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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 article investigates the evolving conceptions of national identity in Canada and Australia through an analysis of officially sanctioned history textbooks in Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia. From the 1930s until the 1950s, Britain and the British Empire served a pivotal role in history textbooks and curricula in both territories. Textbooks generally held that British and imperial history were crucial to the Canadian and Australian national identity. Following the Second World War, textbooks in both Ontario and Victoria began to recognize Britain's loss of power, and how this changed Australian and Canadian participation in the British Empire/Commonwealth. But rather than advocate for a complete withdrawal from engagement with Britain, authors emphasized the continuing importance of the example of the British Empire and Commonwealth to world affairs. In fact, participation in the Commonwealth was often described as of even more importance as the Dominions could take a more prominent place in imperial affairs. By the 1960s, however, textbook authors in Ontario and Victoria began to change their narratives, de-emphasizing the importance of the British Empire to the Canadian and Australian identity. Crucially, by the late 1960s the new narratives Ontarians and Victorians constructed claimed that the British Empire and national identity were no longer significantly linked. An investigation into these narratives of history will provide a unique window into officially acceptable views on imperialism before and during the era of decolonization. [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]

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 way in which the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) in the 1990s considered the meaning of citizenship and national identity. We seek to demonstrate that ARM's citizenship ideal was minimalist because it largely ignored legal and normative notions of citizenship for pragmatic, political, and theoretical reasons. First, we will explore the meaning of citizenship in the Australian institutional context in order to explain the differences between the legal exclusive notion and the normative inclusive understanding of citizenship. Later, we will focus our analysis specifically on ARM's political debate during the 1990s. From this point of view, ARM only portrayed an unattractive normative vision of Australian citizenship which relied on universal civic values based on civic-territorial and egalitarian ideas of citizenship adaptable to any political system. ARM's minimalist constitutional proposal hardly had an impact on national identity because it was not designed to harbour an inclusive normative vision of citizenship. ARM had an opportunity to advance a new conception of citizenship which would have advanced a more attractive definition of national identity. ARM's minimalist approach also negatively influenced the 1999 republican referendum outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between prime ministerial rhetoric and the framing of national identity in contemporary election campaign speeches. Through a hybrid quantitative and qualitative textual analysis, it finds the dominant narrative of Australian national identity in the 2001 prime minister's campaign launch speech was defined by themes of endurance and stoicism. In 2007, and then in 2013, the narrative conveyed a more optimistic image of the nation, despite increasing global complexities. As such, the analysis reveals distinctive elements in the three speech acts which account for shifting ways of speaking of the nation and invoking nationhood in 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Aspects of the national narrative of an advanced industrialised nation are examined in this research. Nationally representative survey data suggest the most important collective figures for Australian identity are the Anzacs, colonial free settlers and post-Second World War immigrants, while sporting heroes have a negligible influence upon what it means to be Australian. Although many Australians have ancestors who were transported, the convict ‘stain’ persists, while indigenous people are also under-represented in Australian identity myths. The most important individual Australians are not the heroes, saints or sages of an earlier ‘golden era’ nor contemporary sporting heroes, but political leaders, medical doctors and scientists who have (had) actual rather than mythical influence upon the everyday lives of Australians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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The environmental consumer-citizen has become a global master narrative that is the outcome of environmental discourse (Darier, 1999; Harper, 2001). In this article, we examine a particular strand of the environmental citizen identity in the context of environmental and consumption consciousness. Through interviews with Australian children about themselves, their consumption, and their links to local and larger global communities, we uncover an adapted strand of this narrative. A local transformation of the master narrative on environmental citizenship is seen in the national identity narrative of the ‘ethno-consumer’. This identity narrative is one of the ‘good’ green Australian consumer-citizen constructed in relation to regional political and economic discourses. We uncover how this strand of environmental consciousness is used as identity capital in children’s narratives of self and nation (Hage, 1998). We suggest that there exist several levels of identity narratives. In this particular context, the national identity narrative appears to adapt and accommodate, but also dominate, the global master narrative for these children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

