute protest by athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal dais during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, supported by silver-medallist Peter Norman, has been recognised as a seminal moment in sports history, Olympic history and race relations. This article examines the filmic history of this event as represented in Salute, a 2008 film documentary. We argue that understanding contemporary films requires more than an analysis of on-screen representations and is vastly enriched through embracing the ways in which films are circulated between producers, directors, advertisers, merchandisers and audiences. Accordingly, this article combines a textual analysis of Salute with an exploration of how new media influence the dissemination, reception and consumption of the film. The textual analysis explores Salute as a documentary film biography through dominant narratives and documentary strategies that characterise this genre of filmic history. Associated new media are considered from two perspectives: how they facilitate the active intervention of the film-maker in the reception of a film, and how new media provide opportunities for audience interactivity with films and film-makers. Linking new media with a textual analysis of Salute provides insights into the ways in which the past is circulated in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postage stamps are a significant but largely overlooked item of visual culture. This article examines how sports stamps represent the past and the ways that museums package the sporting past through philatelic exhibitions. Using the concept of the historical 'story space', we focus on the textual representation of cricket stamps and an associated philatelic exhibition in Australia. These representations of the past will be examined through a combination of both semiotic theory and the 'new museology'. As case studies, we focus on three individual cricket stamps and the depiction of these and other stamps in an associated philatelic exhibition: 'A Summer of Cricket: An Exhibition of Art, Stamps and Stories' curated by the Post Master Gallery, Australia's national philatelic museum, in 2005-6. Via such exhibitions, stamps extend beyond their initial utilitarian purpose and become important representations of the sporting past. To critique how this is achieved, this article asks: How do stamps semiotically represent cricket history? How did the gallery curate an exhibition based around cricket stamps? What curatorial philosophies and approaches provided a particular logic of representation and plausible coherence for visitors? And what narratives were generated by exhibiting stamps in a broader context of the relationship between cricket and national identity? Through these questions, this article reflects on the nexus of stamps and museums in visually narrating sports history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia (and globally), refugees and 'the environment' are major sources of anxiety that define the experience of living in modern times. Contemporary social policy is then a representational technology that speaks to environmental and crosscultural transactions within 'modern' Australian cinematic texts. This article tracks the conversational contours between policy on climate change and border control in Australia and representations of self-other and self-environment relations in Australian film produced in the latter period of the Howard era (1996-2007). Films have frequently sought to mobilize a range of visions and understandings of both security and sustainability, and of the associated productions of policy, identity and space. Such exchanges necessitate critical scrutiny of the politicized cultural contexts that produce them - and an awareness of the normative reassertions that accompany these cinematic mediations of modern Australian experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between war, colonialism, and landscape in the suburbs of Eltham and Castlecrag, Australia. According to the author, images of devastated landscapes in Europe following both World Wars influenced Australians' sense of their own landscape and history. Details related to the architects and founders of Eltham and Castlecrag, including Walter Burley Griffin, Marian Mahony Griffin, and Alistair Knox, are presented. Other topics include the relationship between Castlecrag and Scotland, efforts to preserve Australia's bush landscape, and the use of native plants in gardening.

The article discusses the relationship between native plants, gardening, and identity in 20th-century Australia. According to the author, white Australians made broad distinctions between the ideas of gardens and the bush which allowed them to negotiate issues of national identity. It is suggested that over time, gardeners increasingly accepted the use of native plants and designs alongside European garden practices and began to see the Australian bush as a more familiar and tame environment. Other topics include nationalism, eucalypts, horticulturist Jean Galbraith, and exotic plants.

This article explores the relationship between language and political possibility. It is argued that John Howard's language from 11 September 2001 to mid 2003 helped to enable the 'War on Terror' in an Australian context in three principal ways. Firstly, through contingent and contestable constructions of Australia, the world and their relationship, Howard's language made interventionism conceivable. Secondly, emphasising shared values, mateship and mutual sacrifice in war, Howard embedded his foreign policy discourse in the cultural terrain of 'mainstream Australia', specifically framing a foreign policy discourse that was communicable to 'battlers' and disillusioned 'Hansonites'. Thirdly, positioning alternatives as 'un-Australian', Howard's language was particularly coercive, silencing potential oppositional voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Multiculturalism', writes Pnina Werbner, is ‘an important rhetoric and an impossible practice'. Tracing the rhetoric surrounding the term multiculturalism in recent political debate in Australia, this article examines the relationship between rhetoric and practice, and between different meanings of multiculturalism as they have evolved over the last decades, particularly in the climate of ‘backlash' during the Howard government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article moves beyond generalisations which view Australia's deepening links to the US as reflections of the dependent nation's unique openness to imported cultural forms and forces. It is argued that American influences consolidated local cultural formations and discursive practices that built on persistent geopolitical insecurities and were sharpened by wars in the Asia-Pacific, decolonisation and Cold War. The pursuit of national interests, not foreign cultural (‘soft') power, and certainly not so-called ‘Americanisation', stimulated Australia's strategic reorientation after Word War II. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, extracted from a political memoir, discusses the author's own experiences of identity as a first generation migrant in a country undergoing rapid transformation from one with a dominant Anglo-Irish culture to one in which multiculturalism, while contested, has become a reality. It further reflects upon the impact of the American counter culture on Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, and the importance of this for political identities and beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Modern histories of a nation's literature require a comprehensive, scholarly approach. A serious literary history of Australia should focus primarily on literary form and content – the stories and myths of Australians in a variety of literary genres. Relevant historical contexts will extend from local and regional concerns to Australians' links with Europe, North America and, increasingly, Asia. Colonial and post-colonial contexts provide important avenues of investigation and research, employing the scholarly disciplines of bibliography, biography and textual editing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The idea of "fashion" as being a characteristic of Australian culture is frequently regarded as a non sequitur. Fashion is seen as belonging to far-flung cosmopolitan sites elsewhere while Australia is a far-flung site cut off from the trappings of civilization. Equally, Australia has long been regarded as being cut off from the "finer things" of civility, fashion, and good taste. At best, an Australian sense of style is regarded as anything that is practical, informal, and casual T-shirts, practical footwear, moleskin trousers, and wide-brim hats: as an outfit thrown together without much thought. And yet, there has been an abiding interest in fashion since European settlement in Australia, even in the early days of the convict colony. One recurring element of this fascination with fashion is what it means to speak of distinctively "Australian" fashion as opposed to derivative styles copied from elsewhere. Does it make sense to imagine such a thing? Moreover, if there is such a phenomenon as Australian fashion, when does fashion and dress practice in Australia become un-Australian? This question lies at the heart of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can we point to anything distinctive about Australian fashion photographs during the mid-twentieth century? This article traces discourses of both similarity and difference from European styles that permeated discussion of fashionable dress and comportment in Australia at the time. It shows there is little to gain from unraveling what characterizes "overseas" and what characterizes "local," especially in image making. Indeed, we can scarcely find stylistic distinctiveness in photographs. What emerges is a seemingly contradictory network of opinions, texts, images, and related practices, complicating our understanding of local fashion photography and its relationship to the magazine industry. In the period under consideration, a coherent or identifiable style does not constitute fashionable attire and its representation in Australia other than at times a sense of the understated. It is in the ebb and flow of ideas, motifs, and references, even subtle urban variations, that we can situate the essence of Australian photography and perhaps that of Australian style as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]