Australian identity
Articles
- Good Readers and Good Citizens: Literature, Media and the Nation
Parses the difference between nationalism and the nation. 'To show the oppressive, homogenising and frankly racist operations of nationalism—to suggest why historically and as a…
1 October 1999 - Is Geoffry Hamlyn a Creole Novel?
Discusses the perception of a division in Australian society between those who followed the English model and pattern and those who adopted differing manners of…
1 May 1974 - The Dark Side of the Dreaming: Aboriginality and Australian Culture
There is clearly a new upsurge of comment on and interest in Aboriginal Australian culture, an interest manifested by the reissue of a number of…
1 October 1992 - Walter Murdoch : ‘A Humble Protest’?
WALTER Murdoch, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia for thirty years and once Australia's best known essayist, has been typecast as a…
1 October 1993 - English Heritage and Australian Culture: The Church and Literature of England in Oscar and Lucinda
My argument is in three parts: first, about how Oscar and Lucinda seems to be signalling the need for a move away from the Church…
1 October 1995 - Australian Literature: Points for Departure
Discusses contemporary attempts to change the 'fixed and known directions' of Australian literature by investigating the 'faultlines' (per Susan Sheridan), 'those different intersections of concurrence…
1 October 1999 - ‘The Great Australian Emptiness’ Revisited: Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance
If, as Dean MacCannell argues, tourism is the quest for a 'reality' and an 'authenticity' that are thought to be always 'elsewhere' (160), then it…
1 May 1991 - On Not Being Australian: Mudrooroo and Demidenko
Discusses how the cases of Colin Johnson/Mudrooroo and Helen Darville/Demidenko complicate and reveal fractures in 'Australian' identity. 'By not being [the hegemonic] Australian, Mudrooroo and…
1 October 2004 - Society and Nature in Such is Life
Kiernan questions whether Such is Life reflects the “spirit of the nineties” and whether the ideas that Tom Collins expresses in his digressions are simply…
1 December 1963 - Neither Here Nor There: Suburban Voices in Australian Poetry
Despite over three decades of critical discourse on Australian suburbia Australian poetry on the subject seems strangely under-represented Television and tupperware, not terza rima, are…
1 November 1998 - Rereading David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter: The Great War, Aboriginal Dispossession, and the Politics of Remembering
The author’s account of Fly Away Peter is intended ‘to raise the question of the relation between Malouf’s closely intertwined narratives of the Great War…
1 May 2009 - ‘Isn’t there a poem about this, Mr de Mille?’: On Quotation, Camp and Colonial Distancing
There is something queer about quotation, and something creepy too. To quote is to deconstruct the alleged distinction between speech spoken by me ('my' speech)…
1 November 2008 - Asia, Europe and Australian Identity: The Novels of Christopher Koch
Like Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Christopher Koch explores in his fiction the post-colonial Australian identity, not in an exclusively political sense, but rather in…
1 May 1982 - Origin, Identity and the Body in David Malouf’s Fiction
Argues that a conception of Malouf's fiction as historical is simplistic. Malouf undertakes 'fictional revisitings of moments in Australian history—moments in which, in retrospect, significant…
1 May 1999 - Un-Australian Activities?: Mary Gilmore’s Versions from the Spanish
Somewhere around 1915-18, Mary Gilmore worked on assembling a collection of poems translated from, or based on, Spanish originals. The Mitchell Library hold two typescript…
1 October 1997 - Nationalism before Nationhood: Overseas Horizons in Debates of the 1880s
Using a number of Australian periodicals as sources, the essay explores how the apparently conflicting notions of nationalism and internationalism, of mono-cultural self-searching and multicultural…
1 October 1990 - Towards an Aesthetics of Australian Women’s Fiction: My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom
Discusses the necessity for a theory of Australian woman's culture through which to read Australian novels authored by women. Drawing on insights from Virginia Woolf…
1 October 1983 - The Palmer Abridgement of ‘Such is Life’
In April 1936 Jonathan Cape, the London publisher, informed Vance Palmer that he had been thinking of re-issuing Joseph Furphy's Such is Life. But…
1 October 1978 - On Finding ‘Australia’: Mirages, Mythic Images, Historical Circumstances
Considers critical explorations of the Australian identity by Richard White, Ross Gibson, Robert Dixon and G.A. Wilkes as the 'second generation of the consideration of…
1 October 1986 - Country Poetry and Town Poetry: A Debate
Don Anderson and Peter Porter in conversation, debating Les Murray's critique of Porter's poem 'On First Looking into Chapman's Hesiod'. The conversation focuses on the…
1 May 1979
Contributors
- Don Anderson
- Ruth Brown
- Delys Bird
- David Carter
- Julian Croft
- Ross Chambers
- Leigh Dale
- Robert Dixon
- Alan Frost
- Gareth Griffiths
- Terry Goldie
- Brian Kiernan
- David McCooey
- Les Murray
- Peter Otto
- Peter Porter
- Jennifer Strauss
- Gerhard Stilz
- Helen Tiffin
- Andrew Taylor
- Gillian Whitlock
- David Robert Walker