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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 It draws on visual documentation of these designs, unpublished competition reviews, and responses from the contemporary press, while its examination of both built and unbuilt designs enables a new analysis of contemporary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]

The article reconsiders the validity and relevance of the initiative-resistance thesis particularly in the context of the political party system in Australia. Topics discussed include the role of the Australian Labor Party as the driving force in the nation's politics and policy, separate identity of the National Party and its role in understanding the two-party system, and the critical analysis of Australian political scientist Henry Mayer on the subject.

The article discusses the historical and conceptual framework of race and its role in the development of national identity, migration policy and refugee politics in Australia. Topics discussed include impact of white nationalism on the nation's migration policy or the movement of non-white population in and around Australia, the colonial foundations of Australian whiteness, and the conflict between white politics and the contemporary multicultural and Indigenous policies.

In Australia, public remembrance, particularly relating to national identity and colonial violence, has been contentious. In this article, we take Australia's recent bid to join the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) as an opportunity to identify national, local and multidirectional dynamics shaping public remembrance of the Holocaust and colonial violence in Australia. Joining IHRA signifies a belated national commitment to Holocaust remembrance, which has traditionally been fostered in Australia by survivor communities. Significantly, the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM) has recently ventured beyond survivor memory, positioning Holocaust remembrance as a platform to identify ongoing human rights violations against Indigenous Australians and other marginalized groups. While this multidirectional framework promotes an inclusive practice of remembrance, we argue that it may inadvertently flatten complex histories into instances of "human rights violations" and decentre the foundational issue of settler colonial violence in Australia. To explore the personal and affective work of remembering settler violence from an Indigenous perspective, we turn to two multiscalar artworks by Judy Watson that exemplify a mnemonic politics of location. the names of places contributes to a local and national public remembrance of settler violence by identifying and mapping colonial massacre sites. In experimental beds, Watson links her matrilineal family history of racial exclusion with that of Thomas Jefferson's slave, Sally Hemings. This transnational decolonial feminist work takes the gendered and racialized body and intimate sexual appropriation as a ground for a multidirectional colonial memory, thereby providing an alternative to the dominant Holocaust paradigm and its idiom of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of the relationship between sport, history and film in Australia by exploring the film "Phar Lap: Hero to a Nation," a biographic film about the racehorse Phar Lap. It discusses Phar Lap's success as a racehorse and examines the social impact the horse had on Australia. It explores the success of the film, which premiered in 1983, and discusses how the film is seen in Australian film history. It also discusses how the film portrays the struggle between an Australian national identity and an inherited British identity.

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]

Australian national identity has a long history of being intrinsically tied with landscape, and this is captured in representations of Australia in popular culture. Predominantly, representations of Australia have heavily featured the rural Outback, with television remakes of classic films recently released, such as Wake in Fright (2017) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018) suggesting there is still interest in this idea of an alien and terrifying Outback environment. And yet, most Australians live in coastal regions, many of which form the edge of urban hubs. The Australian beach plays an important role in establishing national identity in part because of its role as a gateway between the natural and the urban. Morris called the Australian beach ‘ordinary’, while Fiske et al. instead include the beach as one of the ‘myths of Oz’. The beach, therefore, inhabits a complex position in Australian imagination as both an ordinary part of Australian lives as well as a mythically beautiful locale for many Australians and tourists alike. Reality television has become an increasingly popular contemporary mode of storytelling and, despite its global dominance, the genre’s tendency to localize content can therefore reveal elements of Australian cultural identity. However, reality television programmes specifically set on the Australian beach have had varying levels of success, ranging from the strikingly popular Bondi Rescue (2006–present) and Bondi Vet (2009–present) to the almost immediately cancelled The Shire (2012) and Being Lara Bingle (2012). This article examines how these texts represent the complexities of the Australian beach through an analysis of representations of the ordinary, the mythic and the body. [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 paper considers the recent rise of ironic engagement with the Facebook posts of Shannon Noll, or "Nollposting". It is a form of "shitposting", or online engagement that is characterised byits disruption of previously established standards of discourse. I argue, following Nissenbaum and Shifman (2015), that it serves as an opportunity for users to accumulate cultural capital through the act of taste distinction (Bourdieu, 1986), mocking those not familiar with Internet standards of discourse through ironic imitation of their forms of speech and cultural consumption. Following recent work on the cultural logic of trolling (R. M. Milner, 2013; Phillips, 2015a), I aim to situate this phenomenon within broader media cultures around Australian national identity. I argue that we cannot understand Nollposting without understanding Noll himself as reconstituted figure of the mythic Australian battler in a postmodern media environment. Like other comedic icons before him (McCallum, 1998), the figure of Noll becomes a renegotiation of Australian 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]

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]