The Sydney 2000 Olympics were perceived as an opportunity for Australia to rebrand itself to an international audience as a dynamic, cosmopolitan and culturally diverse society. In particular, the opening ceremony attempted to convey a narrative of multiculturalism and reconciliation, in the hope of alleviating concerns that had been prominent in the lead up to the Games regarding Australia’s race relations. While this event was generally seen to have successfully contributed to an enhanced image of Australian culture and society, stereotypical images of the ‘larrikin’ character of ‘white male’ identity prevailed, in particular through the design of uniforms for the Australian Olympic team. This article focuses specifically on the uniforms designed by Mambo and Woolmark as the key signifiers of this laconic character. This narrative was in many ways adverse to the themes of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism promoted by the Australian Tourist Board in its repackaging of ‘Brand Australia’. This article addresses the resultant competing representations of national identity that emerged at this event. In developing this argument, the article considers how national identity is constructed through sporting uniforms. It identifies historic controversies surrounding the Australian Olympic team uniform and the tensions that have emerged regarding how the nation is perceived on the international stage, arguing that criticism of this uniform has often reflected broader cultural fears of inferiority. The Sydney Olympic Games Opening Ceremony is established as a critical component of the country’s re-branding through the narratives of reconciliation and multiculturalism. Within this context, the paper provides an analysis of the Australian team uniform worn at the opening and closing ceremonies to investigate the larrikin character portrayed as a counter-narrative of ‘white male’ cultural hegemony, adverse to the Sydney Olympic brand’s central themes. This article considers a range of texts, garments and images in order to reflect on the broader proposition, which concerns how national identity is reflected through dress and why salient characteristics endure when national identity is called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the national election win of the Liberal National Coalition in March 1996, Australia experienced more than ten years of contentious public debate. Discussions about Australia's history and future raged with an intensity that both highlighted and problematized the very notion of national identity. During this period, the television commercials for tea brand Bushells paralleled changes in Australia's political culture. In various ways, events of epochal significance, both in Australia and abroad, surfaced in the brand's promotions. These campaigns not only showed the increasing difficulty of picturing Australianness; they also showed that, no matter how fragmented Australian culture became, there remained a lingering bias to certain images, ideals and values. As the Australian electorate became more insular, parochial and conservative, Bushells followed suit. This article considers how Bushells drew symbolic markers from popular culture - the worlds of celebrity, sport, cinema and so on - in a bid to remain relevant, endearing and likeable. It therefore shows that, for a commodity as basic as tea, much can be gleaned about the contemporary political mood through the vernacular rhetoric of television advertising. [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’s pavilion at the 1970 Japan World Exposition, Osaka, gave physical form to a narrative of Australian innovation during a critical period of change in the nation’s economic and geo-political circumstances. The pavilion’s primary role was to advance Australian relations with Japan, which replaced Britain as Australia’s main trading partner in 1966. Australia’s appeal to Japan unfolded on two levels. A profusion of artefacts exemplified Australian inventiveness, extending back to the rural sphere in the colonial period and culminating in the contemporary example of the Repco Brabham Formula One racing car engine. The representation of Australian inventiveness was amplified by the image and experience of the pavilion architecture, configured for maximum impact; it took the form of a free-hanging circular roof suspended from a giant cantilever, its main display area an immersive, multimedia environment. Although an objectified representation of the nation, the pavilion reflects a process of national identity transformation that aligned Australia’s image with international modernisation trends, to produce a new sense of Australian destiny as linked to industrialisation and the Asia-Pacific region. [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]

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]

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]

Myths associated with outlaws or 'social bandits' are important elements of national identity in many countries. Long after his death the outlaw Ned Kelly lives on in Australian culture through various media, ensuring his enduring symbolic importance for national identity. National survey data indicates Kelly's salience for a majority of Australians, although attitudes regarding his status as hero or villain vary considerably. Younger, left-leaning, working-class Australians and consumers of popular culture view Kelly as important, while tertiary-educated, political conservatives tend to downplay his significance. Perceptions of Kelly's character also influence attitudes regarding his national significance. The lack of foundation heroes in a nation built not only by free settlers but also by English convicts and Irish rebels goes some way to explaining why a 19th-century outlaw is one of the few historical figures recognized by a majority of Australians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about nation and national positioning within the global exemplified in the Australian culture, history and literacy 'wars' have tended to be definitive and apparently oppositional in tone. Yet these debates have proceeded in the absence of a concretized notion of Australian identity and do not adequately address the complexities of political identification and allegiance. Despite intense concerns in these 'wars' about the views of young people and the role of their schooling, young people do not necessarily have less well-developed conceptions of Australia's place in a globalizing world than their elders. Our research on young people's responses to globalization, global cultural products and national identity offers some suggestive new directions for considering these issues and the school curriculum, directions which are built upon the actual ways in which young Australians express uncertainty about US—Australian relations, while simultaneously identifying with American cultural products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]