The announcement in January 2015 that Prince Philip had been chosen to receive an Australian knighthood (an honour which itself had been controversially revived the previous year) sparked a fury of debate about honours, and about the continuance of a British connection in Australia's national life. Such debates were not new, echoing earlier arguments about honours as a national or imperial symbol. Through two related case studies - the Australian honours system and the Australian of the Year award - this article explores the politics of national recognition in 1970s and 1980s Australia. We consider both the politics involved in the creation and alteration of awards by which individual achievement and service are recognised by the nation, and the politics involved in imagining and recognising an Australian nation as expressed in those awards. We argue that these two institutions were more than a means to acknowledge hard work or sacrifice; they were also significant sites for contests over the nature of Australia's post-imperial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great War is considered nationally foundational in both Australia and New Zealand. Yet, as critics of this view point out, British subjecthood remained important and sometimes central to identity at this time. This article pulls two threads from this tangled knot of belonging at a time when identifying and regulating loyal populations was critical. Looking at evidence of those Australians and New Zealanders who served in imperial forces and organisations, and the implications of passport control from 1915, I suggest that the relationship between British subjecthood and national identification was not always easily managed, and was often cut across by gender. Indeed, there is evidence that one's identification as a British subject or an Australasian citizen was not always a matter of choice or positive, and sometimes these identities were antagonists. The significant tensions between British subjecthood and being an 'Australian' or a 'New Zealander' were especially heightened by the increasingly intimate relationship between governments and their people during the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Between 1890 and 1905, Edward Burnett Tylor and Henry Ling Roth extended and formalised two ideas that were intricately connected and deeply influential to the development of nineteenth century anthropology: that the Tasmanian Aboriginal people represented the earliest phase of cultural evolution and that they were extinct. This paper offers a detailed archival exploration of the correspondence between 1891-1905 that informed those ideas. It finds that Tylor and Roth not only received abstracted facts and artefacts from their colonial contacts; they were directed and inspired by an emergent Australian scholarship that sought to propose and urge new disciplinary directions. This paper reveals not only the importance of Tasmanian Aboriginal people to the history of science, but the role that scientific ideas have shaped Australian social memory and 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]

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]

The article provides a framework on the visions and actions that shapes Australia as a nation and its connection to World War I participation. Topics discussed include a comparison of the visions between Pre-World War I and the writtings of New Guard leader Eric Campbell in 1919 acquired by Australian soldiers, the Australian Type' in Pre-World War I and publishing of "The Working Man's Paradise: An Australian Novel" which serves as as an Australian identity and Australia after the War.

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 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]

This article explores the discursive context surrounding John Curran's recent adaptation of Robyn Davidson's Tracks (1980), suggesting that the mutual imbrication of the film and its source texts works against the grain of recent trends in adaptation studies that seek to distance them, and to consider screen adaptations as independent creations. At the centre of the red carpet at international film festival premiers as well as the broader publicity campaign promoting Tracks stands author Robyn Davidson, whose nuanced understanding of the adaptation process and savvy relationship to the media have enabled her to retain a firm grip on her original material, at the same time as establishing for herself a pivotal role in enunciating the film's greater significance and authentic 'Australianness' for both local and global audiences. Davidson's role impacts, ultimately, on the positioning of the film in terms of genre, character, nationality, history, race, and gender politics and ecology--as well as making the adaptation process an explicit subject for discussion in Tracks' wider articulation and framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic interest in Australia's heritage field has developed primarily around the ways its subject has been used to support dominant national interests. Understandings of heritage, however, are increasingly shaped by developments occurring in other nation-states, as well as those occurring at the international level. This article considers the changing nature of Australian notions of heritage within the context of the 'transnational turn'. It does so in two ways. First, the article traces talk of transnationalism at a general level, considering especially theorisations around a materialist understanding of memory. Second, it considers what new representations of the past such a theorisation might call forth in the Australian context. As a point of illustration, the article focuses on the specific case of Australian war memories and their articulation within the heritage field. [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]

This article examines the concept of civilisation in Australian public discourse, focussing on some recent political uses. Rhetoric defending Australia's traditional attachment to Western civilisation has focussed on three themes - the role of the British heritage in Australian public life, the moral foundations of Australia's 'Judeo-Christian' belief system, and the rational principles of the Enlightenment. Although the language of civilisation is not confined to centre-right political discourse, it has been most vocal among conservative-leaning commentators. This article highlights examples of civilisation and its uses in the contemporary Australian context and attempts to give meaning to civilisation in light of debates about Australian history and national identity. I argue in the course of this article that civilisation is differentiated from culture, and that the culture-civilisation distinction correlates with left-right political leanings. [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]

The Anzac Dawn Service is an established and increasingly well-commemorated Australian national day. Its rhythms include music, readings of ritual texts and moments of scripted silence and stillness, all of which take place in familiar commemorative environments. This article takes up the role of darkness in shaping how and what participants perceive of the Dawn Service. It draws on renderings of darkness as generative of atmosphere, linking this to national identity and commemoration. It dwells on three analytical points: that darkness recasts the built environment as mysterious and shadowy, drawing together representational and non-representational aspects of the event; second, that darkness conjures the crowd of participants as unknowable and therefore imagined to each other; and finally, that the dawning light introduces a sense of special temporality, as the inevitability of the changing light conditions moves participants through a range of affective states linked to a specifically national narrative. [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]

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]

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]

Comic books, eagerly consumed by Australian readers and reviled with equal intensity by their detractors, became embroiled in post-war era debates about youth culture, censorship and Australian national identity. Yet there are few references to this remarkable publishing phenomenon in most histories of Australian print media, or in studies of Australian popular culture. This article demonstrates how the history of comic books in Australia has largely been recorded by fans and collectors who have undertaken the process of discovery, documentation and research - a task that, in any other field of print culture inquiry, would have been the preserve of academics. While acknowledging some of the problematic aspects of fan literature, the article argues that future research into the evolution of the comic-book medium within Australia must recognise, and engage with, this largely untapped body of 'fan scholarship' if we are to enrich our understanding of this neglected Australian media industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how foresight, hindsight and perception are enabled, modified and compromised by competing intellectual traditions and by social and professional exigencies. Focusing on the example of one scholar, Dr Leonhard Adam, and his essay ‘Has Aboriginal art a future?’ this article charts the trajectory of this question from obscurity to celebration. It explores why such a significant question was unable to ignite debate, at a time when there was considerable interest in the role of Aboriginal art in the articulation of national identity. It examines the intellectual and social conditions that framed Adam’s contribution and explores what enabled him, as a relative outsider, to develop such a prescient understanding of the future of Australian Aboriginal art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay examines the research intent and material processes behind my exhibition project Dark Manners (2013). The exhibition examined the belief systems of nineteenth-century scientists and the notion of Australia as a nebulous laboratory at the far edges of empire. In doing so, it interrogated the dark issues of colonial settler identity that continue to strain at the moral integrity of Australian national identity. In broader terms, I look at how the transformative process of the craft of bricolage may help to raise, expand and reshape critical awareness of historically inscribed notions of identity in relation to place, while also communicating other perspectives and critical viewpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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]

Nostalgic, socially privileged ideals of childhood have actively contributed to the formation of Australian national identity, as well as modern subject-formations more broadly. This paper argues that, while such nostalgia has been drawn on for normative ends—in the service of the management of the modern individual—nostalgia also has the power to disrupt our conceptions of the normal. In the context of the contemporary "crisis" of childhood particularly, opportunities to reconstitute ideals of "childhood" and "family" differently have become available to communities such as Aboriginal Australians, who previously have been denied access to these nostalgic forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian classical saxophonists advise that an Australian 'language' is emerging in the saxophone repertoire. This is a vital issue to practitioners yet little scholarly research has been conducted in the field. This article begins to fill this lacuna by bringing together the ideas and opinions of leading Australian classical saxophonists with regard to Australian music and live performance repertoire. Drawing on data collected from interviews, it has been revealed that the creation of new Australian music forms an essential part of the ethos of those interviewed. As practicing musicians, they actively strive to create, promote and engage with new Australian music. The resulting relationships with composers provides a sense of purpose and satisfaction to these musicians. Further, in networking within the global classical saxophone community, Australian saxophonists disseminate the compositions of Australian composers, facilitating the works' inclusion in the global canon of classical saxophone music (CSM). The music becomes a vehicle for collaboration and self-expression that fosters and promotes a sense of national Australian identity. Through the ongoing partnerships between composer and performer Australian saxophone music is constantly evolving, resulting in innovative and distinctive contributions to the global CSM repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Australian federal courts, from the creation of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in 1904 until now, is part of the broader history of how Australians have come to see themselves and their relationship to courts as institutions of an evolving Australian government. Although unremarked in current historical studies about Australian national identity, significant changes in the conception of the Australian court system occurred in parallel with fundamental shifts in the creation, formulation and discernment of national identity. This article considers the history of the Australian federal courts alongside the processes of the formation of Australian national identity, as explored by Curran and Ward. This approach reveals much about the strengths and weaknesses of the federal court system today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at identity and cultural reasoning in Queensland, Australia. Particular focus is given to the origins and development of the idea that Queenslanders are unique among Australians. Details on the historical autonomy of Queensland are presented. Other topics include social identity theory, settlers' relationships with Indigenous peoples, and environmental conditions in Queensland.

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]